The 25th Psalm is the text for the
morning.
I do not intend to make careful exposition,
but simply let our minds play over the
psalm previously.
If I were to pick a text out,
maybe it might be the 21st.
Let integrity, uprightness preserve me, for I wait
on thee.
We have a little section of a great
spiritual biography where the man David is writing
himself into this.
He is telling us about himself and his
relation to God and the world.
We see and hear in this 25th Psalm
a living man engaged in the business of
living.
We see here a good man living in
a bad world, a right man living in
a wrong world, and naturally there is not
a smooth song.
My brethren, nothing is smooth if it is
a realistic, fair reflection of life.
The Lord Jesus Christ was not a smooth
life.
He had great inward humility, for he knew
he was in the bosom of the Father,
and he knew that not even his incarnation
took him out of the bosom of the
Father.
For he knew that the persons of the
Godhead are indivisible.
You cannot divide the Son from the Father
by incarnation or by crucifixion or by death.
He knew that he could never be separated
from the Father's heart, though as a man
among men he lived his turbulent life, his
life surrounded by enemies.
So that I think it fair to say
that if you're living too smooth a life,
you may well be in the will of
God or not.
David served his generation by the will of
God before he fell on sleep.
He was a man after God's own heart.
So I think it fair to take him
for an example.
And David did not live a tranquil life.
He had periods of tranquility.
He had times when he ran away like
a lark and sang at heaven's gate.
But he soon found himself down on the
earth again, back in a turbulent and disturbed
world where he had to live.
Now, we do not find here in much
modern religion a man in a classroom learning
and analyzing.
We have taken on the classroom psychology too
much in Christian religion in these days.
Classrooms are not intended to be any reflection
upon the classroom.
It is only to say that the classroom
is an actual situation.
It is something apart from the stream of
life, hoping that it will teach those who
are in that classroom to look into the
stream of life to live better, more wisely.
But it is for the moment not a
part of life, really.
The ivory tower of life.
When Christianity is never to be understood, the
faith of our fathers thought of from the
classroom.
It is not someone looking over heavy glasses
telling them the facts of Christianity or using
a chart to illustrate.
But the faith of our fathers is the
faith of the plain people, the faith of
men living in the world.
The faith of our fathers is the marketplace
where men argue and debate and cheat.
The man of God won't cheat, cheat.
The faith of our fathers is geared to
the kitchen and the home where the wife
answers the phone and the doorbell a dozen
times of a morning and the baby suddenly
runs a temperature out of town and she's
in distress.
And then the doorbell rings again and then
the phone and it's a wrong number.
That's her life.
She's got to have something that'll go down
there.
Your classroom can't help her there.
Nothing abstract can do her any good there.
The faith of our fathers has to get
into the kitchen, into the home, into the
nursery, into the basement where people are engaged
in the downright tough business of living right
in a wrong world.
The faith of our fathers has to get
in to the cab of the truck as
it bowls down the highway, around the curbs
till the arms ache, out on the long
straightaway stretches until the monotony puts us to
sleep, and trouble every horn honking from the
rear, and blowouts and difficulties.
No classroom theory there, no ivory tower there.
Christianity has to get into that cab and
behind that wheel and into the heart so
that he can do that like a Christian
and drive his big truck like a Christian.
The faith of our fathers has to get
into the machine, the smell of hot oil
and dirty gloves and dirty overalls and cursing
men and hard to get customers.
And it's got to be there and it's
got to prove itself there and live right
there and be right there.
The fifth psalm is an illustration of all
this.
A man in the midst of life, a
good man living in a bad world and
living in a wrong world, God's man living
in the devil's world, and he has to
come through that and has to suffer it
out and come out all right.
And that's why I like the Bible.
It's a book of a high philosophy and
lofty theology and brilliant metaphysics, but it's as
practical as your shoes.
You wear bedroom slippers right down where you
live.
You can get into it and it doesn't
fail you.
And you don't have to know a million
things and you don't have to know the
scale of culture nor study from Emily Post
where to put your spoon.
Plain people that don't know what to do
with a spoon.
A man said he went to a banquet
that was so ritzy that it was one
o'clock in the morning, for it was
through, and he found one o'clock in
the morning, a tablespoon.
He'd evidently used up the wrong one at
the wrong place and the snooty waiter wouldn't
take it away.
So there he was at one o'clock
and they were through eating and he had
just a tablespoon lying by his plate.
Well, that would chagrin some people and drive
them to suicide.
But the poor man in this bad world,
trying to live right with God, isn't so
much worried because he knows that Christianity meets
all situations, political situations, industrial situations.
So here was the man, David, engaged in
living and living in a bad world.
Because H.
G.
Weld, you know, said that Buddhism was the
best, but that it wouldn't thrive except in
a warm climate.
Christianity will thrive in any climate at all,
just let the Christ get in.
And whether he is living in an igloo
hut somewhere in the far Arctic, or whether
he's living with a g-string on somewhere
in Africa, if he's a true sincere man,
whether it's his grass or snow igloo, Christianity
will work.
It'll work in the mountains and it'll work
on the plain and it'll work in the
midst of the great.
You'll never see real sunshine for the smoke
and the fumes.
The faith of our fathers will work anywhere.
H.
G.
Weld didn't mean to be funny, but it
was a humorous thing to say, that God
Almighty should give the world a religion that
will only climate.
If that was true, and that might be
true of Buddhism, then what would we do
in cold weather?
Our spirituality would rise.
Every morning you'd have to go out on
the porch and say to your wife, I
wonder how spiritual I can be today.
And if it was a little too cold,
you're a sinner this day.
I can't live for God today because it's
too cold.
Christianity is found everywhere, and it's found in,
you know, we've had some errors in the
church, and one of them has been of
course to make Christianity consist of my own.
And now I'm a theological dogmatist, and I
believe in theology.
I believe in the faith of our fathers,
and I can put it down, and I
could write a book of discipline if I
ever forced to do it, telling what I
believe, and what people ought to believe.
And I believe in doctrine.
But what good is it going to do
you to know that the Trinity is comparisons,
or that there are three persons in the
Trinity, is a better way of expressing it,
if you don't live pleasing to the Trinity?
I borrowed that from an old sago.
What is it profit thee to be able
to discourse learnedly about the Trinity if thou
live as such a like pleasing to the
Trinity?
What difference does it make that you know
that God made the heaven and the earth
if you live an ungodly life?
It doesn't mean anything till it gets inside
you, until it seeps by osmosis into the
bloodstream of your life, leaves your soul, and
gets into your bloodstream, and gets out into
the cells of your spirit, and changes you.
Any doctrine of man has never reached that
man.
Too often we have a Christianity that consists
merely of a lot of creedons that are
believed.
That's not Christianity.
That is only the raw material of Christianity,
until the fire of the Holy Spirit burns
upon that raw material, or changing the figure
until that's but the food, that is but
the meat of Christianity.
That meat enters the soul of a man
by faith and repentance.
It can't do the man any good.
Objective Christianity is not the Christian soul.
The faith of our fathers is objective truth,
having become subjective reality within the soul by
pen and prayer.
As old John Ruskin, the famous critic, art
critic, and philosopher, who a century ago or
so, wrote very eloquently about the error of
calling this a church service, because I know
what I mean by the word.
But he says, watch that we don't get,
that we're not mistaken about it.
He said, we, we meet together and listen
to moral or spiritual truth being expounded, and
go home and say we have been to
a service.
And that's not necessarily true, for service is
more than singing hymns and going home again.
Service is living, serving your generation, and living
like a Christian after the church doors are
locked and the janitor's asleep.
And for Christ, between Sunday night and Sunday
morning, all the week long, as well as
on Sunday.
He was right, though I do not follow
him in throwing out the word church service.
As a result, it can be a service.
We can be giving our money to a
service.
We can, by expounding the scriptures, do a
service.
We can, by singing hymns, do a service.
But the danger is that it's a possible
kind of service, aloof and in a vacuum,
altogether unrelated to the rest of our lives.
That's where the danger lies.
I agree with Ruskin there.
So let's watch.
If your Christianity, your Christian faith does not
affect every being, you have a reason to
wonder whether you have the faith of our
fathers really in your heart or not.
Now look at David.
David here was a man in the midst
of life.
Here he was, surrounded by, look at them,
verse 2 to 19, enemies, verse 9, verse
18, affliction, verse 17, troubles, verse 18, pain,
verse 17, distress, verse 16, and perplexities all
the way through, and sin mentioned three or
four times.
Now there was a man, no every time,
no monk sitting on top of a high
pole, letting somebody else feed him, no hermit
hidden away in a cave going for a
walk at sundown when the birds were singing,
no impractical dreamer, but a man who lived
in the midst of all these were surrounding
him.
Verses 2 and 19 talk about his enemies.
Now I might say that a man is
known by his friends, generally understood, but the
opposite is also true.
A man is known by his enemies.
No man is known by his enemies.
If he does not have enemies, then he's
not doing anything.
If he does have enemies, if he does
anything, he will have a hundred kibitzers telling
him that he could have done it better
if he had a way.
And then we say, what have you done?
And he answers, well, nothing, but I've been
observing.
He hasn't done a thing.
Watching somebody else, you'll have kibitzers, fault finders,
critics, and enemies, and opposers, and ill-wishers.
What you do if you do something?
The way to have no enemies is to
have no convictions and do nothing at all.
Without a conviction, there's only one enemy and
that's God.
The conviction is bound to have enemies and
you will now be known by your enemies.
You should never worry if you get an
enemy.
You should be very concerned with what kind
of an enemy that is.
If I knew that a Communist lived down
on Longwood Drive, too, don't think there are
any down that Republican territory.
But if I knew there was a Communist
living down there, it could turn out to
be my enemy, I'd thank God to have
a Communist for my enemy.
But if he's a good man and Putin
is my enemy, I ought to be distressed
about that.
If you have the wrong kind of enemies,
woe be to you.
But if you have enemies, blessed art thou,
for so the prophets fared before thee.
And I might digress, as the preachers call
it, from my sermon to the young people.
Watch out who your pals are.
You may never have done anything wrong, and
nobody could be able to charge you with
having done anything wrong.
But if you fall in with and make
pals of those who are borderline delinquents, you'll
be blamed for being a delinquent, too, and
you'll have a hard time proving you're not.
Now, if I don't know who you are,
your name is John Doe, Jr. I said,
Pastor, do you know young John Doe, Jr.,
sixteen years old?
And I said, I don't think I know
John Doe.
Well, he comes to our church sometimes, tends
Sunday school classes, plays baseball Tuesday nights during
the summer.
Well, what about John Doe, Jr.?
What kind of fella is he?
Well, I can't tell you.
I don't want to commit myself, but I'll
tell you who his friends are.
And then he names some cigarette suckers, dirty
-tongued, borderline hoodlums, and says he runs around
with them.
I've got my opinion of John Doe, and
I haven't had anybody tell me anything.
Somebody says that's guilt by association.
Sure, it's guilt by association.
Headed egghead, whoever said we shouldn't be able
to attribute guilt by association, ought to go
somewhere and have his head examined.
Birds of a feather flock together, and the
bird that flocks with buzzards is bound to
be a buzzard.
And then I see a ryanek creature flocking
with buzzards, and I go along on that
creature.
What's he done?
You can't prove anything on him.
You haven't got a bit of proof he's
done anything wrong.
No, I have never seen him, but I
know his crowd.
So watch it, dear young people.
You say, how can I win where they
are?
Did you ever hear of a fella going
to hell to win a man who wouldn't
go to heaven?
No, there's a place to start.
You can win them, but you don't have
to win them by running with them.
And if you run with them, then you
will not win them, they'll win you.
We had all the young people in this
church now that have come to me, some
kind of Christian, or at least been interested
over the last 25 years, and then who've
been lost to us through bad friendships.
We couldn't come.
They'd fill every room in the building.
They're gone, as they do from all churches,
because they get into wrong friendship, but that
really is not part of the sermon.
This man was surrounded by enemies, and he
was surrounded by a hatredly thing.
I don't like the word hatred.
There it is, verse 19, bitter hatred.
And always remember sin, hate, always remember that.
And the better you are, the more sin
will hate you.
And then affliction.
Now that's verse 8 to verse 18.
Job's experience interprets the word affliction here.
In James we have it.
If any man's afflicted, let him pray.
That doesn't mean sick.
That means trouble like Job was.
He may be sick, but that's only part
of his affliction.
You can get afflicted without being sick, and
you can be sick without really being sick.
Because affliction means loss or bereavement or having
no one to comfort you.
That was a kind of trouble Job had.
He had a sickness too, temporarily, but that
was affliction.
Job had it, and here it was.
You say, will faith operate?
Is the faith of our Father good?
At a time when there's hatred, at a
time when there's affliction, the answer is yes.
Here was a man living in the middle
of it and triumphant.
And there's troubles.
Verse 17, I don't know all the troubles.
And a man that isn't significant enough, if
God to let him have troubles, is too
insignificant for God to find.
If you're significant, if you signify, if you
mean anything in the world, you'll have troubles
all right.
Paul's experience shows that.
Read 2 Corinthians and see what a time
of it Paul had.
Poor old Paul, his brethren and his enemies
and the Jews and the Gentiles and everybody
was after it.
In verse 18, you know what I'd like
to be able to do?
I wish I could stand here and say,
believe on Jesus Christ, Christians should, and thou
shalt be free from pain.
I wish I could do that, but I
can't do that, as so are we in
this world.
And as my Father has sent me, so
send I you.
In one sense, Jesus is living over again
his life in each one of us.
And he was a man of sorrows and
acquainted with pain.
And he knew it.
Now you might as well brace yourself for
it.
You're going to suffer some pain in your
lifetime.
And there isn't a human body yet found
that was convenient for pain to lodge.
Wherever you're hurt, you wish it was somewhere
else.
And you say, that's an inconvenient place.
If I could stand it, if it was
somewhere else.
And then if it got to the other
place, you'd want it somewhere else.
There's no place where you can suffer pain
conveniently.
Pain is always a rude, uncouth, barbarianistic thing.
And it'll come, all right.
You can figure on it.
It was Shakespeare that said, he's a philosopher
when he has a toothache.
It's all right to sit back in our
ivory tower and philosophize about the heaven and
earth and the things that are going on.
But when you get a toothache, you don't
have so much success in your ivory tower.
But Christianity is good where there is pain.
Oh, the pain of the people of God
down the years.
Read Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
Read any good biography.
If it's not true that the people of
God have known pain, and our Lord said,
oh, so tenderly to his son, fear none
of those things which thou shalt suffer.
He didn't say, pray to me and I'll
deliver you from your suffering.
He said, fear things which thou can suffer.
Always remember you can suffer.
You can.
When the human organism won't take it anymore,
but you can suffer.
So brace yourself and thank God for the
privilege of feeling a little bit of the
sting and the gall and the bitterness that
our Lord felt when he was on earth.
David had it.
Verse 18 talked about pain.
Verse 17 talked about distress.
Now distress, of course, is pain, mental and
physical, mainly psychological or mental.
How distressing mental pain is, it's more distressing
than physical pain.
I think it can be proved that rarely
does it happen that a man commits suicide
because of physical pain.
Almost always it's because of mental distress.
And then there's desolation, verse 16.
Desolation, the grief of loneliness.
I saw a picture in the newspaper here,
I think yesterday, of a man being held
back by policemen.
And I'll never, I think, for many long
months, forget that face.
Five of his children were just burning to
death in the building, to the point where
no living organism could exist second in that
awful furnace.
And this man was going to rush in
there and try to rescue them, and they
were holding him in that face.
I'll never forget it, I think.
Brother, when the fire was out and they
hacked, and that man sat alone, you know
what desolation meant.
Some of you had a husband in the
house and left you.
Poor thing.
The worst part about it was, when he
went, he took part.
He took the part that lives and vibrates.
He took your heart with him.
And you scold yourself for it.
Like the mother whose son has been nothing
but a rascal from the time he was
ten years old, a scoundrel.
He's in prison.
She can't help it.
Her mind doesn't function.
It's her, it's her emotions, her nerves, her,
she loves that no good boy of hers
until she's in prison.
When they walk lockstep, she's walking.
The clank of the door, door goes shut,
and the great iron key turns, it's turned
on her.
And when he wears the, she wears the
prison dress.
She can't help it.
Her heart has been so tied up with
that no good.
I don't know, I should use the word
no good.
Jesus died for him.
And so if Jesus died for him, he's
worth praying for, and maybe he won't be
saved.
But anyway, he loves that boy.
So some of you had that happen to
you, and you've been desolate.
I've had them come to me like that,
sick, white, gray face, and tell me in
voice that was not a normal voice, that
everything was gone, that the one eye, the
one only thing to me in the world
was forsaken.
And I've had men come to me and
sit embarrassed, twist their gloves in their hands,
and tell me about the wife that walked
out.
Poor guy, if he could, he could do
something, he'd clip, if he had a pair
of scissors, he would clip the umbilical cord
and cut himself loose, but he can't.
Can't, he sees the voice and remembers the
little things, he can't.
And so he has a desolation.
Desolation requires loneliness.
Then there are perplexities, and the uncertainties, and
the confusion, and that we're not pleasing God,
all this.
And then sin.
David said here four times, I think, that
he, about sin.
And he prayed to deliver him from his
sin.
He said, Oh God, don't remember my boyhood,
my youth, when I was wild and did
these things, sins of my youth, nor my
transgressions.
According to thy mercy, remember me, oh God,
for thy goodness.
His sin bothered him.
David knew what every instructed person ought to
know, that the only real enemy in the
world, that's the only real enemy.
As long as you can lock the door
on sin and lock it out, you haven't
an enemy.
In hell or earth, nothing can separate you
from the love of God.
It's only sin that's your enemy.
And when sin gives the key to the
enemy, and in comes the invader and takes
over, then there's distress, and heartache, and grief,
and sorrow, and loss of communion, and loss
of fruit, and loss of joy.
Let's be sure there's no sin any place.
Because sin weakened David, and almost is here
in this psalm, and gave to his enemies
their only real power.
Because, I repeat, the only real danger is
within.
If you keep anything outside, you're all right.
As soon as it gets inside, trouble starts.
And it destroyed the enemy within.
The only enemy really that he had, really,
was sin.
So he prayed, and he confessed, and he
trusted God, and he pleaded, and he forced
it on God, and he made God listen.
And he didn't grab at every hope that
everything was all right.
He insisted on knowing.
To deliver him completely, so David began to
hope in God.
Verse six, remember, O Lord, thy tender mercies
and thy loving kindnesses.
I read a passage in a version.
I forgot what version it was.
I have just rearranged my books up here,
and I had translated across a bookcase, and
leaked down over the other side, four or
five of them, and I don't always remember
which translation it was.
One of them said, O God, thou art
loyal to me.
And immediately, I got on my knees and
thanked God.
God's loyal to his people.
The loyalty of love, and the loyalty of
wisdom.
David knew it, and so David trusted God
and said, Lord, your loyal, and your faithfulness,
and your tender mercies have been ever of
old.
This is the Lord.
Verse nine, the meek he will guide in
judgment, the meek he will teach his way.
Verse fourteen, the secret of the Lord's with
them that fear him.
Fifteen, he shall pluck my feet out of
the net.
That's one thing we didn't remember.
A net, a booby trap.
Booby traps for David.
David said, I can't see the booby traps.
I don't know where they are.
And you know how David, he escaped them
by not looking for them at all.
He escaped them by looking to the Lord.
And the Lord, the Lord plucked his feet
out of the net, and he didn't get
into any booby traps.
A lot of you dear people, you're developing
a soul.
You're always afraid.
People are always calling me, or writing me,
or coming to see me, and there's always
some little old pimple on, and they forget
all about the cancer in the soul.
But some little old thing, afraid of some
booby trap.
Can I do this?
May I should do about this?
Think I ought to take in a gram?
What do you think about the opera, Mr.
Tozer?
What do you think about television?
What do you think Mr. Tozer about?
Don't bother me about such things.
Those aren't the things that matter, sir.
There's something bigger than that.
If they should prove booby traps, the way
to escape them is to look straight to
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Straight at him, straight at him.
And as you see Jesus, you out of
the net, and you will escape the net.
So here we have a man.
You have a man in the middle of
life, a living man in a dead world,
a good man in a bad world, a
right man in a wrong world, a man
of God in the soul with men of
flesh.
And he was living in the middle of
it, and living right in the middle of
it, and thanking God in the middle of
it, and fruitful in the middle of it,
serving his generation by the will of God.
So here was a living man, believing and
praying.
After all, trust and obey, he believed and
he prayed.
The devil can silence you so you can't
pray anymore.
That's one of the first things he has
to do.
When an enemy comes into a country, one
of the first things he wants to do
is to destroy communication.
If he comes to your home, if he's
a wise burglar, that is, wise in the
ways of the devil, he'd cut the telephone
wires before he comes in.
Communication with help, the source of help, then
you're an easy victim.
So prayer is the source of communication between
you and help.
And if the devil can cut the wires
and discourage you so you don't pray, you're
an easy victim.
In God's name I beseech you, begin to
pray.
You've had a rough time of it, maybe
some of you have, and I suppose I
don't even know you.
You've been treated rough this last week.
You've gone through hard things.
Well, if you've prayed, then I say, thank
God, and I wouldn't have had it otherwise.
But if you're discouraged and your prayers are
coming to you, then watch out.
Better get your communications established, better get to
God again.
You say, I can't pray, I'm blue, failed,
and I can't pray.
Oh, you can say Abba, you can say
that much, can't you?
We confess our sins, he's faithful and just
and forgives us from all unrighteousness.
And he gives forth the spirit of his
Son, saying, Abba, Father.
And Abba, you know, in one Arabic word
for father, and various other languages have it,
Abba.
And they tell me that Abba is a
word you can speak without teeth.
You can take your teeth out and still
say Abba.
But if it was a difficult thing, you'd
have to get your teeth out and say
Abba before you have any teeth.
A little fella I see back there now,
I can see through the glass, somebody holding
a little chap.
He can't, he can say Abba.
And so we can say that.
If you feel so little and hopeless and
useless that you can't pray, if you can't
pray like a baby, pray like a newborn
babe and say Abba.
Keep saying that, God will hear your prayer
and know what you mean.
Smith, that great English writer of several generations
ago, he never knew what to do with
punctuation, never.
He was a brilliant writer, stylist to perfection,
but he never knew how to punctuate.
So he wrote a manuscript and then he
wrote one page.
And on that page of tuation marks there
were in the English language and said, no,
sprinkle these around where they'll do the most
good.
He didn't know where they belong, but he
hoped somebody did.
And so I say to you this, just
tell God, oh God, I don't know how
to pray.
I don't know what to say, but hear
my heart and sprinkle it around where it
won't fit where it ought to be.
I'm too dumb.
I don't even know how to pray, God.
Ah, God loves people like that.
The meek he will, the meek he will
teach his way.
And if you will simply meekly say, Abba,
Father, for Jesus' sake, pretty soon you will
get eloquent.
And then the communications are established.