So we're looking this morning in Psalm 40,
and I'll just read that.
It's 17 verses long, and we'll consider just
one verse, the very last one together.
One of the things I love about the
Lord is that sometimes when our hearts are
heavy, He picks them up, and that's what
I'm asking Him to do this morning for
us.
Psalm says, I waited patiently for the Lord,
and He inclined His ear to me, and
heard my cry.
He also brought me up out of a
horrible pit, and out of the miry clay,
and set my feet upon a rock, and
established my steps.
He has put a new song in my
mouth, praise to our God.
Many will see it and fear, and will
trust in the Lord.
Blessed is the man who makes the Lord
his trust, and does not respect the pride,
nor such as turn aside to lies.
Many, O Lord my God, are your wonderful
works, which you have done, and your thoughts
toward us, cannot be recanted to you in
order.
If I would declare and speak of them,
they are more than can be numbered.
Sacrifice and offering you did not desire.
My ears you have opened.
Burned offering and sin offering you did not
require.
Then I said, behold, I come.
In the scroll of the book it is
written of me.
I delight to do your will, O my
God, and your law is within my heart.
I have proclaimed the good news of righteousness
in the great assembly.
Indeed, I do not restrain my lips.
O Lord, you yourself know.
I have not hidden your righteousness within my
heart.
I have declared your faithfulness and your salvation.
I have not concealed your loving kindness and
your truth from the great assembly.
Do not withhold your tender mercies from me,
O Lord.
Let your loving kindness and your truth continually
preserve me.
For innumerable evils have surrounded me.
My iniquities have overtaken me so that I
am not able to look up.
They are more than the hairs of my
head.
Therefore, my heart fails me.
Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me.
O Lord, make haste to help me.
Let them be ashamed and brought to mutual
confusion who seek to destroy my life.
Let them be driven backward and brought to
dishonor who wish me evil.
Let them be confounded because of their shame
who say to me, ah-ha, ah-ha.
Let all those who seek you rejoice and
be glad in you.
Let such as love your salvation say continually,
the Lord be magnified, but I am poor
and needing.
Yet the Lord thinks upon me.
You are my help and my deliverer.
Do not delay, O my God.
Father, we thank you for your word.
And Lord, we thank you for this powerful
time of worship.
And we thank you even that in your
sovereignty you have chosen to move your servant,
Melissa and John.
We give you great praise for them.
We pray, Father, this morning that you would
indeed bless these days as they draw things
to a close here.
But we're asking, Father, that you would speak
to our hearts this morning and that you,
Lord, would indeed be our encourager this day
and strengthen each one of us deep in
the heart.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Do you ever get in trouble?
Johnny says, yeah, Brad said once.
So, well, I'll tell you about a time
I got in trouble.
And I was directing a crusade for the
Billy Graham people in Calgary.
And we rented the Saddle Dome.
And the cost was $30,000 a night
in 1990.
I don't think you could rent it for
that now.
And we had it for five nights.
And I left Calgary to go to Minneapolis
to meet with some of the leadership of
the Billy Graham Association.
And when I got there, my boss sort
of looked across the table at me and
said, you need to get out of the
Saddle Dome.
It's too expensive and you need to get
out of it.
Now, I'd already signed the contract and given
a deposit.
And one thing about Scotsmen is they don't
like to buy real estate twice.
Right, Bob?
Once is bad enough, that's right.
So, you know, he said, I'll talk to
you tomorrow morning about it, but get out
of it.
And I had no comfort in my heart
whatsoever.
And I had a fairly restless night.
And the next morning, I bumped into the
big boss, John Kortz, Dr. John Kortz, the
president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in
those days.
And I bumped into him in the hallway.
Hi, John, how's it going?
Good, thanks, Dr. John, good to see you.
And I'm hoping he knows nothing about my
situation.
And then he said to me, been thinking
about you.
Don't worry about the money, man.
Been thinking about you.
Don't worry about it.
Let's pray together.
We prayed.
I still had a whole hour before I
had to meet my boss and confess my
sins, that I had spent some money and
hadn't done what I was told.
But those of you who know me know
that I have a fair amount of practice
standing outside the principal's office, waiting for the
Board of Education to be applied to the
seat of learning.
Somebody came and got me and said, there's
a phone call for you.
And on the other end of the phone
was Libby Raines from the Saddle Dome.
And Libby said, thank God I got ahold
of you.
I rented that place to you, and I
shouldn't have because the Calgary Flames have first
call on it, and they need to play
a game maybe in that time.
So I wondered, would you mind starting off
in the Corral, smaller facility, and then moving
to the Saddle Dome, and we'll give you
the whole thing for the Corral and the
Saddle Dome for the cost of one night
in the Saddle Dome.
You know, it changed my whole attitude going
into that meeting with my boss because I
knew he was gonna say, have you gotten
out of the Saddle Dome?
And now I could say, not quite, and
explain the whole deal.
But you know what really turned that around
in my heart was this one little statement
from Dr. John Kortz.
Been thinking about you.
I want you just to look with me
at verse 17.
But I am poor and needy, yet the
Lord thinks upon me.
Some versions say the Lord cares for me.
Now we may say, I can't totally identify
with this, John, poor and needy.
Yeah, compared to many places in the world,
we are infinitely rich.
But you know, there are always areas where
we are poor and needy, areas where it
is just this word from God that encourages
our hearts, been thinking about you.
Thinking about your circumstances, your struggles, thinking about
your challenges.
And you know, it's a lovely thing just
to stop this morning for a few moments
and remember that God thinks upon.
You and me.
Now that's amazing to me because he's the
almighty God and that he would stop to
think about us.
I didn't tell Brad what scripture to use
at the beginning of the service and yet
the Holy Spirit put in his heart Psalm
8.
What is man that you think about him
or upon him.
And here it is again in Psalm 40
and verse 17.
The Lord thinks upon me, the Lord cares
for me.
Now God reveals himself in nature.
We see that in Romans chapter one that
you can't say there's no God because this
whole place didn't just happen.
It was created and there is a creator
and so on.
And God reveals himself in history.
When you look back through the times of
history, you see the moving and working of
God.
And God reveals himself in conscience, doesn't he?
There's that conscience within us when we're gonna
do something.
There's that warning voice.
And sometimes when we have done something, there's
that voice that comes in conviction that says,
you know, you need to make that right.
And that God reveals himself in that way,
doesn't he?
And in spiritual revelation, he reveals himself in
miracles and in prophecy and he reveals himself
best in Jesus, the son of the living
God.
And he reveals himself in his word and
he reveals himself in personal experience.
And my prayer always is that when we
come together in worship on Sunday morning, it's
this thing of personal experience.
That it won't just be a thing that
becomes a habit, but that each time we
come together, we're experiencing the living God in
our hearts and in our lives and meeting
us right where we are.
Now, when I think about the one who
thinks upon me and who thinks upon you,
there are four things that come out of
that that just quickly we wanna encourage our
hearts in.
The first is that it encourages our faith
that God thinks upon us.
If you are in Christ Jesus this morning,
you have a touch of God in faith.
By faith, you are saved and by grace,
you're saved through faith, I should say it
properly.
But you see, it encourages our faith, does
it not, to know that he thinks about
us.
Now, I can't understand why God would think
about me because I would say in the
scheme of things, I'm pretty insignificant, five foot
five and a half.
That half, so important.
I don't know what it is in meters
and centimeters.
Ought to work that out someday.
And you know, at one time, it was
five foot five and a half and skinny
as a post.
And over the years, we've expanded a bit,
but it's still pretty insignificant compared to the
scheme of things.
The billions of people in this world and
the needs that are there and the immensity.
If we were to take the immensity of
our needs and concerns and worries and all
those things in this room at this very
moment.
But listen, let your faith be encouraged this
morning.
There is one who sits on heaven's throne
and he doesn't count you as insignificant at
all.
He loves you so deeply that he not
only died to pay for the price of
your sin, but he loves you so deeply
that he rose and sits at the right
hand of the Father as your representative and
mine.
He thinks upon you.
Now, there are no times of difficulty and
distress and struggle, and they can sometimes be
so overwhelming, but he thinks upon us.
And I love to look at it this
way.
If you've ever seen a disaster situation in
Belfast where I grew up, the Royal Victoria
Hospital became renowned as the place in all
the world for dealing with massive disasters as
hundreds of people would be rolled in after
bomb and shooting attacks and so on.
And people would come to study their methods
and how that was to be done.
And you know what the secret of the
whole thing was?
This thing called triage.
It was taking that which was most vital
and important and getting it to the place
of treatment quickest.
And that which could wait a little bit
would wait a little bit.
But I think as this verse says, he
thinks on us.
Maybe this morning in your life, the great
sovereign Lord of all is saying, it's okay,
I can still do triage.
I can still get you what you need
and where you need to be in my
grace and in my love.
He always deals with us in this way.
We have done a study on Joseph and
was it not at the times when Joseph
was in his deepest need that God shows
up.
We've done a study on Ruth and the
same thing we discovered there, didn't we?
It was there that the Lord moved in.
We have seen it in the life of
Daniel and so many others through the scriptures
when he thinks upon us, as he thinks
upon us.
And he's given us the gift of the
Holy Spirit which proves his thoughtfulness.
I loved last Sunday, Rachel shared a little
bit.
I thought she was just gonna talk about
the song she was gonna sing at the
offertory, but she came instead to the microphone
and said, I had a meeting with God
this week.
He was thinking about her and she was
thinking about him.
And you blessed my heart when you said,
the next day was kind of depressing.
Who wants to be with people?
When are you gonna be with God?
The gift of his Spirit.
My friends this morning, whatever the challenges and
issues you face, the Spirit of God in
the heart of the believer is more than
sufficient.
He thinks upon those who humbly walk with
him and acknowledge our guilt and our wrong
and deal with it time by time and
know the freshness of his forgiveness and the
strength of his power.
Secondly, this morning, as I think about these
words, the Lord thinks upon me, it enlarges
my hope.
Now, hope is one of those things that
you cannot live without.
And without hope, there are all kinds of
things that set in, aren't there?
But consider his love and his thoughtfulness to
us.
You ever noticed that it was after everything
was created that he created man?
Everything was provided first.
That's also so that we couldn't say, look
at what we did.
Because that's that little bit of Irish in
all of us that would take the claim
and the glory, isn't it?
But it really enlarges my hope when I
think how he thinks upon us.
His Word contains his thoughts to us.
I am the Lord.
I change not.
Woo-hoo!
You know, when I was growing up in
church in Ireland, nearly every Sunday we sang
these words.
And to use a term that I heard
Martin Lloyd-Jones one day say, we dragged
it mournfully.
Change and decay in all our ways.
It's true, isn't it?
Things change.
But my hope is in the one who
does not change.
He hasn't changed his mind.
He hasn't changed his heart.
He hasn't changed his power.
His thoughts are so practical and providing and
full of kindness and forgiveness for us.
We need hope, don't we?
There's a wonderful story that I heard about
a young boy in school who actually had
an accident at home and was quite badly
burned.
And the school system that he belonged to
had a program for children who were in
hospital so that they could still receive coaching
and help and so on.
And he'd been in the hospital over the
weekend and on Monday morning, one of the
teachers was called to the office and she
was told, would you take this program and
go and coach this child?
He has problems with nouns and adverbs and
verbs and I understand his problem, believe me.
And so the teacher comes to the hospital
and she asked for him, but they didn't
tell her that he was badly burned.
And it was quite a shock when she
got in to see this little boy.
And as she's sort of stumbling through, she's
saying the school sent me to help you
with your nouns and your verbs and adverbs
and so on.
And that she went away kind of discouraged
because she figured, you know, he's badly burned
and I don't think I really helped him
at all.
But because of the program, she dutifully went
back the next day.
And in the next day, as she came
in, one of the nurses stopped her and
the nurse said to her, you've come to
visit this boy.
And I wanna talk to you before you
go in there.
Now she's sure.
I must have really blew it yesterday.
And she begins to speak to the nurse
and she starts to say, I'm so sorry.
Listen, if I said something wrong, or I'm
just so sorry.
And the nurse said to her, wait, wait.
We always jump to the wrong conclusions, don't
we?
Nurse said, you know, we've been so worried
about him.
Because over the weekend, he was completely unresponsive.
And over the weekend and early Monday, we
were quite sure that he was just gonna
slip downhill and leave us.
But yesterday when you came in, everything changed.
What was it?
It was hope.
That teacher brought hope into that room.
And you and I walk with the one
who is the Lord of all things and
the God of salvation.
And we walk with hope if we are
in Christ Jesus.
We are so blessed to have that great
and unperishing hope that nothing can touch.
I get sort of tickled on the inside
sometimes thinking about how things have changed for
me over the years and the aging process.
And I'm just thrilled in the hope that
I have I'm gonna emigrate once more.
I emigrated from Ireland to Canada.
But there comes a day when I'm gonna
emigrate to glory.
And nothing is gonna be changed thereafter.
I have that hope that is in Christ.
Do you have that hope this morning?
You see, one of the things that I'm
convinced happens is we get so entrapped in
all the stuff.
All the challenges that we face.
All the issues.
Where will the next meal come from?
All of those things.
And they are important.
I am not minimizing them.
But what I want to say is, it
enlarges my hope when I just pause and
realize, hey, wait a minute.
God is thinking on me.
There is hope here.
There is somebody who can produce exactly what
I need.
We have seen it even in the past
week where somebody had a need and somebody
else was moved by God to meet that
need.
Wonderful, isn't it?
And this thing of hope is so powerful.
Some of you are not old enough to
remember Leonard Brezhnev, the president or premier of
Russia.
And when he died, George Bush went to
his funeral.
It was interesting to watch the funeral of
this communist dictator.
And right before they put the lid on
the casket, Mrs. Brezhnev, after 70 years of
communism, is standing beside the casket of her
husband who has suppressed Christianity and Christ in
the years that he led the country.
And just as that lid is being lifted
up to be set onto the casket, Mrs.
Brezhnev goes, talk about hope.
And of course, Russia has since opened up
to the gospel wonderfully.
Number three, as I pause and think about
the Lord thinks upon us, it enables our
love.
Think about Him often who loves you.
And it enables us to grow in love
to Him and with Him and through Him.
Just think upon this love of God.
He has thought enough to prepare a place
for you.
Now, I'm not a fan of the King
James Version.
It's a nice version.
But there is one verse that I love
and I think we should change in all
the other ones.
Okay, I'll tell you why.
And you'll say, he's as selfish as could
be.
It's in John chapter 14.
And Jesus says in verse one, let not
your heart be troubled.
You believe in God, believe in me.
It goes on in verse two and says,
in my Father's house are many mansions.
If it were not so, I would have
told you.
And lo, I go to prepare a place
for you.
And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will doubtless come again and
receive you unto myself.
Where I am, there you may be also.
So, you know, if I ask you to
memorize scripture, it's okay to do it, right?
Yeah.
He loves us enough to prepare a place.
I like this word, mansion.
I've never owned one here and I never
plan on it.
But there's something about that in that old
version that captivates my imagination, that mansion.
Not because I want to live in a
mansion, but what really gets to me is
that Jesus, my Jesus, would say for you,
this for you.
And if you wonder what drives me sometimes
around the world to preach the gospel, it's
that.
I can look in the face of somebody
in Vietnam and know that they might never
have anything on this earth, but this for
you.
I can stand beside a dry well with
somebody in Niger and know that it's a
big and a mighty problem, but there is
one who enables our love, who says this,
this is for you, this love.
Huh, I might be done in less than
105 minutes.
You know what I love?
I love how he answers prayer to prove
it.
And I love how on Sunday morning, the
presence of God just sweeps into this place.
You know, in his presence, there's room to
move.
There's room to change.
There's room to set down the burdens.
There's room to deal with all those issues
that overwhelm us in his love.
And maybe you're here this morning and you
never experienced his love, his presence.
There's a missionary doctor in China called Charles
Barlow.
God called him to China and he loved
the Chinese people.
And a disease came along that started to
kill people and they could find no answer
for it.
And they have no real way of research
where he is.
And so he managed to extract some of
those germs that were killing people.
And he headed home to the United States.
He headed to Johns Hopkins Hospital.
And on the way to the hospital, the
doctor took the germs and injected them into
himself.
Now that's love.
Because he's saying to those who trained him
and those who worked with him before he
went on the field, help me find the
answer.
Isn't that exactly what Jesus did?
Isn't that powerfully what Jesus did?
In 2 Corinthians 5 and 21, it says,
he who knew no sin became sin so
that we might become the righteousness of God
in him.
The doctor from China helped the team find
a cure and took it back to China
and saved thousands of people's lives.
Oh, as he thinks upon us, it enables
our love.
When I think about how Jesus loves us
enough to take all of that sin and
guilt and pressure that we might be free.
Lastly, when I consider he thinks upon me,
it makes me remember that he establishes our
purpose and our direction.
If God thinks on me, I don't need
to be anxious.
I can rest in him.
I can surrender to him.
And if I've trusted Christ with my soul,
can I not trust him with everything else?
If I've trusted Christ with my soul, that
which is most precious, can I not trust
him to work out the other things that
can burden and beset me?
Yes, I believe we can.
I can trust him with every circumstance of
life, with health, with business and busyness, and
I can surrender every step to him.
But you know, sometimes we lose our perspective.
I don't know if you'll ever get a
chance to read it, but there's a great
little story by Tennessee Williams.
He wrote it in 1931 called Something by
Tolstoy.
And with this illustration, I'll close.
It's a story of Jacob Brodsky, shy Russian
Jewish man.
His father owns a bookstore, and all that
Jacob wants to do is marry Lila, his
childhood sweetheart.
Dad wants him to go to college, so
he sent him off to college.
And in his first year at college, Jacob's
father died.
So he came back to run the bookstore
and quickly married Lila, and everything should have
been good for all time, right?
But you know, Lila was bored in the
bookstore.
She needed adventure, did a great singing voice.
And an agent picked up and said to
her, I'll set up a tour of Europe
for you.
And so she left to do the tour
of Europe and to go and sing.
Before she left, Jacob reached in his pocket
and took out the key of the bookstore,
and he said to her, you'll need this
for when you come back, and I'm gonna
wait for you coming back.
You know, Jacob loved books, and he got
in the back corner of the bookshop, and
he would just read.
He was waiting for his love to come
back, but he would just read.
And then 15 years later at Christmastime, Lila
came back.
She came into the store, and she was
quite shocked that Jacob didn't recognize her.
She said to him, I'm looking for a
book.
He said, okay, tell me a little bit
about the book.
And she said, well, it's a love story.
It's the story of Jacob and Lila.
And you know, they were childhood sweethearts, but
Lila's music came between them, and it's kind
of, I'm not sure how it ends yet.
Do you know the story?
Jacob said to her, I think it's something
by Tolstoy.
She dropped the key and ran out of
the shop.
You see, Jacob had waited 15 years, but
in that time, he forgot who he was
waiting for.
He forgot why he was longing for her.
He lost his purpose.
No wonder this morning, dear ones, am I
speaking to someone, and you've lost that purpose,
that closeness, that nearness, with the one who
thinks upon you.
He is here this morning and thinks upon
you still and invites you to come to
him and to know the depth of his
love.
Oh, may the Lord encourage our faith and
enlarge our hope and enable our love and
establish our direction in his will this morning.
May we just pause and pray together.
Dear Heavenly Father, as we pause in your
presence, there's something about that story of Jacob
and Lila that can be so real in
our hearts.
It's so easy to get focused on that
which is right in front of us and
forget the one who loves us and who
thinks upon us.
Lord, this morning, we want to just come
to you and pray that you would keep
our focus and our purpose and our direction
centered in Christ Jesus.
Lord, you know the burdens that we carry,
but you're bigger than the burden.
You know the disasters that we face, but
you're bigger than the disasters.
You know the difficulties, but oh, my great
God and Savior, you're bigger than the difficulty.
And so, Lord, in the power of your
Spirit this day, continue to minister to us.
Let us not forget in the days of
this coming week that you think upon each
as individual.
Lord, continue to bless your word, we pray.
In Jesus' strong name.