As we've been studying the Psalter, we've in recent weeks seen various perspectives on the church and on the saving redeemer of the church in Psalms 45 through 49. Now we come to a song that focuses upon God is as judge. This is a feature that has not been lacking in these other songs, though it's been very implicit there. But now it becomes quite explicit. God is presented as judge and judge, not only of the church, not only of people who acknowledge him. but judge of all the world, both his people and the world of those who are not his people. and been the creator of the world and the judge of the world since the world has been made, and will one day judge, ultimately, the entire world. Our God is not a local deity, a mere national or tribal or even personal God, the way some think personal opinion, but I don't believe in any God. Well, so what? That's your opinion. And it's an opinion that one day will be tested by a reality that is, apart from God's revealing glimpses of it in His Word, unimaginable. the Lord and never committed themselves to Him through Christ His Son and receive the salvation that Christ has accomplished, it will be a day of unimaginable horror and enduring horror as well. God is sovereign King and supreme judge over all people in all the earth and throughout all ages of time. The truth that the Lord is judge, it has to be admitted, is a sobering one, even for believers. But it's far from a gloomy truth. It's part of the glory of God, that He not only has made the world and all that it contains, but also that He sustains and governs and one day will judge the world. For the believer, the truth of divine judgment fosters a healthy sense of self-examination. We're brought to a kind of sobriety when we read a psalm like Psalm 50. It may seem to not fit where it is. Following these psalms that speak about the Church and all of its beauty and perfection and believers and all of their perfection and how beautiful and glorious the Lord is and how love obtains between the glorious God and His perfected bride, the Church, to find a psalm that then speaks to us about God as Judge is almost like a discovery of a defect has been made. where the loving husband has an anger issue. And he's not all we thought he was before the nuptials. And until one night, he just breaks forth with a harsh exclamation. And then, again, maybe throws something. And this portends fearful things. No, it's not that this song is revealing any defect in God or His misplace, but it's showing us yet another dimension of God. He is the God of grace, but what about people who do not acknowledge Him for His grace? Does God just wring His hands and say, well, I tried to love you and I tried to save you, but you didn't want it, so I guess I'm just defeated in my determination? And there's just nothing I can do with you. You don't want to believe in me, so it's hands off of you. That's not it at all. And for the believer, even though, as I said, we have tasted and seen the Lord as good, and we do feed deeply and vitally upon these passages of Scripture that give us hope in showing us the perfection that is certain to be ours ultimately. Yet here and now, we're working out our salvation. And it's good for us to do that with a plain and straight and faithful declaration from God Himself in His Word that God isn't just busy running the universe and unaware of how we're working out that salvation. He's assessing that, too. He's making judgments of that. He's not just a spectator. And so I say for the believer, the truth of divine judgment, the ultimate judgment, and even the temporal judgments that come on the world and humanity from God, fosters in us a healthy self-examination where we ask, Am I indulging some attitude now, or performing some action, or submitting myself to some habit that is wrong in God's sight? If so, Lord, grant to me grace to repent of it and be done with it. But also for the believer, the doctrine of God as judge of all the earth brings great comfort and inspires increasing gratitude. And you might say, well, how does that work out? If God, even of his own people here, he's criticizing them and rebuking them, in a sense. What's pleasant about that? Well, take a human analogy. Boys and girls, have you ever come home from school or finished your schoolwork, as far as the instruction is concerned, and you want to play? And you ask mom or dad, can I play now? And the response you get is, have you finished your homework? Have you ever had anything like that happen to you? Now, does that question make you happy or sad? Is any child, any adult here who remembers his childhood, kill my fun here. Of course, I haven't finished my homework. But if I go and do my homework, Mom, I can't have my fun. Well, you know, there are two types of parents. Some parents would say, oh, I don't want to ruin your fun. Go have your fun. Don't worry about your homework. And if you've lived with that kind of parent, you know what it's like to have some fun for a little while. But that doesn't stop the next day from coming, does it? Or next week, when the test comes, And there you are. The test is there. It's in your head. You don't know the answers. You don't know how to get the answers. Why? Because you have an unloving, indulgent parent. They have let you be your worst self, and you're not prepared for the reality of life. On the other hand, a loving parent says, well, go finish your homework, and then play. If you can't have time for both, do the homework. But if you do your homework, you probably will find time to play, maybe just not as much as you want. OK, that's a little disappointing. But then comes the test day. And your homework, your study, you're prepared. You know the answers. Here's the question. On the test day, which child feels better and happier and has it to last? The one whose parents said, go play. Don't worry about your studies. There's always a characteristic of doing what's right. Right seems a kind of a boring thing, almost a mean thing at first. But when we do right, or a little bit of trouble in doing it, once we do right, we're happy, we're at peace, and we're thankful, whenever they're happy. But when we make a God He's a loving father. And as a loving father, he practices discipline with his children. And the writer to the Hebrews tells us that that's a loving thing. Don't despise the discipline of the Lord. He disciplines every child he loves. The author of Psalm 50, Asaph, and this is the first psalm of his that we encounter in the Psalms. Asaph, one of the Levitical singers, as we learned from 1 Chronicles 6, was good at drawing sweet comfort out of the knowledge that the Lord's judgment begins with, what does it end with, the household of God? His classic psalm, the most familiar one, is Psalm 73, where he begins by saying, surely God is good to Israel. an orthodox religious confessor. Surely God is good to Israel. But then he's a very brave man, a very humble man too. Then he brings us into his heart and his mind. And he says, you know, that's what I'm saying with my lips, but here's what I really believe. It's not such a great deal worshipping God. You've always got to do these things. Some of these things don't make a living very easy. For example, he tells us not to lie and a lot of times a good quick lie gets us out of trouble and maybe even gets us a job. Now, that's Psalm 73, and Asaph is telling us about how he's feeling. But then he says, I came into the sanctuary of God. I began to attend the ordinances of His grace, and I realized that there would be the beat of the world, the godless are set in slippery places. And he's, wow, he's comforted. Not so much that he hates the wicked. He's comforted to know that, oh, by God's grace, I'm not going to be slipping and falling and facing condemnation for eternity. You see? In Psalm 58, Asaph speaks of the judgments of God in two main forms. Refining for the righteous and rebuke for the wicked. For us to know that we who are in Christ are refined and not condemned by divine judgments, Our psalm then opens with the theme of the church's refinement. That's where all that beauty came from. As we've been seeing it in these earlier psalms, the beauties and perfections of the people of God perfectly fit together into the body and bride of Christ. Glorious, all glorious within, as an earlier psalm told us. The workshop, as my old pastor from Scotland used to say, is downstairs. The showroom's upstairs. We're in the workshop now. And it's noisy, and it's dirty, and sometimes painful. God, the God of judgment, is the opening note. In verse 1, our attention is focused on our God. And in this verse, this opening verse, three of the five names used for God in this psalm are expressed. You find the other two in verses 14 and 22. But three of them here, these terms, mighty God, that's one word in the Hebrew. And God, that's a word. And the Lord, that's a word in Hebrew. The first three names, gathered together as they are, give us a fairly full, though not exhaustively full, vision of who God is. He is the mighty God, all-powerful. If He wanted to pinch off that leaking oil pipe in the Gulf, He could do it with a word. And the fact that He's not doing it indicates that there's something And it doesn't look like they will for at least another couple of months if then that much oil leaking into that body of water could extinguish all life in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Does it end? Who knows how much oil is in that reservoir? But God is almighty. He's not like men who have to wring their hands. And at first, the BP people were saying, it's not our fault. It was those nasty subcontractors. But nobody can do anything. And see, that's what people don't want to come clean and say. Oh, turn to God, people. We're humbled here. We can't come up with a solution. He won't say that. stupidest and last thing that they would say, just tell people to pray about it, to pray to Almighty God. It seems superstitious, antiquated, ridiculous, because we've become so used to gadgets that do what we want them to do, but now we've got a gadget doing something we don't want to do, and we can't stop it. God is Almighty. He has all power, all majesty. Almighty, all-dominion are His, inherently and essentially. He wasn't born an infant and grew to be a 97-pound weakling boy who, because he was getting sand kicked in his face at the beach, decided to build himself up into a muscular man. God has forever been and always will be and is certainly now inherently and essentially Almighty. We're told that He's God. Elohim is the Hebrew word, the second designation, the most common name for God used in Scripture. This name is first encountered in the account of creation, and thus has the primary connotation of God as creator and sustainer of the heavens and the earth. He's not just the Almighty God, but He's acted. He's done something. He's effective, amazing, and mighty things. He's created the heavens. We haven't even seen. We think we've seen. We've just sent out deep probes into space, and we've seen a little bit more. But we haven't gotten to see all that's there, the heavens and the earth. Thirdly, He's the Lord, and that's His covenant name, a name which also has the essence addressed in this psalm. This great and glorious God is here acting in a special way, though. He's summoning as judge all people, all people that ever have lived or do now live or ever will live on the face of the earth. That's the picture that we have with the image of God summoning the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting and everything in between. All people are accountable to God, the God who's made them. It's foolish, it's ridiculous, it's absurd for anyone to think that we've just evolved out of muck and mire. It's absolutely astonishing that anybody could ever believe such a thing. But of course, the Bible tells us that men don't want to believe in God. They don't want God to be their judge or their king, telling them what to do. Psalm 2, we've seen that. The people of the earth and the kings and everybody in conspiracy together say, get rid of God. He'll just ruin our lives. So he said, well, if there's no God, where did we come from? Oh, well, we see things combining, chemicals combining, and cells developing, and tissues, and then systems, various degrees of complexity and various animate creatures. Ah, that must be it. We're at the top of those series of processes that have resulted in life. But it's ridiculous to think of such a thing. And it's monstrous too. If that's true, And let anyone here stand up and say it's true. I could kill you. And it wouldn't matter. Because it's no crime to kill the result of random forces over hands of time. You say, yeah, well, you'd be arrested. You'd go to jail. Ah, well. arrest me for killing you. Why should they? You've done something wrong, you say. Wrong? If what is, is, what is, is right, no matter what form it takes. That's what Hitler and the Nazis believed, and taught, and practiced. All people are accountable to the very God Where does the oxygen come from? We're busy. It doesn't come from us. We're busy trying to destroy the world. It doesn't come from us. Where does it come from? It comes from God. Oh, well, I'm not going to worry about that. I'll just breathe it in and not give a thought about the God who's giving it. No. God is no fabrication of men, no mental construct of men. In fact, men try to deconstruct We want to get on with our own thing. We can advance ourselves as we desire and do as we desire. And the history of the world is a history of that. And it's been wars and wars and killings and crimes throughout the history of the world. That's reality. That's not a fabrication. That's the world you get when men, women, and children made by God and made in the image of God, and separated from God by their sin, try to live without God. How God calls, He summons the earth. But notice how He calls, in verse 2, through heralds, through instruments. The Lord summons all men. Until the last day, the day of his final judgment, though, God doesn't... Anybody heard God shouting from heaven recently? Come to me! You're accountable to me! This is what people who smugly tout their atheism say. I see no evidence of God. I see no evidence of God. It's just like a person with his eyes closed saying, I don't see blue and I don't see red either. That's a figment of your imagination. I say, well, just open your eyes. Open my eyes? That's just a little detail, a little flap of skin. You're asking that, that's going to make all the difference in the world? Just remove that, open my eyes? Never, never. There's no blue, there's no red, because I don't see it. No, God doesn't summon men by crying out or sounding trumpets or blasting away. Until the very last day, that's how it's sounded. He summons them. But meantime, God sweetly and appealingly summons all men in all nations of the earth through His Church. You see that in verse 2? Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God has jumped forth. Now, let's be honest and brave here as Christians. We're not perfected in beauty now. There's still a lot of work to go in sanctification and in ultimate perfection in the final day that is yet to be accomplished. We still have our hypocrisies. We still are mean and not loving. We still are proud and presumptuous as believers. The Church of Jesus Christ is the closest thing on earth that anyone will see of God that can be seen prior to the final day of judgment. And even with all of the imperfections, there is such an admirable overall nature to the Church. When you sum the whole Church up, you know, you've got your warts, And you've got wheat and tares growing together. But when you sum it all up, for the unbeliever, it's better than beauty perfected. Because the unbelievers never laid eyes on anything like the Church. The Church composed of people who didn't wake up one morning insane and for that reason say, now I believe in God and I trust Christ for salvation. knowledge of the true God. They woke up from their insanity and from their sin-lashed lives. They were liberated from the bondage of the devil, like the kerosene demoniac, and now sit clothed and in their right minds, and instead of wanting to lash out and hurt others. Each one, though we still stumble and forget and treat each other lovelessly at times, Even when we do, and we're called to account, we say, I'm sorry. I repent of it. Please forgive me. There's nothing in the world like that. Not absolutely nothing. These posturing politicians and capitalist things are all saying, it's not my fault. I don't care if we're killing whole industries. Not my fault. the day of salvation, the day of inviting grace, the day of a call to repent. And repent doesn't mean give up all your fun and turn to the drudgery of serving a mean God. It means turning from the bondage and putrefying power of sin and turning to the God of holy love and beauty and being transformed into His image. That's how somebody was asking me, I've done it more than once, but recently. How did you know you became a Christian? When did you become a Christian? I told him, 1971. How did you know? I said, because I became a good man. And I wasn't before. I changed. I didn't really want to change. But I did. I was changed. I began to regard other people with a sense of care. Instead of cynicism. That's it. Being transformed into the image of God. Where does that come from? Where does such goodness come from? Is that something that's evolving from the sludge? The primordial muck and mud? Out of which life, apparently, according to some, has ascended. It's from God. So the church is doing the summoning. Look at the church. You'll see the best evidence on earth about God. I remember being in Czechoslovakia in 1980 and talking to a mid-level official of the Communist Party in the town of Kutná Hora. And he was asking, what was I doing there? I said, well, I've come to see some friends. Oh! I think you're coming to see friends who go to the church. I said, well, I'm sure you do know that. And yes, we have come to see friends in the church. What is the church? Why do you say you believe in God? And so forth, he's mocking me in the faith. Then he went on to say, but you know one thing about the Christians, they tend to tell the truth. They tend to be diligent. They tend to work hard. But they're suckers. We tell them where to go. Here, your building. The building that the church in that place was meeting in had been a brothel. And the Communist Party said, that's your church. You can meet there now. And what did the Christians do? Did they complain and gripe and say, this is a defiled place? They went in and scrubbed it and cleaned it and fixed up, replaced the rotten places and painted it and made it into a sanctuary. But here's what the Communists thought. It might take them three, four, five years to do that, but once they get the building in good shape, we kick them out and send them to some other dump, and we take over the building. Well, the last laugh is going to be on that man, because he's dabbling with the apple of God's eye, and he is going to find that the reason that they are diligent build up and improve everything they touch is because of building programs going on in their own hearts and minds. God is building them up in the faith, the knowledge, the grace, love, truth of the Lord. So this is the day of salvation. Notice in verses 3 and 6, though, that the Church is not only calling on the people of the world to come to the God of salvation, but the Bride of Christ is at the same time calling upon the Lord to come quickly to His people and to the consummation of their salvation. In verses 3 and 4, the call is for the Lord to come in certain ways. First, with purging purity and power. That's from the image of the fire. Fire devours before Him, but devours only that which is combustible, not that which is precious. It doesn't consume gold. It only refines gold. So come with purging purity and power. The more we grow in the Lord, the less we fear and hate God's judgment and the discipline of the Lord. But we welcome it. We say, It's going to make me better. So come that way. Secondly, with majesty. Come with majesty, calling on heaven and earth to witness the glorious righteousness, justice, and graciousness of all that God has done. Verse 4, He summons the heavens above and the earth to judge His people. And that doesn't mean the heavens and the earth are going to be acting as judges. What a thing He's done. What a loving thing. What a gracious thing. What a glorious thing. Glorious fruits of His redeeming grace and sanctifying work in the lives of His people form the center of universal attention. In verse 5, gather, my godly ones, to Me those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice. And that sacrifice is not his people's making, and so God's making, the sacrifice of his own son. And the heavens declare his righteousness, for God himself is judge. And the final day won't just be God judging men, but men will judge God in true light. And the wicked will say, God will say, how is it you didn't believe in me? And they're not going to say, well, and bring out all these great reasons. Because in that light, that light of reality, All of those reasons are going to just vanish. And every time we'll confess God to be judge, and rightly to be judge. The rich man in the gospel, who pampered himself and neglected poor Lazarus, when he and Lazarus together died, and one was in the bosom of Abraham and the other was in the anguish of hell, the rich man never once said, I don't belong here. He wanted to improve the position a little bit, give me a drop of water. But he didn't say, it's wrong. I don't deserve this. For all will declare that God is a righteous judge, the God of all the earth, who is the judge of all the earth. He will do right. And more than that. These opening six verses give us a glimpse into the final day of God's judgment. But that day is preceded by days of faithful and merciful divine warning. This is one of the beauties of the Church. The Church is the only entity on earth that will do something that's painful and unpopular and say to a man to his face, you're a sinner without God. You're a sinner. It doesn't give me pleasure to say that, but I'm not speaking from a position of superiority either. I'm a sinner. We're sinners and we're without hope in the world except by God's mercy. And He has been merciful. He's given His Son to be our Savior. You're not going to go into the doctor, the physical medical doctor, or a surgeon and never hear any such thing, is there? You may hear somewhat unwelcome news. You know that little lump? That's cancer. You need to cut it out. You may hear unwelcome news. But you're not going to hear that you're going to hell from anywhere on earth except from the church. And the church will only say that because it's true. It's part of what God reveals in His Word. And by revealing it, God is graciously calling on people to consider their lives in the light of truth, not in the light of their own mythology, their own personal tension, to spin tales to suit their own So, the warnings come. The day of final judgment is preceded by such warnings. And these warnings, in the light of the day of all days, take up the remainder of our psalm. The first section of warning is directed towards the people of God themselves, the Church. And the character of this section of warnings is corrective. It's not condemning. It's corrective. In fact, this passage, verses seven to 15, could be likened to the letters to the seven churches in the first chapters of the Book of Revelation, where Christ is addressing his churches, various congregations, and he's saying, I see this is good that you're doing, but this needs to be corrected. He's refining his people. In a similar way, the Lord addresses his people in verse seven. Although his communication will prove to be corrective, he concentrates first on his saving grace and love. Hear, O my people, and I will speak. O Israel, and I will testify. Now, the word that's in this version translated against is an interpretation more than a translation, but all translations are to some extent interpretations. But this one is a bad one. It doesn't make sense. I will testify against you. I am God, your God. Well, the translators for that verse, that could mean against, but it could also mean to, or even upon. Well, upon, that doesn't make sense to throw that out. Testify to you. Well, no, it must be against, because God goes on to chew the people out. In verses 8 to 13, you're a bunch of losers. You've done all this stuff wrong. So it must be, I may testify against you. That's not true. Hear, O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, and I'll testify to you. I am God, your God. He's testifying to His people, to the truth that they have begun to let slip from their minds and hearts and vital intention. Hear my people, I am your God. What kind of theology is in that verse? What would jump out at you? He always starts with grace with His people. And there may come faithful words as the people have regarded His grace with presumption and abuse. He starts with grace. I will testify to you. This is who we are. You are my people. I am your God. And we love it that way. That's what you see. The essence of His gracious covenant of salvation The Lord speaks a word of commendation to His people. They are consistently availing themselves of the means of His grace. I do not reprove you for your sacrifices and your burnt offerings are continually before me. That's a commendable thing. You're availing yourselves of the means of grace. And they're not distorting or adulterating those means, apparently. God doesn't correct anything they're doing outwardly, formally. But with verses 9 to 13, the Lord issues words of faithful and loving, though painful, correction. In some, these verses, 9 to 13, speak of the absolute propriety God has over all things in the world, and at the same time, His being independent from those things. You see how God says that. I'm not taking anything from you. I'm not taking a bull out of your house. I'm not taking a goat from your field. Every beast of the forest is mine. I don't need to go to your house. Even the wild animals are mine. If I were hungry, I wouldn't tell you. I take care of myself. I can take care of myself. God is the only one who can do that. We all need other people or other things. Anybody here not need your employer? Or if you're retired, not need your pension? Where does that come from? That's not from you. We need things. God doesn't. It speaks of God's propriety in all things. And why does God present himself in that way? Because the people of God, His people, were being tempted, and some had given in to the temptation, to think and act in merely outward ways, formal ways, external ways with regard to the The answer, you see, is found in verses 14 and 15, primarily, where God says, offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to God the most high, and call upon me in the day of trouble. You see, here's the idiocy of starting to think that God is a demanding God, an unreasonable God. And he's just a pathetic God, but he happens to have greater strength than us. So he's demanding that we give him our time and give up our money and give up ourselves and all sorts of things. But the idiocy is this. Be thankful for what God has given you. And pay your vows to the Lord. That is simply to be faithful. give me your checkbook. I don't want to. And I say, it's a burden. It's heavy. And it's ruining the tailoring and the profiling in your suit, making a bulge appear there. Give me your checkbook. But you don't feel that to be a burden, do you? It's a burden if I take it. What God is calling on His people, pay your vows, simply means to be faithful to God and adhere to Him. God's people can and do grow weary of faithful attendance upon the means of God's grace, as though God is demanding of them some great and unreasonable sacrifice. There are times when our delight in the Lord's saving grace can degenerate into dutious and even resentful attitudes, and the steps of our worship pin accordingly these steps of mere outward fools. The corrective to this ungrateful The great and precious promises and wondrous provisions that we have received from our Heavenly Father to reignite thereby the fires I decide to be generous to you. I'm not going to take your checkbook this time. I'm going to give you a car. Any car. Car of your choice. You can have a Rolls, or a Bentley, or a Lamborghini, or any car you want. I'm going to give it to you. Free and clear. You don't owe anything. I'll pay the insurance too. It's yours. to go to the trouble of exercising that magnificent gift. blessings of our Heavenly Father. And further, we are to call upon the Living God, not just to go mindlessly through the religious motions. And if we do revive our prayer life, and to some of us, our prayer life in use of revival chanting, I never cease to be amazed If we do revive our prayer life, we'll find ourselves rescued and honoring our God by our mighty dependence upon His Savior. by our own gratitude. We were at the prayer meeting last night, touching on a portion of Isaiah's prophecy, and were struck with the fact that the believer, God's people, are the only people on earth who can hurt God. We can grieve God. The unbeliever can't. The unbeliever God is just full of righteous wrath towards the unbeliever. There's enough hurt. But we grieve our God. We grieve Him because He's given us, He's lavished upon us His costly, redeeming love. If you ever doubt that God loves you, you look to the cross. That's what the Bible tells you to look. Don't look to see if your crops are failing or flourishing. Don't look to see if you're being promoted at work or being hired. That's not saying anything necessarily one way or another. The job may be a curse itself, and you just don't see it, and God lovingly is removing you from it. But when you ever wonder if God loves you, you look and see that while we were yet sinners, God demonstrated His love for us by giving His only begotten Son to die for us. That settles the question forever. This is the correction that was necessary for the people And if we're thankless, it's because we've lost sight of the gift that God has given us. And that needs to change. But our psalm moves on to rebuke the wicked in verses 16 to 21. Whether they're in the church as tares, anywhere. They, too, could be formalists, as verse 16 says. The Lord begins by rebuking the pure and incessant formalism of the tares among the weak in this church. Some people in the church are always going to be just faking it. There's no vital trust in the Lord. They don't believe in God. They are practical atheists, and yet they go through the motions for any number of reasons. Maybe their parents brought them up in the church, and they have an emotional attachment. Maybe they think, somehow, I don't believe this junk, but it'll make my kids fearful of a God. And maybe they'll behave themselves more easily for me. Any number of reasons why cares come into the church. But we learn that it's pure formalism from the attitudes, the heart's attitude, that the Lord exposes in verses 17 to 20. This is a category. These are cares. These are not just believers who have lost sight of what they have. These are sins of heart and hand. Verse 17, you hate discipline. There are people who hate discipline in the church as well as in the world. The world doesn't like discipline, but there are people in the church. You cast my words behind you, whether they're words of testimony to an unbeliever outside of the church, from the church, or members of the church, or whether it's the preaching and teaching of God's Word within the church to those who are tares. To those who will be in the final days, Jesus says, not everyone who calls on me and says, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. You cast my words behind you. The last thing you want to do is have God speak and hear it. You see a thief, you're pleased with him. Why? Because he's not stealing from you. And he's setting an example, a bad example, that gives you license to I can't tell you how much money I won playing cards or dice. It's a game of chance. But cards is a game of skill. Playing cards, stealing out of stores, and if it happened to be handy, breaking into a car and taking it. No problem at all. You see, this inner thing stops. It's pre-licensed to be this way. And not everybody's so accomplished and competent in her loyalty, are they? But you see, if you're pleased with him, you associate with adulterers. Let everything go, you know. Let it all hang out. Let's do whatever. Because what's in the heart is deceit. against your brother, whether in the church or out of the church. We're all brothers and sisters in a general way, by creation. You know, sometimes we don't like to think about that, but we are. Our brothers are not just in the church. There was one other day of judgment. There was the day that the judgment of God fell fully. But God is practicing. We come then to the final, ultimate consideration in closing the two verses. This ultimate consideration of where we stand in relation to God's correction or review, because we either get one or the other. If we're in the church, we'll be corrected, we'll be disciplined, lovingly, and it's for our good. If we're in the church's face, we'll be reviewed. And our hypocrisy will be exposed. It will be condemned. Or if we're out of the church, they're refusing to heed the testimony of the church. Same thing. But where are you today? It's not a matter of something secret or profound or stratospherically intellectual. It's a matter that's near and within each one of us. We can answer this question today. Where am I? is the fifth name for God in the Hebrew language, if you haven't heard it before, is a name that also is used to designate false gods. In other words, it shows that you're not content to just kill off the one true and living God, but eventually you have to kill off all vestige, even of false religion. Reducing God to a vague Or are we grateful above all for the gift of Christ's mercy? You wake up in the morning and think, oh man, I'm not feeling well. I'm back now to remembering that yesterday was a lousy day at work, and I'll probably lose my job today. And the money isn't paying the bill. of ingratitude, whatever form it takes, slipping in our grasp.