What does it mean to bless the Lord?
When I was younger in my faith,
I remember hearing that phrase, bless the Lord,
and it confused me.
And I thought to myself, well, how can I,
as a very finite creature,
how can I possibly bless an infinite being?
I certainly can't give him anything
that makes him better off than he was before I brought it.
Right?
So I remember sort of ruling that phrase out of my mind,
confused, but of course later on,
I came to learn that that idea of blessing the Lord
as creatures is completely biblical.
I learned that we as worshipers are called
to do exactly that, bless the Lord
with all that is within us.
And what that means is we recognize who he is,
and we magnify his name,
and we magnify his attributes in praise and worship.
And when we do that authentically from the soul, we bless God,
which is an amazing thing, isn't it?
An amazing privilege.
And if that's still hard to process,
here's the illustration that I like to use,
but it also helped me way back in the day.
When my kids were small, they would go shopping with mommy
to buy me a Father's Day present.
And whose money were they buying that gift with?
It was my own money.
But when they gave it back to me in the form of that gift,
I was incredibly blessed by that.
It's one of the great privileges of being a parent
is when your children honor and love you
by bringing you a gift.
So as God's children, everything we have comes from him,
but then we come and we present it back to him,
our love and our honor in the form
of this sacrifice of praise.
The fruit of lips, the Bible says,
they give thanks to his name
because of his abundant goodness to us.
It's a beautiful picture, isn't it?
And all you parents, you get it.
And those of you who are future parents, you will get it.
But it is a wonderful thing to behold.
Let's grab our Bibles.
We're gonna talk about blessing God this morning.
We're gonna go to Psalm 103.
It's gonna catch up here.
Psalm 103.
Boom, there it is.
Now, some have said that Psalm 103
is the absolute high point of praise in the book of Psalms.
And that is a high compliment
because the entire book is about praising the Lord.
It's definitely a psalm of pure worship.
And when I say that, here's what I mean.
There's no petitions in it.
There's no cries for deliverance in it.
It is simply straight up worship.
And as you'll see, as you arrive there,
we do have a superscription this week at the top,
which is helpful.
It tells us that David authored this amazing song.
We don't know exactly when in his life he wrote it,
but my guess is later in his life, right,
when he had a greater sense of his own depravity and sin,
and also a greater and higher sense
of Yahweh's mercy in his life.
And look, in spite of David's heinous sins,
and we could go on and on about that,
we remember that God called him a man after his own heart.
And you see why in Psalm 103.
Because it's woven throughout this.
You see a man who goes on and on, verse after verse,
magnifying God's goodness and God's grace.
And although David wrote this 1,000 years before the cross,
what we're gonna see as we go through it
is much of the Psalm points forward, right,
to the time of Christ, to what he will accomplish
when he comes to earth and takes on flesh for us.
So we're gonna talk again this week
about the structure of this Psalm.
And I don't know if this has been helpful for you each week
or just annoying, I don't know.
But I am a visual learner, so I like to at least put,
again, I know you can't read the text.
But I want you to see those lines of separation,
just to give you some key things to focus on.
So this is a pretty complex Psalm,
and I could do many lines,
but we're gonna keep it simple this week.
I've drawn lines of separation after verse two, five,
and 19, and you may wanna do that in your Bibles as well.
So let's read, we're gonna walk through
this sort of structure here as we read the text.
So Psalm 103 is Psalm of David, very simple superscription.
And the first two verses, what we're gonna see,
as you see on the screen there,
is the threefold call to bless the Lord.
Verse one, bless the Lord, oh my soul,
and all that is within me.
Bless his holy name.
Bless the Lord, oh my soul,
and forget none of his benefits.
That word benefit is gonna be our key for this morning.
Now verses three to five are key to understanding
David's praise throughout the Psalm.
He ended verse two with that word benefits.
Now he's about to list those benefits.
Five marvelous acts of God in the life of the believer,
each one being introduced with the word who,
and at least in the NAS.
And if you're inclined to mark up your Bible
and you're already drawing lines, that's great.
You might wanna circle the five who's that you see
in verses three to five.
No jokes about Whoville.
I thought about it,
and I know it came to your mind as well.
You can circle those five who's.
Verse three, who pardons or forgives all your iniquities,
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit,
who crowns you with loving kindness and compassion,
who satisfies your years with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.
Then we have this huge section,
and all I'm calling this is the details
about the things he just listed.
Okay, from verse six to 19.
David's gonna elaborate and give us more detail
about those five marvelous deeds.
Verse six, the Lord performs righteous deeds
and judgments for all who are oppressed.
He made known his way to Moses,
his acts to the son of Israel.
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.
He will not always strive with us,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He has not dealt with us according to our sins,
nor rewarded or repaid us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his loving kindness
towards those who fear him.
As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
Wow.
Just as a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.
For he himself knows our frame,
or he knows what we're made of.
He is mindful that we are but dust.
As for man, his days are like grass.
As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.
When the wind is passed over it, it's no more, it's gone.
And its place acknowledges it no longer.
But the loving kindness of the Lord is from everlasting
to everlasting on those who fear him,
and his righteousness to children's children.
To those who keep his covenant
and remember his precepts to do them.
The Lord has established his throne in the heavens,
and his sovereignty rules over all.
Is it rich enough yet for you?
There's so much here, right?
And then finally we have this doxology
in these final three verses, verses 20 to 22.
David is gonna call both the physical
and the spiritual realms to praise Yahweh with him.
Bless the Lord, you his angels,
mighty in strength, you perform his word,
obeying the voice of his word.
Bless the Lord, all you 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, oh my soul.
Okay, so let's go back up to the top,
and let's talk about this concept of blessing God.
Notice once again, as we saw last Sunday in Psalm 96,
notice the pattern of Hebrew poetry here.
The use of repetition to emphasize
the core truth of the Psalm.
Last Sunday, remember in the first three lines of the Psalm,
it said, sing to the Lord, sing to the Lord,
sing to the Lord.
And the obvious implication was,
we should sing to the Lord.
It's amazing how we miss it, right?
We should sing to, we should make a joyful noise
to the Lord.
And here in Psalm 103, we see the same pattern, right?
Again, the use of repetition and command.
This time in the first two lines,
bless the Lord, bless the Lord,
bless the Lord, and bless the Lord.
And the obvious implication is,
we should be blessing the Lord.
We're gonna talk about what that looks like.
But look at exactly how David then phrases this,
because this is very rich in meaning.
Bless the Lord, oh my soul.
He says, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.
So David calls upon his own soul to bless Yahweh.
And he understands that true worship,
true worship comes from deep within.
It's not just from the voice box,
it's not just by the lips,
but from the innermost part of a man.
Because if we bless the Lord with just our lips,
we know that God, that's hypocrisy, right?
And God knows it's hypocrisy.
We can't fool him.
And he condemns it.
Over and over in scripture, he says,
this people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
So we don't wanna be hypocrites when we worship.
So our praise has to be a natural outpouring
of what is already present deep in our souls.
That's such an important thing to understand.
Our praise must be a natural outpouring
of what is already there.
Deep in the heart.
And it should pour forth then as fully as possible
with all that is within me, David says.
And I mentioned this a couple times.
Look, this is the third straight week
we've talked about worship.
I promise we're gonna move on to some other themes,
but this section of the Psalms is just chock full of this.
As I've mentioned several times,
our praise is not to be half-hearted, right?
We're to bring all of what is within us to the Lord.
It's not to be just distracted mumbling.
The Lord is blessed when we honor him
with all that is within us.
Now, having said that, we all fall short of that standard.
We can be honest here, right?
We all do.
We may strive to bring God a sacrifice of praise
that is worthy of him, but we can be honest.
Our spiritual affections are not what they should be.
And so look at what David is doing here in Psalm 103.
He makes the intentional effort to rouse himself
to bless the Lord.
David is preaching to himself here
in these first two verses.
He is stirring his heart to worship.
He's like, come on, soul.
Come on, soul.
Why so sluggish?
Wake up.
Bless the Lord.
Look at what God has done for you, David.
Look at the glory of his name.
Look at his attributes.
Look at his compassion, his loving kindness, his mercy.
He is rousing himself to this.
Because look, let's be honest.
Worship is not automatic.
It doesn't just happen on its own.
And it shouldn't fluctuate based on how we're feeling
this day versus feeling that day
because God deserves better than that.
So we make the intentional choice
to bring all of our faculties, to coordinate them,
mind, body, soul, emotion, voice, lips, all of it,
to bring it before God as an offering.
And that's the picture we get in Scripture.
It is an offering we're bringing to his throne.
And so we make that intentional choice.
And that's the way Psalm 103 begins.
This high point of worship, David is urging his own soul
and stirring himself to bless the Lord
with his entire person.
And this is such a great lesson for all of us.
Now the transition between verse two and three is critical.
After prodding his soul to worship,
David exhorts both himself and his audience,
and us by extension,
not to forget the benefits of God.
Forget none of his benefits.
The Hebrew word there for benefits is gemul,
and it refers to how a person deals with another person.
David is saying, do not forget how Yahweh has dealt with you.
Do not forget how Yahweh has dealt with you.
And then he goes on in verses three to five
to list a series of ways that God has dealt
both with himself and with his fellow Israelites.
And it's these dealings,
as David contemplates how God has dealt with him
in such mercy, that is what causes him
to come and to worship the Lord.
It's an amazing list of things
that point to God's goodness,
things that every Christian should know by heart.
But even by using this language,
David acknowledges we tend to forget, don't we?
We are a forgetful people.
Raise your hand, every one of us.
Because we get caught up in the minutia of life,
the daily grind of life,
and we forget it's in our nature to do so.
And so we can forget the big,
we could get so focused on this silly minutia
of things we gotta get done,
and forget all the big things that really matter.
So we have to be intentional about remembering.
Forget not the benefits that you have in Christ.
And then when we begin to remember,
we make that choice, okay, I'm gonna remember,
that stirs our souls to come into worship
and to bless the Lord.
Does that make sense?
That's what David's trying to do here.
That's what he wants to say to us.
Now before we get into that list,
we gotta make sure we understand who he's talking to.
Because each of the benefits in verses three to five
is addressed to a particular group of people,
and the pronouns tell the story.
David says, he says your iniquities,
he says your diseases, he says your life,
and then later he uses the pronouns us and our.
So he has a particular group of people in mind,
and it includes himself,
because he's saying our and us.
And then if you skim over the whole Psalm,
you see a number of qualifications of who he's talking to.
And I count five of them.
In verse 11, 13, 17, and 18, here's what they say.
Here's who he's talking to.
Those who fear God, those who fear God,
those who fear God, those who keep his covenant,
and those who remember his commandments.
So that's a pretty good indicator.
These benefits apply to faithful Israelite believers
in that day who were worshiping Yahweh,
who were living in a healthy fear of him,
and were committed to obedience.
Now do those things save them?
No, not even faithful Old Testament saints
were saved by their works.
But just like today, the fact that those kinds of works
and that heart posture was present,
also indicates the presence of spiritual life.
So let's get to the list.
Now I'm gonna walk through a different order
than David lays out here,
because I think it makes more sense for us.
So I'm not trying to rewrite the Bible, by the way.
So be careful.
But I think there's an order that makes more sense for us.
By the way, I gotta go to our guy Spurgeon.
Here's what he says about this list of benefits
in verses three to five.
He says, this begins a series of great benefits
God brings to his believing people.
He selects a few of the choicest pearls
from the treasury of divine love,
threads them on the string of memory,
and hangs them about the neck of gratitude.
Look at that, isn't that great?
Because there's a whole list of benefits that we have.
I mean, the list goes on and on
of the benefits that we have from the Lord.
But he says, look, David just gives us the choicest few.
And then he, it's like a beautiful necklace, right?
He hangs them, he threads them on the string of memory,
right, and hangs them about a neck of gratitude.
Really a beautiful picture.
Okay, let's start with the second phrase in verse three.
Here's the first benefit that we have.
Who heals all your diseases.
Now, the gut reaction to that is,
wait, all diseases?
God heals all of our diseases?
The answer is yes.
That doesn't mean that every disease we get gets healed,
but it does mean that to the extent
that healing comes to our bodies,
that God sovereignly causes that healing to happen.
That's an important distinction, right?
Because look, the biblical record tells us
that not everybody gets healed, right?
And by the way, we all die, right?
I'm gonna die of something,
so ultimately I'm not gonna get that healing, right?
And our observation tells us that as well.
But when healing comes, it's because of God's sovereign hand,
because he's providential over everything.
And apart from him, if he were not sustaining you and I,
we would all die very quickly.
True?
Okay.
But no, the Bible never promises us
a life free of sickness and disease.
In fact, I got a really nasty cold this past week,
and I feel like the Lord was showing me something.
Like, thank you, Lord.
And I got it, it hit me Sunday night,
so I got it from one of you lovely folks,
so thanks for that.
But it was such a, and Portania has to live with me
in the midst of this,
but it was such a great object lesson for me,
because as I got out of bed on Monday,
and I'm hacking and my lungs are burning,
and I'm sniffling and I'm a mess,
I start groaning, ask her,
and then I start popping Theraflu tablets, right?
Right away, right?
And it reminds me of a couple things.
Number one, I live in a fallen world,
where there is disease.
And number two, I am subject
to the frailties of being human.
And that's what sickness can do for us.
It can remind us of those things,
the world that we live in.
But so I did three things.
Number one, I prayed,
because I know all healing comes from God,
and I've got too many things to do to be sick.
That's why I always tell the Lord.
And then he laughs at me, right?
But I prayed.
But number two, then I used modern medicine.
It's something that God can use as a means
to bring about healing in my life.
And then three, I trusted God's timing.
You know what?
Adam might have been up here this morning,
and that would have been wonderful, right?
God's sovereign over those things.
I trusted his timing, and I got better over the week.
I'm not completely healed, you know?
But I'm up here.
So that's all by God's grace.
And so we praise him for his healing, right?
And that's David's point here.
Whenever healing takes place, through whatever means,
even modern medicine, it comes from God.
So bless the Lord, oh my soul.
Amen?
Okay, second benefit is something
you might not expect David to list,
but it's very practical and very encouraging.
Look at verse five.
Who satisfies your years with good things,
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.
So for the faithful believer, God brings satisfaction
during our years on the earth.
Now, like healing, we can't take this promise further
than it's intended to go.
David is not saying that every single year
or every season of life is gonna be easy or comfortable
or as satisfying as we wish it would be, right?
And that's really the key,
because a lot of life is managing expectations.
It's not as satisfying, if we were gonna draw it up, Lord,
it'd be more satisfying than this, right?
But that's our sinful nature, so we gotta be careful.
But over the breadth of a believer's life,
God does bless us in more ways than we deserve.
In fact, you should take that word deserve
out of your vocabulary.
More than we deserve and in more ways
than we even take the time to recognize.
Let that be a truth.
First, there's the physical satisfaction that we receive,
right, in the form of divine provision.
Everybody here has plentiful food, plentiful drink, shelter,
an abundance of material goods.
We have family, we have friends,
we have a church body that we can live life with.
We really do have so much, so much to thank God for
if we'll just slow down long enough to see it.
But beyond that, we receive spiritual satisfaction,
and this is even greater, love, joy, peace, comfort,
assurance, and so many more things.
Those are God's gift to us.
They give us a deep satisfaction in life,
and we can have those things even when our life
isn't what we would draw up,
even in the midst of trials and difficulty.
We can have that spiritual satisfaction in Christ.
And then David says that becomes a source of energy for us
and strength for us, even as we get older.
It says our youth is renewed, right?
Now I can testify that this verse does not stop time
and age on your physical body,
but there's no question that what Paul says
in 2 Corinthians 4 is true,
that though our outer man is decaying,
what's going on inside?
We're being renewed day by day.
That is the truth.
So this is why it's so imperative as we get older,
and our body is decaying that we're being renewed
each and every day.
So as we get older, we don't just run off and retire
and go live in the woods and separate ourselves
from the body of Christ and no longer serve Christ
or serve his church.
The Bible seems to indicate that in our later years,
we should be even more fruitful
because we've grown wise and strong in our souls.
And it's our obligation then to pass that on
to the next generation.
Amen?
So bless the Lord, oh my soul, for this one, right?
Okay, third benefit, look at the second half of verse four.
Who crowns you with loving kindness and compassion.
Now your translation may say steadfast love and mercy.
We're gonna camp here on this one for a while
because I absolutely adore this.
What David is describing here is the Lord's faith
full love for his children.
Chesed is the Hebrew word, and it's such an important word
to understand, his faithful love for his children.
Four times in Psalm 103, we see this word,
loving kindness in the NAS.
First you see it here in verse four,
then you'll see it in verse eight where it says
God abounds in this type of love.
Then in verse 11 where he says his faithful love
is so great for us that it cannot even be measured.
It's as high as the heavens or above the earth.
Can't even measure it.
And then finally we see it again in verse 17.
We're told it's eternal in nature.
It's from everlasting to everlasting.
And what I love about this is how the New Testament
affirms that truth.
In our call to worship this morning,
Adam read from Ephesians one, and it says
before the foundations of the world were laid,
God chose you in Christ.
And in the future you will reign with him eternally.
What does that mean?
From eternity to eternity.
God has loved you.
Eternity past to eternity future.
God's faithful love is from everlasting to everlasting.
Whenever I think about this type of faithful love
that God has for me, again I go back to me as a parent.
Because being a parent, this is the most
obvious parallel we have to the relationship
God has with us.
And maybe if you're a parent and you've played this game
with your kids, you look at your kids,
you say how much do you love daddy?
And they stick out their little arms, they're like this much.
That's how my kids sound.
Hi, Jen.
And then daddy go, well I love you this much, right?
And they go, well this much.
And you go back and forth.
Who wins that game?
Daddy wins that game.
Why?
Because my wingspan is greater than those little squirts.
Right?
Well, Psalm 103 is our heavenly Father doing that.
Saying this is how much I love you,
it can't even be measured.
So your little arms, you're like how much does God love you?
This much.
God's like, oh no, no, no, no.
No, you can't even measure it.
Your puny little arms can't even describe it.
Understand that you guys, take that in.
It's hard for us, right?
But that's how much he loves us.
If you're found in Christ, there's never been a time
when he didn't love you.
And there'll never be a time going all the way
into eternity where he will love you any less.
Because his love is infinite.
And perfect.
And eternal.
And it's unchanging.
It doesn't fluctuate based on how you're doing.
I know that's hard for us because we're human, right?
And we make value judgments all the time.
But God's love doesn't change.
And the amazing thing is this side of heaven,
we're supposed to, we can't really grasp it,
but maybe you know in Ephesians three,
Paul prays that we'll strive to do that.
He says, make this your goal,
that we would come to comprehend the height and the depth
and the width and the breadth of the love
that God has for us in Christ.
So we can't grasp it, yet we're to strive
to try to understand how big God's wingspan is.
How much he loves us.
Now I find it interesting that as David is reflecting
on God's love, his mind goes back to the days of Moses
in the Exodus.
We talked about this quite a bit just recently, right?
Look at verses seven and eight.
He talks about the days of Moses again in the Exodus.
Now frankly, there's no better story in the Old Testament
that proves two principles.
Number one, God's power to rescue his people.
And number two, God's people's tendency
to forget what God has done for them.
Isn't that true?
We're all forgetful, but man, the Exodus really lays it out.
God does this amazing thing and they go, what?
I don't remember because I don't have manna right now.
I need food, I need water.
It's really an amazing thing.
Yet through that story, David says in verse seven,
he made known his ways to Moses
and his acts to the people of Israel.
And then what is the fundamental truth about Yahweh
that comes through in those days?
Verse eight, this is amazing,
that the Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.
That's what comes through.
Like, that's the story of the Exodus?
Yeah.
Here's why that language matters,
because David is going,
he had to be picking up on Exodus 34 in this.
This foundational passage about the history of God's people.
Exodus 34 is right after the people grumbled against Moses.
Remember, he struck the rock sinfully,
and then they get to Mount Sinai,
and what did the people do?
They built a golden calf for crying out loud, right?
They began to worship this idolatry.
And if you remember, God tells Moses
he's going to destroy them all,
because they deserve it.
But God also knows what Moses is about to do next.
And God is gonna let this process play out
as a shadow and a type of something far greater
that's to come in the future in Christ.
Because Moses becomes a type of Christ in that moment.
He mediates for the people.
He intercedes for their sin.
And he asks God not to destroy them.
And the Lord, knowing that that's gonna take place,
then says to Moses, okay, okay,
I knew you're gonna do that,
but now, Moses, I wanna tell you what I'm really like.
I want you to know the fundamental truth
about who I am as your God.
And he says to Moses, in the morning,
come up to Mount Sinai and present yourself to me
on the top of the mountain.
So Moses goes up the next day, right?
And it says, the Lord descended in the cloud
and stood there with him
as he called upon the name of the Lord.
And what comes next is basically Yahweh saying,
okay, Moses, you think you know who I am?
Let me tell you who I am.
Let me share this with you.
And then you have this amazing verse.
Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed,
repetition again, right?
The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth.
That's what David picks up in Psalm 103.
Who keeps loving kindness for thousands,
who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin,
yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.
Again, given how the Israelites
had just responded to God's goodness,
how is it possible that that is God's description
of himself?
Because if it were me or it were you,
you know what we would have done?
Hey, Moses, come up to the mountain.
I got something to say.
And what would we have said to him?
I'm a God of anger and wrath,
and I am done with you people.
That's what we would have done.
But God takes that moment of sheer rebellion
and stresses his compassion and his grace
and his covenant love and his kindness
and how slow he is to be angry.
Now, if you study Jewish history,
many rabbis, Old Testament scholars will tell you
this is the preeminent chapter
in all of the Old Testament about forgiveness.
So that's why I think David picks up on it.
Why he wants to talk about the essence
of why his soul blesses God so much.
He comes back to Exodus 34.
He says, because that is my God.
And we should do that as well.
That is my God.
So we see loving kindness coming back to Psalm 103,
loving kindness four times,
and then we see an additional word here
three times, compassionate.
We see it in verse four, verse eight,
and I want you to look at this uniquely in verse 13.
Look at verse 13.
Just as a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.
This is that parent thing.
This is God's fatherly, tender love for his children.
But what's fascinating to me is the reason
given in verse 13 for that compassion.
Look what it says.
For he knows our frame.
Stop and consider that.
Here's the reason why God is so compassionate.
Because he knows your frame.
He knows what you're made of.
Have you ever heard that phrase?
Show him what you're made of.
God knows what we're made of because he made us.
He knows our frame.
He knows how frail we are.
And he knows how vulnerable we are
because we're contingent beings.
He understands that if he doesn't sustain us,
we just die.
The verse goes on, he's mindful that we're merely dust.
That's Genesis 2, seven.
God formed us from the dust.
So God knows this about us.
This is so important to understand.
He knows all of our weaknesses.
He knows more of your weaknesses than you even acknowledge.
He knows about our foolish tendencies.
He knows the things that tempt us.
He knows our childish stumbles and falls.
He knows our fears and our worries.
He knows the level of pain that we have to endure
in this life and everything else.
He knows all of that.
Here's the key now.
And it causes him not to get angry and mad at us all the time
because we often think that.
No, it causes him to be compassionate towards us.
To be tender and gentle with us.
Like any father.
As a parent, when you see your child struggling
through a frailty or struggling in some type of vulnerability,
you cannot help.
That's not the moment where you go,
yeah, but he's really disobedient.
No, we're like, that's my baby.
And it causes God to be compassionate towards us.
And then you have this beautiful add-on
in the New Testament, right?
Describing how God the Son takes on a human nature
so that he can physically experience our dust-like frame.
And the result of that, Hebrews 4.15 says that in Jesus,
we now have a high priest who can sympathize
with all of our frailties and all of our weaknesses.
That's how much God loves us.
It's amazing stuff, you guys.
This is what David is doing.
He's churning up all these things and saying,
guys, we have so many reasons to bless our God.
Some of you guys know, I mentioned the name Sam Storms
before, he's one of my favorite authors.
I mentioned he's a charismatic Calvinist, which is wild.
And in his comments on Psalm 103,
he brings up a really interesting question.
I read a blog article this week that he wrote.
He says, what is your knowledge of God's knowledge of you?
What is your knowledge of God's knowledge of you?
And he goes on to ask, he says,
why do we hesitate to draw near to God at times?
Why do we strive to keep Him at arm's length?
And he suggests that for many Christians,
it's because we know the depths of our sin.
We know how sinful we really are, and therefore,
we're like, I can't face God.
I can't face Him with it.
And so it's easier to just not pray.
It's easier not to confess sin.
I just withdraw because it's too painful
to go to my Father with my sin.
So Storms writes this.
He says, Christians like this live daily
with the paralyzing conviction
that God is so utterly repulsed by them
that all hope of a meaningful relationship is shattered.
But they've misunderstood the nature of our Father.
And this is what I wanna get through to you this morning.
His knowledge of you and I doesn't repel Him
or stop Him from fulfilling His promises towards us.
Remember, the work of the cross is done.
The atonement is complete.
He's not repelled by us.
Again, Storms says this.
Our tendency would be to say,
it's because He knows that I'm dust,
that my frame is fickle and weak and prone to wander,
that He will have nothing to do with me.
Have you ever felt that before?
I have.
It was a time early in my walk
where I just, all I could see was God just this Father
that was angry at me all the time
because I had fallen short of His standard.
And it's easy to fall into this trap.
But Christ came to set us free
from that type of guilt and shame.
So Storms finishes the quote with this.
He says, David says no to that.
It's precisely because He knows what you're made of
and how you function and what you think
and feel and how often you fail
that He chooses in His sovereign grace and mercy
to shower you with a compassion and a kindness
and a saving love that you could never hope to earn
or merit on your own.
Let that sink in.
It's still emotional for me decades later
to learn that truth.
But it's so important.
Now that truth is in no way an excuse
for believers to continue to live in rebellious sin either.
Right, so we can't swing the pendulum just to one side.
We're still called to strive in obedience
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We're not to sin so that grace can abound.
Paul says may that never be.
But we have to understand that because
God has placed His divine love on us,
He now sees you and I in His Son.
He sees us clothed with the righteousness of Christ
so that we don't live in guilt and shame.
But we keep coming back to our Father who loves us.
We keep coming back even with the hard truths
about who we are and what's really in our hearts.
We keep coming back to Him.
We don't run away from Him.
That freedom is there to come to His throne
with all the brutal truth about what's in your heart.
So He has compassion on us as a Father does for His children.
So say it with me, bless the Lord, oh my soul.
Okay, fourth benefit, sorry.
Fourth benefit, it's in verse three.
Who pardons or forgives all your iniquities.
Not some of your iniquities.
Not the sins that you can offset by your good works.
But all your iniquities.
And isn't this an amazing statement
of the sufficiency of God's power to pardon us
in the Old Testament, right?
It's important to see that from an Old Testament saint.
The sufficiency of God's pardoning power.
And significantly David lists this one first, right?
Because what could be more important
than the forgiveness of sins?
And then when we stop to reflect
on the sheer magnitude of our sin
and the undeserved magnitude of the righteousness
of Christ that we receive from Him,
I can't think of a more staggering reason
to worship and praise and bless God.
And then there's two other statements here in the Psalm
which elaborate on that forgiveness.
And they are overwhelmingly beautiful.
You have a negative statement and a positive statement.
First, what God has not done.
Look at verse 10.
He has not dealt with us according to our sins.
Nor rewarded us or repaid us according to our iniquities.
Whew, that's good.
And then the positive statement, what God has done,
verse 12, as far as the east is from the west,
so far has He removed our transgressions from us.
Honestly, has there ever been any more beautiful statements
ever penned, ever, ever, ever, than that?
Is there better news?
Please, someone tell me.
Consider this, how God deals with us.
How do human beings deal with each other?
How do we deal with each other?
We, now I'm not talking about anybody in this room,
but we keep every injustice done to us fresh in our minds.
Right?
We nurture the memory of every hurt that has come our way.
We rejoice in the faults and failures of those people
that we don't care for that much.
We don't forgive easily, if at all.
In fact, we seek every opportunity to make others
pay for their transgressions.
We hold those things over them, and then we hold out hope
that someday they will get what they deserve.
There's the D word again.
And then compare that with how God deals with us.
Okay, so again, this is the arms thing.
Our love is this much.
God's like, you have no idea how much I love you.
You have no idea how much I love you.
He deals with us not according to our sins.
He chooses not to repay us according to our iniquities.
Now, our iniquities deserve payment, right?
They do, they deserve eternal judgment.
But for those who know Christ, fear Him, obey Him,
worship Him, we need not fear that He will ever exact
payment from us for our sins.
Right?
He's never gonna come to us and go, okay, look.
Here's the thing.
I looked at your record, and it's long, and it's this many
works you have to do now.
It'd be impossible, right?
Couldn't be done.
In fact, it's so far from the realm of possibility
that God would demand payment from us for our sin
that David compares it to the distance
between the East and the West.
Metaphorically, what does that mean?
He'll never do it.
He has removed your sin, get this now,
an infinite distance from you.
Bless the Lord.
An infinite distance from us.
Now, here's an important question that should be part
of our witness as Christians, because we don't want to
give him the impression that because God forgives,
that he's not concerned about accountability for sin.
He's not concerned about justice.
So we have to be able to answer the question
on what grounds does the Lord apply that type of mercy
to people like us who are filled with sin?
Does he just wave a magic wand and go,
hocus pocus, it's gone?
Right, because that would not be a God of justice,
and clearly the answer is no.
Now, David wrote these words, you know,
with the Old Testament sacrificial system in mind.
He couldn't see yet what Christ would come and do,
but he did have the day of atonement,
and he did have the blood sacrifice,
and he did have the scapegoat onto whose head his sins
were symbolically placed, but friends,
this is a great time to, another reason to bless the Lord
that we live under a much greater covenant than David had.
On this side of the cross, all those old covenant types
and symbols were fulfilled once for all by God,
when he displayed his own son, Christ Jesus,
as a propitiation in his blood.
So the reason why God does not deal with us
according to our sins is because he dealt
with his one and only son over the sins
that we deserve payment, penalty for.
He dealt with his one and only son.
And the reason why he doesn't repay us according to our sins
is because he has repaid his own son
with what his holiness demands.
That's the great exchange, right?
Again, say it with me.
Bless the Lord, oh my soul.
I mean, do we need another one?
Sure.
Let's get to the culmination of the benefits.
Look at verse four.
Who redeems your life from the pit.
And guess what?
This is literally the final disease
that God is going to heal his children from,
his physical death.
The Hebrew word for pit can refer to either the grave
or destruction.
So God's promise is that he will redeem us.
He will perch us out of the grave.
And we need it, right?
Because David says in verses 15 and 16,
our days are like the grass or the flower in the field.
One season we are flourishing.
One season we are growing and we are blooming.
But then the season comes where we wither and we die away.
And you come back to that spot the next season,
what does it say?
Virtually nothing remains.
That's our life on earth.
But as we know,
there's more to life than just the physical, right?
Life goes on.
We came into being at a time,
but we were created for eternity.
Every single one of us, believer and unbeliever.
So life goes on, it's just a change of venue
from the earthly realm to the spiritual realm.
And that goes on forever.
And as we know, the grave claims the majority of people
on the earth, many, many people,
why does the road that leads to destruction?
Jesus himself confirms.
So the fact that you and I are brought to the narrow gate
by God himself is reason enough to worship
and praise and bless the Lord.
I mean, if that's not enough that there's this broad path
that leads to destruction,
but we get access to the narrow gate
because God chose to give us access.
He saved us from ourselves.
If that's not a reason to bless the Lord,
I don't know what is.
Christ laid down his life to purchase our souls
for all eternity.
We heard this in Ephesians one, right?
In him we have redemption through his blood.
The forgiveness of our trespasses
according to the riches of his grace.
Say it one more time.
Bless the Lord, oh my soul.
So as we wrap up, again, look at the order
because I think it's important.
God heals, God satisfies, God loves with compassion,
God forgives, God redeems.
And make sure you see this.
All these benefits are ours at no cost to us,
but great cost to him.
We deserve his wrath,
but he's given us grace and righteousness instead.
And guys, that is the gospel in a nutshell,
and it's sitting here smack dab
in the middle of the Old Testament.
Don't let people tell you,
oh, two completely different testaments.
This is the gospel right here
from an Old Testament saint.
So how often do you take the time
to let the immensity of God's goodness
just overwhelm you like a flood?
And then lead you into praise and worship
because that's where David ends, Psalm 103.
What other ending could there be to the Psalm
than praise and worship?
The final three verses,
David becomes like a conductor
who's come to the final movement of a great symphony
and he calls all the instruments in.
He says, we are all gonna do this together now.
Bless the Lord, you angels.
Bless the Lord, you armies of heaven.
All creatures of our God and King, bless the Lord.
And then lest it gets too grand and too big
that we forget that it's about us,
he comes back to where he started,
to you and I and to himself,
and he says, one more time,
bless the Lord, oh, my soul.
Make it personal.
Bless the Lord, oh, my soul.
Guys, Psalm 103 is about as pure as it gets
when it comes to worship.
All we have to do is come and join the song.
That's what, if David could walk in here,
he'd say, just join the song, man.
These things are true.
And this is what you were made for.
Amen?
Go ahead and bow your heads.
And God, we are so grateful for Psalms like this one.
So filled with worship and praise to your name
and what a great reminder David has given us, Lord,
that as we get caught up in so many things in this life
and we're so distracted by our phones
and by all the things that are just coming at us, God,
that somehow we can lose sight of these giant things,
the way you do all of these things
that we talked about this morning,
the way you satisfy us.
God, the way you show us your compassionate love,
the way you bring healing when we need it,
the way you forgive our sins through the blood of Christ,
the way you redeem us from the pit.
Father, help us to be intentional about this,
to not lose sight of these basic gospel truths
in the midst of this world that we live in.
Help us to be intentional to stir up our souls,
to continue to worship your name and to bless you.
Because I know, God, that's why you did make us.
That's why you have chosen us.
That we might know you and enjoy you
and be your witnesses all across this earth
in the time we have left,
and we don't know how much that is.
And so Father, strengthen our church,
strengthen us as believers, strengthen our worship,
strengthen our hearts, Lord,
to recognize all the ways that you have benefited us.
And may it end in worship and praise.
Thank you for our time this morning.
We praise you now in the precious name of Jesus.
Amen.