Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / June 16, 2019 | There's An App For That - Psalm 118:24

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June 16, 2019 | There's An App For That - Psalm 118:24 · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Father's Day.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: The righteous lead blameless lives.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Blessed are their children after them.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I want to introduce you, if you were missed last week, to the series that we are on this summer.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: The sermon series is a series called There's an App for That, and it's based upon a Bible app, which many of you use, I think, called UVersion.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: The most popular by far Bible app in the world.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: For example, over 400 million verses were shared on this app last year.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been a Bible app for 10 years, and in the last eight years, what they've done is they've done a statistical analysis to see what verses and what chapters and so forth were read the most, were shared the most, were bookmarked the most, and so forth.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they they've put out this little announcement.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is the world's favorite verse for 2012, 2013, 14, 15, 16, 7, 8, and 19.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, you know, that'll be fun.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't I have us devote a week this summer to each of those verses?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So last week we took the uh first verse, uh the 2012 world's favorite verse, Philippians 4, 6.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was a verse that touched a lot of us, that a lot of us needed right at that time.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Very famous verse.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry about anything, modern translation.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The old King James says, be anxious for nothing.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: But in everything through prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's a verse about anxiety or verse about worry.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us how to get from worry all the way down to peace.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it says that the way to get from worry to shalom or peace is to cross the bridge of prayer.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: You take it to the Lord in prayer.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: It uses all four words used for prayer, uh, Greek words in the New Testament.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Three of them mean the same thing, basically.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: One of them is different.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I mentioned to you last week that this was the most overlooked part of my desperate prayers to God, my worry-filled prayers to God.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: When I take my needs to the Lord in prayer, and your needs, I sometimes, I often forget to say, thank you, Lord, uh, for what you're doing.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and I mentioned that simply because the vast majority of the emails and texts that I received since last Sunday morning's message emphasize that same thing to me.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I emphasize that again.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, as you're taking your needs to the Lord in prayer, remember this kind of prayer and find ways to thank God in your prayer.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then the peace of God, not the peace with God, not peace from God, but the very peace that God Himself has, the serenity of the Trinity, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that was last week.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say the verse together from the Christian Standard Bible here, and then we'll move on to this week's verse.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: You ready?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Go.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you've downloaded that into your heart and soul and learned it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Today we move up.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: We move closer to today, 2013, the world's favorite verse, Psalm 118.24, is a verse which you may not know that you know, but you know this verse by heart already, right?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: It goes, this is say it with me, this is the day that the Lord has made.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: You sing that song, you know that verse, you may be dismissed.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing more to be said.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty straightforward, pretty cool.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I need, can it, we need some more people.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: That kid's so cute.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: We need some more people to talk, because I mean, what do you say about this, right?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, well, I'm gonna try, okay?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, preachers, they say I'll keep it short, yeah.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, but I'm gonna share with you what it means, what we think it means, what it really does mean on the surface, then I'm gonna share with you a secret or a deeper meaning.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: So when we usually use this, and right now, this morning, all around the world, these this this song, uh, for there's a song, there's an old song and a more modern song.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know the old ditty that goes, This is the day, this is the day that the Lord hath made, that the Lord hath made.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: We will rejoice, we will rejoice and be glad in it, and be glad in it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day that the Lord hath made.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is rejoice and be glad in it.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day, this is the day that the Lord has made.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that song, or song like it, is beginning the worship service in, I'm sure, every state in the Union today, and many countries around the world.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what it means to both song leader and singers when they sing it is what a great day this is.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sunday.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Could be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, but it's the day the Lord has made, it's the day the Lord has given us, and I get to live in this day, and therefore I should be glad, and I should rejoice, and I should.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a call to worship, isn't it?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it always leads.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's the first song in a worship package.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's a great, that's that's good.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I that's a great meaning.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a surface meaning, but it's a great meaning.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the meaning of this verse, simple meaning, inside the four walls of church building, or the seven walls of a church building, whatever.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when you take the song home in a Christian home, Christian family, and it enters the walls of a home, it develops a little twist, generally, which goes like this.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Children, this is the day the Lord has given us.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Stop your complaining.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Stop your whining.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if any of you use this verse, but I think that's pretty much why it was hung in a plaque on the wall of our home growing up.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and my mother was the one who usually quoted this verse to it, when her litter of kids, there were six or seven or eight or nine or ten of us at the time, when we began whining.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes it would be because we lived in Portland, Oregon, where it rains 364 and a half days of the year.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we would be stuck in this tiny little house, we'd be bouncing off of each other like ten pence.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd begin, we'd start complaining or whining that we couldn't go out to play, and then we'd hear this angelic voice wafting from the kitchen.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day that the Lord hath made.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd quiet down for 12, 13 seconds.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: We start again.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Did we start whining when we got told that we had to finish our choice before we could play that board game, sorry, or whatever?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day that the Lord hath made.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: In the summertime, did we often go, life is so unutterably, we didn't use that long word when we were kids, but life is so totally boring.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day that the Lord hath made.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's used inside Christian homes today, legitimately, I think, to remind children that we shouldn't complain.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: My father and my mother would not let us complain and whine because they believe, based upon this verse and others, that whining and complaining was an affront against the goodness of God, who had created a day and then allowed us by his grace to live in that day.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so they were right about that.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: I believe they're right about that.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that whining and complaining, as Paul says in Philippians 2, is something that Christians shouldn't do.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can shut your kids down when they start doing it, great.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if you never go deeper with Psalm 118, 24, then you have stayed in the shallows and you have missed some of the beautiful, great meaning of this verse.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, let's continue to praise God every morning for giving us another day.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: God is in the day-making business.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: The ancient of days is the manufacturer of days.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: He has a continually running conveyor belt stretching from heaven to this world.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: One new day rolls off God's assembly line every 24 hours, right on schedule.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: We rise from our beds each day, knowing that an endless succession of sunrises and sunsets come from his workbench, each of them individually crafted with grace and wrapped with love for his people.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: So this verse, yes, reminds us that God's compassion never fails.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's new every morning, for great is his faithfulness, and that goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our lives.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that sufficient for each day is God's enablement.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's one meaning of this verse.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it stays on the surface, but it's a valid meaning.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm telling you that this verse is secretly richer and deeper than this.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: That this line right here, this is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it, is a line in a story.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is the almost the final line in a story whose plot line is the plot line of every great story ever told.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the story is told us in Psalm 118, which was which is quoted more than almost any other psalm in the New Testament.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was quoted by the crowds when Jesus wrote in on Palm Sunday.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was quoted by Peter on Pentecost Sunday.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was it's quoted in all of the Gospels and in most of the epistles.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther said that Psalm 18, he said, I love all of Holy Scripture, but Psalm 18, that's my part of Scripture.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I own that scripture.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the piece of scripture that gets me through every day.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote one of the verses from Psalm 18 and put it on a plaque in his study.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because this psalm is an incredible psalm.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: There are six psalms in a row, and this is the last one.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Six Psalms, Psalm 113 to 118, which are called the Hallelujah Psalms, the Halel Psalms, which were sung by the pilgrims as they went up to Jerusalem for the three major feasts of the year.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: They were sung as the thousands and even perhaps millions of pilgrims from all over the world went up for Passover to Jerusalem each fall.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they were sung, and so they would end as they went through the gates with Psalm 118.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: They would shout those words at the end of the Psalm, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they would walk through those walls.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then during Passover, those were the six Psalms that were sung during the Passover.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those were the verses of the Bible sung by Jesus and his disciples the night before he died in the upper room.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Psalm 18 were the last words that Jesus sung before his crucifixion.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so this verse is part of a story about crisis and rescue and thanksgiving that every one of us has known in our lives.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Let me show it to you.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to show you all the verses of the Psalm.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Feel free to look at it on your own.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: But in context, and remember, any text out of context is a pretext for saying, for believing whatever you want.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: But in context, verses 1 through 3, paint a picture of a crisis, the kind of a crisis that you have faced and that I have faced in our lives and that God's people way back then had faced.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: I called to the Lord in distress, the psalmist says in verse 5.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: In verses 10 and 11, he says, All the nations surrounded me.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know when this was written, but we know a number of times in Israel's history where David and where other leaders of Israel looked outside of Jerusalem and found the nations surrounding them.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: They surrounded me, he says, using the same word a second time.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: They surrounded me, he says, just in case we need to know.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And there is this picture of a sort of a claustrophobic picture of this vice pressing tighter and tighter.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: They surrounded me like bees, he says in verse 12.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I can't, I couldn't help thinking reading this of uh of remember those kids, the soccer team way over in Thailand, the border of Thailand and Burma, that less than a year ago last summer got caught in a cave, didn't even get discovered for nine days down there in the darkness.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: They went down deep, they couldn't get back out, it was dark.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: There was this team of uh of 12 young kids and their 25-year-old soccer coach.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then when they got discovered and they used ground penetrating radar, and all of a sudden they realized the only way to get them out was to somehow put down seals, you know, who could swim.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: There was this huge underground cavern totally filled with water, and these kids, most of whom didn't even know to swim, they were gonna have to put oxygen masks on them and take them wriggling through the earth and underwater for a 9 to 11-hour journey.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And a team of Navy SEALs from the United States and Britain and Australia and Thailand and China and so forth, all got together and they chose 18 of them to go way down in the cave and rescue these kids.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: One of the rescuers died, but they, after another three days, they got all of these kids out of there, squeezing through these tight spots.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I freak out when I even say that because I'm so claustrophobic, you know.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what this passage is.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: This passage is like getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and you go, I don't know, get the surrounding me like bees.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So let me explain this one to you, okay?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up on a little farm and we had a fruit orchard, dozens of fruit trees, and we all had loads, we had loads of clover that we cut for our cows and so forth.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Great, for alfalfa.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And because of the clover and because of the fruit trees, bees loved our place, and my dad took advantage of that by getting a bunch of beehives and it stacked them up by threes.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: So right next to each other, right between the fruit trees and the field that had the most clover.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little ways away from the house.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was four years old.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: My brother Steve was three.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: We we had a good time chasing each other and getting in fights.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, even at that age, and one day we were running through the fruit orchard.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember whether I was running away from him or he was running away from me.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I would like to think I was running away from him because the other way sounds really mean.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: But one of us ran right without looking, was terrified, ran right into the hives and overturned three of them.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine what happened.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: The bees just swarmed out of there and absolutely irate, and within a second, both of us were surrounded.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the word here, they were surrounded in swarms of bees and getting stung.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we began screaming, screaming, and though we were a ways away from the house, my mom heard that and were running toward the house, screaming from mom, and she comes out at that time.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: She was in her mid-twenties, as she was young, and uh, and she had really long hair.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew later how much she despised bees, and she had her own reasons for being scared of them, but of course, these are her two sons, and so she's brushing away bees, and so they're getting mad at her.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I just I just clearly remember after this whole thing is over, and uh, and I only had like a dozen stings.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: My brother Steve, who has red hair and so forth, got over a hundred stings and had to be taken to the hospital, and I prayed for him every day.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: No, um, but sorry when you're four, but I just remember watching my mother painstakingly pulling live bees out of her hair for the next hour.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I, you know, even when it's bees and not a cave, I we felt just enclosed and surrounded and attacked and wanting to get out.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever lived, for instance, in a small place?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: You ever, like when you were single, did you ever live in an apartment so small that did you?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm not maybe you weren't like Harry Potter and lived under the stairs, but but I just think of the time I uh I I sold door to door for five summers to make money go through college.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And and my last summer I was in Florida, and I got paired up there with two kids who were going to the Nazarene College up in Kansas City.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we finally found a place to stay, and it was a uh trailer home that normally got pulled behind a car or something.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was so small, so small, that the three of us could from our beds, any of the three of us, we could reach out and answer the phone, we could turn on the water at the sink, we could open the bathroom door.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was that small.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was just, I think that's why I'm claustrophobic today, but it's one of many reasons.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: If once, if just once, the people who owned the huge house out front had come to us and said, hey, just for fun, why don't we switch places for a day?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd gotten to be out in their beautiful large house.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, anyway, I'm going on about this, probably because I'm neurotic about this whole thing of getting squeezed tight.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the crisis, and I talk about that because even if it's not bees or a cave, you know what that feels like.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: There has to have been a time when you thought, I can't get out from underneath this financial burden, and it just weighed on you and it squeezed you.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you got a word about your help from a doctor, and it was so scary and so bad that you couldn't think of anything else all day from the moment you woke up to the moment you fell into a fitful sleep late at night.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: That news just crushed upon you, right?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it just squeezed you.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it was a relationship and you felt there was no way to save it, and it was breaking up and falling apart, and you just felt like you were in a vice.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the picture here, right?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: A crisis, and we don't know what that crisis is, okay?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: But then the great thing is that the Lord swoops in from heaven, the Lord pulls a rescue operation, he says in verse 5, the Lord answered me and put me in a spacious place.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Whew, finally, and the Lord helped me.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 13, verse 14, the Lord's my strength and my song, he's become my salvation.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Get ready.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is where our verse, this is the day the Lord has made, let the let us rejoice and be glad in it.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is where our verse starts getting deeper and richer.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because this phrase, or this clause, actually, because it has a verb, uh, comes it it comes out of something previous in Israel's history.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: It comes out of the most famous time of crisis and rescue in Israel's history.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that time of crisis and rescue was the crisis at the Red Sea.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: You remember that hundreds of years before Israel had been held captive in Egypt.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, Pharaoh had let them go for a little while before he changed his mind and began chasing after them as they've left Egypt.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: You have two million, you have women, you have children, you have animals, and so forth, and they're going really slow.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, their scouts, Israeli scouts, tell them they're coming after us.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: The army of Pharaoh is coming after us.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then they walk up and they get caught at the at what's at the Red Sea.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the Red Sea, I mean, they're Caught between their enemies and the deep blue sea, and they are getting surrounded, and they are squeezed, and they are in utter and total crisis, and they're crying out.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens, as you know, is God starts to rescue them.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing he does is he sort of defeats the sea by sending a great wind and he creates a pathway through the sea, and the Israelites move through the sea.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Does that rescue them?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, not completely, because you know what happens is that Pharaoh's army follows them, starts coming through the sea after them.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they're absolutely terrified.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: And again, on the other side of the sea, they're grabbing Moses, as they did on the front side, saying, Why did you bring us here to die?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: But then they get rescued again, as you know, because God who had defeated the sea now defeats the army of Pharaoh by using the sea to get rid of them.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And what happened is that on the other side, after the waters came down and they realized they really and truly had been rescued and delivered and saved, they did what people always do.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: They wrote a poem, they wrote a song.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Moses and Miriam got together and wrote a song, and it's called the Song of Miriam, the most famous song in the Old Testament, because Miriam led a choir, and hundreds of Israel's women sang this song over and over.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: For years they would sing this song.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the Song of Miriam, and the most famous line in that song is The Lord is my strength and my song.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: He has become my salvation.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And now, hundreds of years later, in Psalm 118, a psalm which I remind you was sung by pilgrims going up to Jerusalem by Jesus and his disciples the night before he died, a song all about Passover.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Just before Jesus died on the cross to save us, they sang these exact same words quoted in Psalm 118.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give thanks to you for you answered me, you have become my salvation.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, lest we think that Psalm 18 is only about our personal crises of health and money and relationships, lest we somehow limit this psalm to only the surface view about today, and we should not whine or complain, we have sort of an outlier verse just before our verse, this is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: We have this strange verse about a picture's a stonemason who's building a beautiful building, and he's picking between the stones, and he's, oh, this is a good stone, and he puts it in, and he's getting to the roof, which is to the capstone, which is going to hold the whole building together.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we have this picture of the stonemason going, oh, this is a worthless stone, throwing it aside, and suddenly swooping down from heaven, God Almighty rescuing that rejected stone, waiting, and then plugging it perfectly in as the capstone to hold the building together.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's the picture in verse 22, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone to let us know.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just about you.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's something else happening here.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's someone who's being rejected, who right now is becoming the key to the whole building.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in the New Testament, they understood this so well that this became the most quoted verse of any of those other verses in Psalm 118.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Quoted by Matthew, quoted by Mark, quoted by Luke, quoted by Peter in his Day of Pentecost message, quoted by Paul, quoted six times, because somehow, as they're singing this, we need to realize the disciples looked at Jesus in the upper room and realized who's more rejected than our Savior and friend Jesus Christ.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is a prophecy that he's going to be rescued.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus understood it that way as well, and the disciples all understood it clearly later.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so you understand where we're going with this.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day that the Lord has made in context, is about a day of salvation.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: You've become my salvation.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: That was verse 21.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 22, the rejected stone has become the keystone, the chosen stone, verse 23.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the Lord's done this and it's marvelous in our eyes.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, this is the day the Lord has made.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'll rejoice and be glad in it.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: He's not just singing, well, this is a nice Tuesday morning.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's singing, this is the day of salvation the Lord has brought about.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: So let me tell you about three days of salvation.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: The first day of salvation that this verse is singing about is the day of the day that Jesus gave us salvation.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: The day that Jesus hung on the cross, the day that was fulfilled when he rose from the tomb.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Easter, Good Friday and Easter, that's the day of salvation this song is really about.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: This would be the perfect song to sing on Easter morning.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day the Lord hath made.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let's rejoice and be glad in it.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day of salvation where the Lord acted to bring salvation to the whole world.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Day one.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I'm going to just say about that, by the way, Craig Keener, who's at Asbury Seminary, puts it this way.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: The verse points to the greatest act of God on our behalf when Jesus our Lord died and rose again for us.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: G.K.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Chesterton put it this way.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Do you realize that the day that Jesus rose from the grave, in a sense, the world was recreated?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the first day of the new world.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the Bible, he said, tells us that Jesus walked in the garden to remind us of the first day of history when God walked in the garden to speak with Adam and Eve.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is the day the Lord has made, is the day of resurrection.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: The second day that this refers to is your own day of salvation.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: I hope there's been this day in your life.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Where you looked at the resurrection, the cross, and the empty tomb, and you said, That story is my story.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: He died for my sins on the cross.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: He rose from the grave to give me eternal life.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you put your faith in Jesus Christ in that moment.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus' promise came true in your life, for he said, Whoever believes in my word, verily, verily I say to you, I give him eternal life, and he's passed from death unto life, and he shall never perish.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that was your day of salvation.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what day that was.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: I pray to God that day has come.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you're here and that day hasn't come, I'm so glad you're here.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that wonderful day.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, every day of the week is great.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, every day of the week we should be glad and rejoice because it's a gift of God.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: But there was a day of salvation, 2,000 years ago, where Christ died for your sin and rose again to give you eternal life.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that day can become your day by experience if you put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6, too, God says at just the right time I heard you.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: On the day of salvation I helped you.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, the right time is now.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Today is the day of salvation.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul said this, calling people to make the day of the cross and the day of the empty tomb their own personal day of salvation.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a way, every day that you live as a Christian is a day of salvation.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: You could say, every single day is, Spurgeon called it this in Psalm 118.24, he says, this is really about the gospel day, which is every day in the last 1900 years, which it was back then.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a Christian, is a day in which the Lord Jesus Christ in heaven keeps you saved because your eternal life doesn't depend on your behavior.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on Christ keeping his promise.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so every day, in a way, is a day of salvation for you.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Augustine was saying that, 400 AD, when he said, We've just been telling his congregation, we've just been singing to God, this is the day the Lord has made.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about it.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't a day of the common sort, not the kind of a day that has a sunrise and sunset, but a day that never sets.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what he meant by that was that this verse doesn't primarily refer to Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, a day that we just ought to be glad in.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, this is primarily a day about salvation.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody who's experienced that day of salvation in their own lives has a day that never sets in their own heart.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why they can rejoice and be glad in it.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it even goes further than this.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, by the way, the modern Augustine, J.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Vernon McGee, puts it this way: the day which the Lord hath made is the day of salvation.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: That day has already been 2,000 years long, and we will rejoice and be glad in it.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: But let me add, the third day of salvation is that day when either Jesus returns and you get caught up to glory, or actually the day of your death, when the Lord catches you up to be with himself, absent from the body, present with the Lord.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: The day of your final salvation, we could call it.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: I love the way Johnny Erickson Tata talks about it.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: She gave the talk at Wheaton when one of our kids graduated, when Doug graduated from Wheaton.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, Johnny Erickson Tata got in a terrible accident in a pond when she was 17, left her paraplegic, she could feel nothing below her shoulders.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh but when she was still trying to deal with it, she went to her church, it was uh an episcopal church at that point, and she was in her wheelchair, and she said, but part of our liturgy in the Episcopal Church was that we were to kneel.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, and there I was, I just stood out like a sore thumb, and I began to cry because I couldn't kneel, I couldn't move.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: I went to a convention, there were hundreds of people, and part of that was they told everybody to get out of where they were sitting and to kneel.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: And there I was again, sticking out like a sore thumb, but all of a sudden I realized as I was crying, that I was crying with joy for a day that was coming, for a day that was coming when I could run and when I could walk, and I could shout and I could leap and I could kneel.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I told the Lord at that on at that point, I was crying out of happiness, and I said, before I come to the feast table, the banquet table, on that day in heaven, I'm going to fall on my knees before you just to show that I can.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a day that you and I have waiting for us too, and it's a day of final salvation.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: She said, on the Wheaton stage graduating, she says, these atrophied hands, these the, you know, all of this stuff that I can't feel anything, my body is wasting away.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm telling you that one day this body, this body is gonna do things that I I've been longing to do all my life.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: She's looking for a future day like you are looking for that future day, and you're longing for that day because that day is a day of final salvation, and on that day you and I will say, we'll rejoice and we'll be glad in it.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Some people say, you know what, you're escapist for that.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're Pollyanish.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we live in the first generation.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody else, I think, said this.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, Tolkien or somebody, said, we live in really the first generation where stories that have happy endings are looked down upon.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: Those are only for children.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: Steven Spielberg never won an Oscar for any of his movies that had happy endings, you know, Star Wars type movies.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: He had to make a movie that had a sad ending because the idea is that grown-ups need realism, and realism is negative, and there are no happy endings, and it's a morbid type of a thing, right?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: Although the fact of the matter is, our favorite movies, Princess Pride, how about the Hallmark Channel, right?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those things are the most favorite things for people because we love happy endings.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And J.R.R.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien, none other than Lord of the Rings guy, right?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna be the fourth member of the Trinity when we get to that.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, Tolkien put it this way: he said the reason we love happy endings, he says this whole idea that we're fugitives or we're escapists or we're polyannists is totally wrong.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: He said, the fact is, the reason we love happy endings is that is Capital R reality.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: We know inside ourselves that even though we don't see happy endings on this earth, except in story, the reason we love those myths and we love those stories is that that's really what's going to happen.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: This world is not going to end the way we're often told, with the sun burning us to a crisp and everything, you know, negative.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: The world is actually going to end with what he called a U catastrophe, which is why the Lord of the Rings and all of his books end with a U catastrophe.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: EU in Greek means good.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Catastrophe means bad.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: It means catastrophe.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, you know what?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's an incredible catastrophe coming, but it's a good one.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're not escapists because we believe, you know, we picture, and he pictures it in his books.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's horrible things that happen.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: He says those things have to happen.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're part of the crisis from which one day we are going to get saved and rescued, but in the end, it's going to be so wonderful.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: One day he's coming a glorious day.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so we sing about that day, and that's part of the day of salvation that we're talking about here.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: So listen, yes, let's sing that as our first worship song.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's fine.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's use it at home to tell our kids to stop whining and complaining.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's good too.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: But remember, this goes deeper.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is a day of salvation thing.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is about the resurrection of Christ.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is about your day of salvation.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: This story can come true in your own life as you look at the cross and the empty tomb.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: You can crawl into this verse and one day sing with the rest of us, this is the day the Lord has made.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's rejoice and be glad in it.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for this verse and what it means and the fact that, wow, the fact that this story is gonna end so well.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna end the way this psalm does.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not escapist.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's true reality.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: Lord bless us.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Bless us as we look forward to that day in Jesus' name.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.