Joy tends to surprise us. Often when we least expect it or deserve it, God reminds us that He is near and still loves us. Join us today to learn four reasons to rejoice from Psalm 51.

Four Reasons to Rejoice

Monday, August 8, 2011

INTRO

A year’s worth of gains, erased in a day. It only took last Thursday for a jittery market to wipe out all the growth of the year for the Standard and Poors 500 index.

Swell

Welcome to HT in a time of market and economic uncertainty. I’m CM sharing the GS that’s all about Jesus as we begin a new week together and a program called Four Reasons to Rejoice. The financial markets have never been a place for the feint hearted. But they weren’t the place for any of us last week, even if we think of ourselves as brave. The spiraling, whipsaw markets we saw last week, only increases the fear of widespread panic and maybe a second recession. I can’t think of a better reason to turn to the Lord, to lose our fear in Him and that’s why we begin this week with a series called Reasons to Rejoice. So let’s forget for a moment the Italian debt deal, even a hopeful end-of-last-week jobs report, and the fear of the return of recession. Let’s turn to the Lord and worship.

OPEN – Beautiful Redeemer – Women of Faith – Rejoice

An album called “Rejoice” and a song by Women of Faith called “Beautiful Redeemer on HAVEN Today and a program called Four Reasons to Rejoice.





Thanks for joining me as we talk about some lessons to learn that will bring joy in our lives. From Psalm 51 and this was the psalm that David wrote, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love. According to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.” David took another man’s wife, Bathsheba, and then that led to his committing murder. And then of course the prophet Nathan confronting him of his sins and reminding him that he needed to confess his sins, he needed to repent of his sins. And then later in Psalm 51 he says, “Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean, wash me Lord, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you’ve crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Powerful words from Psalm 51. I hope that you will take time to read and pray through that entire Psalm later today. I was reading through prayer requests that come to Haven Today – we get a lot of them – and I was reading one that came in from a man in Toledo, Ohio. He said, “I so desperately wish to be Christ-like. At 64 however, I’ve developed so many bad habits over the years that it’s difficult for me to be constant in the faith. I don’t read my Bible and this, of course, should be the very first thing that I should do.” He says, “I’m a fairly decent sort, but I do believe that time is running out.” He asks for help, he asks for prayer. Well, that’s what I want to do. I want to provide some help for all of us in the next few minutes from Psalm 51. I want to share with you “Four Reasons to Rejoice”.





You have made your way to a very unique radio program, a program that blends music as well as message with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I want begin by quoting a line from a pastor friend whose now in heaven. I’ve used the line before on this program and if you have ever heard Steve Brown, who is also on Christian radio, you’ve heard him quote the same line. Here it is, “Cheer up. You’re worse than you think.” Now, think about that for just a moment. It relates to what we’re talking about in Psalm 51, because I want us to have joy. And how do we live the Christian life and find the joy we need? We live it through daily repentance. Let me share these four reasons to rejoice:

Reason number 1 – repentance involves painful self discovery. In the history of the Christian church, those we quote the most, those we respect the most, those that studied the Bible the most, understood that repentance was a daily part of the Christian life.

But that life starts when blame-shifting and rationalizing ends. You take a long steady look at yourself every day and when you do, what do you see? Well, you see what David saw in Psalm 51 verse 3. David acknowledges the results of his self discovery and he’s very much aware of his sin. The glamour of it, the excitement of it, the illicit thrill of it has worn off and what’s now left is a walking nightmare. When you repent like David did in this Psalm, the reality of what you’ve done is at the forefront of your mind. You’re not fooling yourself any more. You’re not burying it and trying to forget it, thinking it will go away. You become painfully conscious of it. And David goes on to make another important self discovery. The problem isn’t solely what he did, the problem is also who he is. And that’s the point of Psalm 51 verse 5, “surely I was sinful at birth. Sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” He’s not blaming his mom for his problem. What he’s doing is recognizing a truth that also applies to you and me and it applies to the man who wrote from Toledo. We have a bent in our very nature that makes us sin. It’s in our nature to have outbursts of anger. It’s part of our dark side that we take secret pleasure in the misfortune of others. It’s part of us to want to do what we’re told we cannot do. Now this is maybe very familiar to Christians … I hpe to you. It certainly is to me. You know what sin is. You’ve seen it, you’ve confronted it. If you’re a Christ-follower, I pray you don’t deny the reality of lingering sin in your life. However, you may not be prepared to accept that you’re a sinner who needs to repent, even if you’re a Christian. C.S. Lewis made an interesting observation about people who haven’t awakened to the reality of what the Bible calls sin in their life. Lewis said it this way, “No man knows how bad he is, till he’s tried very hard to be good.” And Lewis’ point is that people who don’t recognize the seriousness of sin in their lives have too easily given into it all of their lives. Lewis said, “You don’t learn the strength of an army by surrendering to it. You learn its strength by trying to fight against it.” Lewis said that the people who deny the seriousness of sin in their lives have led sheltered lives by too quickly and too easily giving in to sinful impulses. My challenge to you if this describes you, is to try – really try – to live the life demanded by a Perfect and Holy Creator God and what you will discover is that you will fail. And the question then becomes, what are the consequences of that failure? How do you deal with the fact that you don’t really measure up? Only one answer and the answer that leads to joy is to repent.

Reason number 2 – repentance is seeing your sin as treason. Cosmic treason. Now that may sound a little strong, I know, but that’s what David is effectively saying in Psalm 51, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” That statement has confused a lot of people because David certainly sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah. David isn’t denying that, but what he’s affirming is that his sin against those people is at a deeper level, it is a sin against God. He’s offended God by his offenses against Bathsheba, Uriah and the nation of Israel that he betrayed. And we do the very same thing. There isn’t any person listening to Haven Today who can say, “I haven’t done anything to wrong to God.” No, because the extent to which you’ve sinned against other people you’ve sinned against God. In fact, our sin against God doesn’t even have to involve the mistreatment of other people. Even to the extent we’ve lived our lives in passive ignorance of God living, our lives as if God weren’t there, as if he didn’t have a claim on our lives. Then we have offended a loving and a Holy God who’s reached out to us in a breathtaking way, and yet we’ve just brushed him off as if he weren’t real. Real repentance begins when you begin to experience sorrow and regret over offending a Holy and loving God, rather than regretting the pain and the inconvenience that your sin has caused you. What does that lead us to? It leads us to daily repentance. And where does daily repentance lead us to? It leads us to joy in the Lord and joy in living our Christian lives.





We need the Lord, don’t we, to change our hearts and set us free and lead us to joy, joy in this life and joy in the Lord, joy in the salvation that we have. We’re sharing 4 truths that lead to joy from Psalm 51.

Let me give you the third reason. Reason number 3 – repentance is not about doing more, it’s about becoming undone. Now let me explain what I mean by that. Most of us are a sort of “can do” people aren’t we? At least I am and I know most of the people I meet are. Our instinctive reaction to the message that we need to repent is to ask a follow up question. “Ok, what do I need to do? Give me the list, give me the formula and, yeah, I’ll repent.” Our instinctive reaction is to get religious and that’s exactly what David says God doesn’t want. Listen to verse Psalm 51 verse 16, “You don’t delight in sacrifice or I would bring it. You don’t take pleasure in burnt offerings.” We think things go badly for us because we haven’t done enough yet, we haven’t prayed enough, or like that fellow in Toledo said, who listens Haven Today, we haven’t read our Bibles enough, so we think we’ve got to do more of the same. We’ve got to do it better. We’ve got to do it more often. That’s a ruthless treadmill which at its heart is fueled by our own pride and self-righteousness. We want to believe that we can do something about our own sins, that we can pay for our own sins and establish our own standing before God. That, though, is false repentance. True repentance doesn’t center on what you do, it’s becoming undone. And becoming undone is what’s implied by what David said in Psalm 51:17. The acceptable sacrifices to God are a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart. Is David saying we’ve got to be sad enough? No, he’s not saying that. That would just be turning repentance into more human effort. You’d be going through trying to gin up enough broken-heartedness for your sin so that God will accept you. To come to God with a broken heart and a broken spirit is to come to God in the realization that you’ve come totally empty handed. Spiritual brokenness is spiritual poverty. It’s what Jesus referred to as being poor in spirit. It means that you bring absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing to the table. Now I know that’s a little hard to swallow, but it’s true and it brings us to the

fourth reason which I want to share with you right now. True repentance involves the acceptance of God’s mercy. That’s how David opens this beautiful Psalm of repentance, appealing solely to God’s mercy in verse 1, “Have mercy on me, O God.” The only thing that David appeals to is God’s mercy. You see, that just flies in the face of what so many think repentance is. We tend to think repentance is either passing some sort of exam and earning God’s favor or we might even think of it as a bargain. We perform our side of the deal and we thereby obligate God to perform his side. There’s not a single shred of any of that in Psalm 51 or the entire Bible. David doesn’t appeal to how well he’s done, he knows he’s failed and so have we. He doesn’t suggest that God somehow “owes him one”. He knows God doesn’t owe him anything and the Living God doesn’t owe us anything. The only thing David can grounds for appeal, the only basis for our coming to God is his mercy alone, his undeserved, his unmerited divine favor. Here’s the deep truth: How can David appeal with confidence to God’s mercy? How does David have any confidence that God will grant him mercy? The answer is because David knows that God is God, as he says in verse 1, “a God of unfailing love and great compassion.” The Hebrew that’s translated “unfailing love” is a covenant word. It reminds us that God has bound himself to us, his people, and he sticks to his word. His love never fails. His multiplied compassions never fail. But where did David see God’s mercy, his unfailing love, his great compassion and where do you and I see it? How will it change our lives? Well, probably in a lot of places, but preeminently David saw it … and you and I see it … in God’s acceptance of the sacrifice of an innocent for the guilty. And you know who that was. It was sending his own son, Jesus Christ to die on the cross and that’s what we do daily when we repent. We cling to the cross and we find deliverance and then we find our joy.



Song: Our Great God – Fernando Ortega – Come Down O Love Divine



“Four Reasons to Rejoice”. This is Haven Today and thanks for being with me. My prayer before coming into the studio was that people who are lacking joy, Christians who just are beside themselves in living their lives would turn to Psalm 51 and would turn to the life of David and would find hope and would find joy through this whole concept of repenting. Even though you repented once, and Jesus died on the cross to save you of your sins, this daily living for Christ is bound up in repentance. And when you understand repentance, then you’re going to be able to have a life of joy. And I was praying that for the man in Toledo. Before we close now, let me just pray for you.

Dear Father in Heaven, I pray that this message, “Four Reasons to Rejoice” has been a blessing to others and has ministered to all of us because we’ve stayed close and true to your word. Some of us are really worried. We don’t know where the market is headed. Some of us are out of work and we have no prospects for work. Some of us are living with pain and all different kinds of discouragement in our lives. Lord, for anyone listening right now who is going through a time of worry or sadness or hurting or may just be wondering are you really there … Lord, have mercy on us. Show us you care and that you are there. Give us the joy that comes from a life of repentance, a life that sees our great and daily need for your mercy and loving kindness. Like King David, all Christians are still sinners. But there is power in the cross. There is joy in forgiveness and joy every day comes out of repentance. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. May we taste your grace afresh and after the joy you gave us at the end day say thank you. Thank you now in Jesus name, amen.