Nevertheless, we are in Psalm 39, as you saw. Psalm 39. Before we read, let me pray for us. Heavenly Father, I pray that You would be with us, that through the Word of Christ, who is the true preacher, and by Your Spirit who dwells in us, that You would enlighten our eyes, that we may behold the wonders of Your glory, even in such a Psalm as this, that has somber notes. But Lord, that we would see that You are our Father and You do discipline us as children. And Lord, we do see that though we are vain and our life is but a few handbreadths, as the text says, that You are forever. From everlasting to everlasting, You are our God. So teach us, O Lord. Lord, let the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight. O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer, in whose name I pray. Amen. To Psalm 39, hear the word of the Lord. I said I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue. I will guard my mouth with a muzzle so long as the wicked are in my presence. I was mute and silent. I held my peace to no avail and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me as I mused the fire burned that I spoke with my tongue. O LORD, make me to know my end, and what is the measure of my days. Let me know how fleeting I am. Behold, You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before You. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath. Surely a man goes about as a shadow. Surely for nothing they are in turmoil. Man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather. And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool. I am mute. I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it. Remove your stroke from me. I am spent by the hostility of your hand. When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him. Surely all mankind is a mere breath. Hear my prayer, O Lord. Give ear to my cry. Hold not your peace at my tears, for I'm a sojourner with you, a guest like all my fathers. Look away from me that I may smile again before I depart and am no more. " As the grass withers and the flower fades, the Word of our God stands forever. And the Word this evening is teaching us that if we are God's children, we need to accept His discipline, yes. But as we accept that discipline as children, learn the Father's lessons. We need to learn the Father's lessons. A constant refrain I heard growing up with my dad is whenever something would go wrong with me, which often was the case, and we'd be driving home from somewhere and maybe it was a baseball game, he would say something like, well, what did you learn? I heard that more times than I can count. What did you learn? And this is as I'm not wanting to talk to anybody, just sitting there looking out the window. What did you learn? What did you learn? What did you learn this? What did you learn that? Maybe getting in trouble at school. What did you learn? Over and over and over again, I was asking, being asked by my father, what are you learning through this? He's trying to teach me the pattern of taking adversity and drawing wisdom from it. Now, I learned where my dad got that from when I was 13, and be very careful if you ride a mower. I was helping my grandpa mow the churchyard, his Lutheran church, with a zero-turn mower, my first experience with anything, any kind of equipment like that. And I decided to have a little, I was having a little fun with it while he was cleaning up at the end. And I pushed it back into reverse and pushed it forward really fast. And I figured out what happens when you do that. You're smiling as you know. What happens when you do that is you, I put it into a little wheelie. And I was wheeling, wheeling, wheeling for about three, in my mind it was like forever, but probably about three seconds and then smacked back down. My grandpa, very serious Norwegian bred man from the Midwest, looks at me and says, you're not gonna do that again, are you? No, sir. Okay, we're in the car and he said, well, grandson, what'd you learn? I go, oh. There's a pattern of learning from father to son, from father to son. As spiritual children, we're constantly learning, we need to learn the Father's lessons. David is learning the Father's lessons here, and this psalm, he's learning two among many, but two broad ones. The first is that life is short. The second is that eternity is long. Learn the Father's lessons that our life is short and eternity is long. Seeing that life is short, we see David is under vexation. He says, I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue. I will guard my mouth with a muzzle so long as the wicked are in my presence. I was mute and silent. I held my peace to no avail and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned. So David is caught in the cycle of the world, of intrigue, palace politics perhaps, certainly violence and danger, enemies and political struggle all around him, even as he's ruling the kingdom. And maybe we don't actually know when he wrote the psalm, but you can imagine him as king, dealing with people, not knowing who is giving him an honest word and who is not, who are his enemies, who are his friends, who are opportunists, who knows? But seeing that you can't deal with the wicked the way you want to, because you don't always know who the wicked are. So David is guarding his words. I will guard my mouth with a muzzle. I will guard my ways. I may not soon my tongue. As long as these wicked are in my presence, maybe he doesn't even know who these wicked again are. He's mute and silent, but even as the problems grow, the fire is burning, the frustration is mounting. He feels the machine of politics churning him up on the inside, and it's like when you turn a fire over with a poker, oh, it can burn. His heart became hot within him. As I mused, the fire burned, he said. And among all this, vexation is just the right word. It's vexation. Then he speaks, he speaks out against it. Oh Lord, make me know my ends. What is the measure of my days? Let me know how fleeting I am. In a world where you don't know what's going on, David is grasping for something, and in this case, he's grasping for his own vanity. You know, when we want to find out how, when we are trying to get a grasp on our situations, we often are trying to wrap our mind around it, find something solid, and the solid thing in this case is the truth of his insolubility. That's not the right word, because that means you can't dissolve. But his lack of being solid, his own lack of fleeting, or his own lack of solidness as a person, the fact that he will be here one day and he may have a heart attack and die and be gone. Let me know what is the measure of my days. Let me know how fleeting I am. It reminds us of the Psalm of Moses, Psalm 90, where he says, you know, teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom. I need wisdom, Lord. So in that wisdom, that wisdom starts by seeing just how small and short I truly am. The days, as he says, are a few handbreadths. A handbreadth is just this. You hold your hand up. It was a measure they had for short things, like our inch or a centimeter, except a little longer, just across your hands. You know, some people have gigantic bare hands. They can mess up the handbreadth measure a little bit. But for the most part, most adults, you know, male, female, generally have similar size handbreadths. You get a good vision of that. But then what David is saying, look, my life is just like this. It's small. It fits in the palm of your hand. God, it's this small, smaller than a bug to you. Our lifetime is as nothing before you. All mankind stands as a mere breath. You think about being out perhaps in a tree stand with Richard in a missions conference, and certainly it was probably cold, or just outside in the cold in general. And you breathe, and you know as a kid you pretend like a foolishness, and as a kid you pretend you're smoking with your breath when you're out there. But that's just what life is. Next time you're out in the cold and you see your breath, Just think, that's what God sees as my life, just here, there, gone. Here, there, gone. Next generation here, next generation there, over and over and over again in human history, and it's gone. Have you thought about that the scale of human history for the last six or seven thousand years, give or take, I think it's six and a half, that to God, that's just, maybe, I mean, certainly to Him it says nothing, but even in the image of the psalm, it's like maybe half an hour to Him. It seems like it's forever to us, but it's short to Him. And Peter says 1,000 days are to Him as a day, and a day is 1,000 years. God operates outside of our time, but at the same time, looking in time as the Eternal One, He sees us for what we truly are, and that's just a breath here, a breath there, inhale, exhale, and gone. David says, I know this to be true, but teach it to my heart, because if my heart doesn't understand this, it won't affect the way that I live. There was a man, this is an anonymous story, there was a man who died, a great man of this generation, this is of the 19th century, and this particular pastor telling the story was a It was William Plumer, and so you can imagine maybe he's thinking of Robert E. Lee around the same time period. And so at the funeral of this great man, anonymous great man, an eloquent survivor, he says, said this. He said, a pebble has fallen into a vast lake. It has rippled the surface, but soon all will be smooth as ever. None of us here are great men or women. None of us are going to be remembered in 200 years that we know of, and maybe if we do, maybe that's not a good thing. But have we thought about that even the greatest among us who die, it's just like God throwing a pebble into a lake. It'll ripple, and then after a little while, it will go back to normal. All of us, the breathiness of our life coming and going, we try to make something that lasts in this world, and it just doesn't. The operations of this world are as the world of the Shadowland. Think about C. S. Lewis' Silver Chair, and how Eustace, Jill, Paul, his friend, he brought into Narnia for the first time, and my absolute favorite Narnia character, Puddleglum, they go down into the Shadowlands to find Prince Rilian. And these shadowlands are these under the earth, they have to go underneath this city into deep darkness. And the earth men are under a spell you find out from the wicked witch. And this is the refrain they give to each other. Many sink down, but few return to the sunlit lands. That is what Adam and our sin has put us in. Adam, through his death and sin and rebellion, has put us into the shadow lands and everything we do, we truly do in the dark. And few, so relative few, compared to the span of human history, return to those sunlit lands, the land of the sun. As we know though in that story, the earth men are set free. They're set free from this rain and Jill and Eustace and Poglam and Prince Aurelian with them, they do return to Narnia, to those sunlit lands because of the courageous acts of those three. But so we know that it was Christ who had to come down to the shadow lands, talk to the people, the shadow people, the people that live in the mist and the fog, and shine His light on them to help them see where they truly are, so they might see their condition and follow Him to the land of light above. If we are shadow people, if we are mere breath, if we are seeking something to grab onto, we cannot be living for this life. We must live for the life that is to come, the life that is not a mere breath but is solid and waiting for us, stored up with treasure in Jesus Christ. He is the one we need if we are to find that our life is more than just a few hand breaths. But we can't know that, we can't know that unless we see through the Father's discipline and the vexation that we go through, if He reveals to our eyes that this is in fact just vanity. That putting our treasure here, putting our stock in the things here, here today, gone tomorrow, we need something that will last. And the hard trials of this life will show you that faster than just about anything else We learn the Father's lessons. We learn those lessons through discipline, and the first lesson is that life is short. Life is vanity, so you need to grab on to the one whose life is not short, the everlasting God, the true God in Jesus Christ. So, life is short, but eternity is long. Verse 7 says, as he looks upward to God, and now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool. The first path out of the shadow lands is, as I have just mentioned, through Jesus Christ and through the confession of sin, the thing that put you in the shadow land in the first place. You need to have the God of light, in whom there is no darkness at all, to take care of it. We wait for none other than the Lord, the psalmist David puts his hope in Him, and in putting that hope in Him, step one is confessing sin. Deliver me from these transgressions, Lord, that You know. Deliver me from the scorn of it, the scorn of the fool, the well-deserved scorn of the fool, might I add. So we need first forgiveness of our sins and to become, and to take our sins into the light and let God, well God already sees them, but let ourselves see them for what they truly are. So we take our sins into the light and then we see the discipline upon them from Him. Verse 9 says, I am mute, I do not open my mouth for it is you who have done it. Remove your stroke from me, I am spent by the hostility of your hand. When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him. Surely all mankind is a mere breath. So he asks for forgiveness of his sins, then he acknowledges the discipline that he's under for those sins. That's why he asks, remove your stroke from me. I'm learning the lesson, Lord. I'm not going to open my mouth against you. I will be like Job sitting in the dust for it is you who have done it to me. Back in verse eight. And then he acknowledges the results. When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, consume like a moth what is dear to him. All mankind is a breath. We saw in verse 38 that God shoots his arrows at David. He shoots arrows not at David's soul, but at David's sins. And Charles Spurgeon so helpfully reminded us that God shoots His arrows not at us, but at our sins to kill our sins. Because if He doesn't kill our sins, how can we be with Him? And so He uses these things, even with forgiveness of sin, to continue to purify us, not just from the offense of sin, but from the root cause. Speaking of my dad, one of my least favorite things about my dad growing up, which was very much a high quality of his, now that I'm a father myself, is that whenever I would create problems and there would be maybe a cost to pay, my dad always forgave me. We always talked about it, but he made sure I made everything right. And I saw this, the most expensive incident was actually something my brother did. My brother was swinging a large, probably about a piece of, a stick about this big near the van window, and his hand slipped. Wood went straight into the glass, $300, but my brother had to pay for it. My dad could have covered it, but he wanted my brother to learn, through money and the loss thereof, to be more careful about his surroundings. Now he helped him, he helped him get the jobs he needed, he made sure my brother could pay, so he provided all those things after, but that discipline hurt my brother. and many other stories like that, where the discipline the Lord has for us, though He does forgive us, though He does accept us in Christ, though Christ's blood has washed away all of our sins, there can still be those worldly consequences that do teach us and purge us of our sins, the propensity to sin in this case. It's a fatherly lesson for sons. So we have our sins forgiven, we have our sins disciplined as children, and then in that forgiveness and discipline we learn to cry to Him better than ever. Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my cry, hold not your peace at my tears." This is a, you know, we've talked about the Psalms have parallelism, so one line builds on the other. You know, what does the first line mean? Well, it means whatever the second line helps you know what the first line means and vice versa. This is a triple parallel. Hear my prayer, O Lord." Okay, we hear a lot of that in the Bible. Give ear to my cry. Okay, so God is listening as He hears my prayer. David's adding some flavor to this through the Spirit. Hold not your peace at my tears. Progressive, hear my prayer. Give ear to it. Move on my behalf when my tears are being shed before you. And why? David's learned a lesson. I'm a sojourner with you, a guest like all my fathers. My life is exactly what you've taught me it is. My life is short, but your eternity is long. Let me be a sojourner through this life and through the vanity of it, and make me come to my home in you, O Lord. That's where sojourners are going. Guests, they're on their way. As we are being forgiven for sin, confessing our sins, being disciplined for sins, struggling as it is, we're being brought home. We're being brought home. Another final story with my dad, and Matthew knows this story. He's been told it before. I was about, I think I was about 11 and my brother was 13. We were in the Grand Canyon when we were living in, we were living in Las Vegas. We were vacationing in Arizona, going to the Grand Canyon, going to Sedona, Flagstaff, all the cool things. And we're at the Grand Canyon. We hiked down into the canyon. My dad, once we got to the bottom, he said, okay, Set your alarm, 30 minutes, turn around, come back. As we were way ahead of my sisters and such. And about 30 minutes goes by, and I say, okay, Eric. Gotta turn around, because I wasn't a huge, I'm still not an avid hiker, although I do like it. My brother very much still is an avid hiker, and his avid hikerness came out in this case. He said, no, no, no, we're almost to the edge of the canyon, just 10 more minutes, 10 more minutes, we'll hustle back, it'll be okay. 10 minutes, okay, okay, fine. 10 minutes goes by, we're not any closer, 10 more minutes, okay. 10 more minutes, and then it's like, Dad's gonna be kind of mad at us, we need to turn around. No, no, no, we're almost there. Another 10 or 15 minutes, I stop. I'm like, we're in trouble. And he just keeps going. I don't even know if he made it to the end. I think he did. But my dad comes up after a while and says, and I'm still waiting for him, my brother, to come back. Where, what happened? He said, he wanted to keep going. Okay. And so my dad keeps going. I actually wait there. My dad comes back with my brother. And then we all go back up together. We get back when the sun is setting on the canyon. And all I wanted to do, even though we were in so much trouble and I couldn't control my brother, was go home. All I wanted to do was go, at this point, in our guest house, all I wanted to do was get back to the place where I could take my shoes off, because I knew we were in trouble, and we're gonna be disciplined for it. And I didn't put my foot down probably hard enough on my brother to turn around, but all I wanted to do as in that situation was go home. I was a sojourner in the middle of the Grand Canyon, a guest like every other human being in the face of lizards and snakes, and I just wanted to go home. That is what God will do for us. He picks us back up when we've wandered off too far. He's going to discipline us. He does forgive us and love us, but He is going to take us home. Not by our strength, not because we're worth taking home, but He does love us. The love from eternity past shown in the present poured out on us in Christ. Even better than a father coming, this is a father who sends his son to go find wayward children and to bring his sons and daughters home. He sends his son to the cross. That cross is the way, the truth, and the life that brings men home. When we're lost, out wandering, wandering in the shadow lands, we are looking for markers. The biggest marker of all is that cross, and the cross calls to the children of God in an effectual and powerful way, come home. You will be forgiven, you will be disciplined, but not in the same way the Son was disciplined on your behalf, and you will be saved. You will be brought home. Learn the Father's lessons. Life is short, eternity is long, but eternity is open to you in Christ Jesus. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, these are great truths and they bring us great comfort. And Lord, I pray that you would extend that comfort to us when we are experiencing your discipline as we so often need. Lord, You do not save us, You do save us. You justify us all at once. That is there and done. Lord, it takes so much time to sanctify us. Lord, help us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for it is You who work in us, O Lord, to will and to work for Your good pleasure. So Lord, accomplish Your good pleasure in us. I pray that You would give what You command and command what You desire. Lord, we do ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.