All right, our text this morning comes from Psalm 103. It's going to be on page 502 in the Pew Bible. If you brought your own Bible, it might not be on page 502. So just turn to the middle. You'll be in the Psalms and you can direct yourselves from there. So I'm going to be focusing mostly on the first five verses, but I'll read the whole thing. I know the temptation is sometimes to close your Bibles after we read it, but keep it open, because we'll kind of jump around in the psalm. So I want you guys to be able to see the text. It sounds like everybody is there. So this is Psalm 103, entitled, Bless the Lord O My Soul. It's a psalm of David. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him. As far as the East is from the West, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him, for He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children. to those who keep His covenant and remember to do His commandments. The Lord has established His throne in the heavens and His kingdom rules over all. Bless the Lord, O you His angels, you mighty ones who do His words, obeying the voice of His word. Bless the Lord, all His hosts, His ministers who do His will. Bless the Lord, all His works and all places of His dominion. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this day set apart to rest and to worship. We pray that you would be glorified today through all that we do, through the preached word, the word read, the music, our tithes, our prayers. Lord, help us draw closer to you in worship. Lord, those of us that might be on spiritual mountains or in valleys or just on the long road of faith, we pray that you would use this psalm to deepen our love of you and in turn enrich and liven our worship of you. Lord, we believe in the Holy Spirit, so we believe that this word will be applied to all who hear it. Lord, and as you would work mightily, for your namesake. We pray this, Saul, in your son's name. Amen. So before the U.S. Olympic hockey team played the Soviets in 1980 Winter Olympics, Coach Herb Brooks sat his team down in the locker room and he said, great moments are born from great opportunities. And that's what you have here tonight. That's what you've earned here tonight. William Wallace in Braveheart, before his army faced a much larger army, he turned and he said, they may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom. Before I preach, I always write, I believe in the Holy Spirit at the top of my manuscript to remind me that the Lord works. And if you spend any time, maybe like 13 or seconds more with the guys in our youth group, and you ask them to do literally anything, you'll hear them grunt and say, let's go. So we all do things to motivate ourselves before an important event, right? To remind us how we've gotten to where we are and to reorient ourselves to what's important. Because that's something about us, right? All of us forget from time to time what's important. or why we're doing what we're doing. And that's the beauty of this Psalm, Psalm 103. See, David is speaking in this first verse, it's a command to bless the Lord. So he's commanding his soul to worship and to bless the Lord. He's trying to stir his own soul to action. So he starts out exhorting himself and then he goes into reasons why he should bless the Lord as a reminder. And so this psalm has something to say to all of us. A lot of times we think of spiritual highs like the mountains and then the spiritual valleys. But the truth is there's a lot of time in between. So, Megan Melanson, she went with us to Mexico. She took a lot of pictures and there's one that I really like. So, we were kind of in the desert and this picture is just a long interstate with a bunch of sand and cacti on the side and the sun. And that's all you see. Just a long road that looks really hot. And I think a lot of us, that's where we spend some of our days, just a long road in our faith. Nothing bad's happened, nothing's good happened. And so we're numb from like the constant grind. We do the same thing day after day and we need spiritual nourishment and spiritual refreshment to jumpstart us, to keep us going, to get us going again. And so this psalm has something to say to us. And before we really jump in, I think it's important that we look at what it means to bless. So that was kind of a stumbling block for me when I was trying to figure out what this meant. So when we think of blessing somebody, we think of giving them something. All right, so when we first moved here, it's been over two years ago, all of you blessed us, all right, by giving us things, whether that was your love or cookies, we ate a lot of cookies. inviting us to lunch, right? Helping us move in. You blessed us by giving us things. We were blessed by what you gave us. And so if we think that blessing the Lord is us offering something up to Him, that's kind of right, right? And so if you look at the Old Testament, you might be thinking, David's pumping himself up to like go offer a goat, like sacrifice a goat. But that doesn't really take a lot of spiritual fortitude, right? You kind of just go and the goat dies and you're good. But we want to know that to bless can mean a few different things. So when God blesses us, it would be like we receive something from God, and that's very good. And that can be a material good, like the roof over our head or the meal that we eat. Or it can be a spiritual good, like the reconciliation that we have to God the Father, through the sacrifice of the Son. But this verb can also be translated to kneel. So we would kneel before God, which of course is an act of worship, or an act of adoration. So if you read from the NIV, I'm sure some of you guys have that, they translate it a little bit differently, and they say, praise the Lord, O my soul. Which is a good translation. So when we read this, maybe don't think of sacrificing a goat or something we offer, but something we do in response to what the Lord has done for us, to worship and to praise. So as we jump in, we see that David wants his soul to worship, and this quickly becomes all-encompassing, right? So he starts with his soul, bless the Lord on my soul, but then in verse one, in the second half, he continues, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. And so we see parts of this picked up by Paul in Romans 12, when he tells us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And so one point of really early application here is that when we're urging ourselves to deeper worship, we need to definitely engage our soul, but we also need to engage our heart, right, and our hands and our mind, because the deeper we dwell on God, right, the deeper our theology, the deeper our worship is going to be. And so David encourages himself to worship God by remembering God. So in the first stanza, he lays out three things to remember, and these reflect three different attributes of God. So those are going to be our three points. I was late getting this to Mindy, so it's not in your handout, but it's only three, so I think we can remember it. So verse two, you'll see David exhorts us to remember all of God's benefits, lest we forget God's grace. And then in verse three, he exhorts us to remember God's forgiveness, lest we forget God's mercy. And then in verse four, he exhorts us to remember God's redemption, lest we forget his love for us. So our first point is to remember all of God's benefits, lest we forget his grace. And when I first started meditating on this, my temptation was to modify it just a little bit. So my mind kept drifting to all of God's gifts to me, not all of his benefits. And there's certainly nothing wrong with taking time to think about all that God has given us, right? And that will definitely lead us to worship. If you've never done that, I mean, just take a second and you'll fill up a notebook faster than you probably think. So that will lead us to worship, but maybe instead of focusing on what God has given us, it's equally important for us to focus on why God has given those things to us. And that's where we start to dwell on all of God's benefits. And this can definitely go wrong very quickly. So it requires that I, as I preach, and you, as you do this later, maintain focus so we don't start to merge into a weird prosperity gospel. So we want to stay away from that. One of the benefits I have from being a Christian is that God gives me lots of money. We want to stay away from that. But we really want to focus on who we are in Christ. Because that's our new identity, and in this identity, that's when the blessings are given to us. So one benefit is, like Paul tells us in Galatians chapter 2, that it's no longer we who live, but it's Christ that lives in us. And what does that mean for us? It means that we are no longer enslaved by sin. We're no longer under the oppression and dominion of our sinful desires. So I'm sure that there's an eloquent way to say this, but I think there's beauty in the simplicity of the fact that before Christ entered our lives, whether that was only four years of our lives, or whether that was 60 years of our lives, we were unable to not sin. So everything we did was corrupted by our sinful nature. It's like we had wet paint on our hand, and everything we touched, even if we were trying to do something good, got that paint on it, except that paint was sin. completely corrupted through and through. But now through the power of Christ, applied through the Holy Spirit in our lives, we're able to fight back against sin. That means that one of the benefits of God is that we are able to not sin. something that we could never do left to our own devices. And does this mean that we'll stop sinning completely? No, it doesn't. But it means that we have an entirely new outlook on our lives. It means that like Paul says in Romans 6, sin has no dominion over us because we're not under the law, we're under grace now. Or that because we're now sons and daughters of God, God uses everything in our lives for good. No one else in the entire world can say that they rejoice in their suffering. Only Christians can say that. That's picked up in Romans. So we say we can rejoice in our suffering because suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint. Nobody else says that, right? Nobody else rejoices in their suffering. It ends at, oh, we're suffering, that's bad. But because we're sons and daughters of God, we can trust that He's using that to further our faith. And then, just for a second, just think of the Beatitudes. Think about how backwards those statements would be to every other religion. to every other person on earth. So Jesus says that the following people are blessed or they're given a special gift from God. The poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. That's not a normal list of people that we would say are blessed. All right, so that's only Jesus working in us and God the Father looking down on us. So we're able to receive these blessings from God because we're reconciled to the Father. because of the Son and empowered by the Holy Spirit. And that's just one benefit. And David exhorts us here to remember all of God's benefits, which we're not going to go into, because that would be a really long sermon. To remember all of these. And as we remember God's benefit and work in our lives, the deeper our worship is going to be. Because the more appreciative, the more in awe of God we're going to be. So Reebok and I are watching this show. It's an old PBS show. I'm definitely going to get made fun of for this. It's called Downton Abbey. I think it's pretty enjoyable. With the entire show, if you're not familiar, set in the early 1900s, and it follows this really rich family in England. And so it focuses on the lives of the family that's really rich, and then their servants. So the family lives upstairs, and it follows their problems like, who am I gonna marry? How do I? have these proper manners, things like that. But then it also looks at the problems of the servants. So like the cooks, and the butlers, and the chauffeur. And they have much simpler problems. Like, can I get home to see my dying parents? Or like... What am I going to do with my life? And so one of the most interesting dynamics is that one of the servants of the chauffeur, the driver, he falls in love with one of the rich guy's daughters, and they end up getting married. And so from one day to the next, this servant goes from not being able to freely walk upstairs, to go around the living quarters. He has to ask permission to speak to the family. And he can only eat after the family eats. So that's one day. Then he's married. And then the next day, he goes to being waited on. He has full access to the house. He can speak openly to the business of the family. And it makes him a little bit uncomfortable. Because he's thrust into this new world where he thinks everybody is a little bit stuffy. But over time, he realizes that his new identity as a member of the family has benefits. So he's able to use this newfound money that he has to help others, like where he came from. He's able to speak freely about the business plans of the family. And so he ends up saving the family business. And so the key for him is to realize all of the benefits that his new identity as a member of the family has brought him. And so we also need to take time to remember all of the benefits of God, lest we forget God's grace. Secondly, in verse 3, David calls us to remember God's forgiveness, lest we forget His mercy. So our tendency, I think, is to focus on this second half of verse 3, the who heals all of our diseases. But in poetry, especially in Hebrew, a lot of times you'll see the second line of a verse will explain the first line. So we want to affirm that every time we're healed by a doctor, that's the secondary cause of our healing. Primarily we're healed by God. through the doctor, but what we really need to focus on is God's forgiveness. Forgiveness cleansing us through the guilt and the stain of our sin. So we want to look at this spiritually. And so when we look at verse 3 and we see that God forgives us of all of our iniquity, the depth of our gratitude and the posture of our heart towards God will be directly proportional to the view of our own sin. So the more we see our sin, the more we'll realize we're forgiven of, and the more we'll worship God. And we see this played out several times in the Gospels. Alright, so we see sinners bow down before Jesus and worship Him when their sins are forgiven, because they realize how much they've been forgiven of. But then in contrast, we see the Pharisees, who don't have a great grip on how sinful they are, And when they're forgiven of their sins, they scoff at Jesus. They say, you're not doing a lot. I don't have that many sins for you to forgive. So it's important for us to note that this is an active thing that God does for us. He forgives us. It's not a passive verb. So God actively forgives us. And we might experience this a little bit better if we used a different verb. All right, so I'm going to pull out an illustration. So if I came to you guys and I said, Dean Edson was punched by Grace, you might think Dean probably deserved it, right? The way I said, Dean was punched. All right, but then if I change it and I say, Grace punched Dean, Grace, why would you do that? Right, like that's a little much. So we put the impetus on grace. And so this active verb, God forgives us, puts the emphasis on what God does, not on what we do. So by saying that God forgives all of our iniquities, David's putting the focus on what God does rather than what we do. Forgiveness starts with God. It's not something that we initiate with our good behavior. We're not working off demerits or trying to work off our sins by good behavior. It's something that the blood of Christ has accomplished for us and that we are brought into by faith. And we see how much we're forgiven in verses 11 and 12. I don't hear a lot of Bible, so I'm glad you kept them open. Verse 11, he says, he shows his love for us, for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him. And in verse 12, shows us the result of that love. As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from him. And this isn't like the person at work who we forgive, but then don't send a Christmas card to, right? This is pure and total forgiveness. And this is poetry, right? So we need to remember that David is using opposites here. So you cannot be further away from the East than from the West. especially given the context that David had at the time, right? So he didn't know the earth was round. So as far as he knew, the east just went on forever, and the west just went on forever the other direction. And so in the eyes of God, his sin was separated by an infinite gulf. There was no way it could be any more unforgiven, right? So he was completely forgiven. And this is especially poignant when you think of the sin that he might have had in mind. So a lot of people think that Psalm 103 is connected with Psalm 51 that John preached on last year when David is begging for forgiveness from the Lord. So the sin that he is saying that he is forgiven of as far as the east is from the west was committing adultery with the wife of one of his most loyal warriors and then having that guy murdered. And he's able to say, I am forgiven as far as the east is from the west. And why is he forgiven? Not because he's done something good, not because he's paid tenants, but because God loves him. and that love is enough to fill the ground to the heavens, the heavens to the earth. So it's like in a movie that came out recently, a little daughter tells her dad that she loves him 3,000 because that's the biggest number that she can fathom, right? She doesn't know any bigger numbers. And so David's saying that God loves us from the heavens to the earth is as much as he can fathom. And what does this tell us about God? Verses eight through 10 picks that up. It says that He is merciful and gracious, He's slow to anger, He's abounding in steadfast love, He doesn't hold on to His anger, and He does not deal with us according to our sin, but according to the blood of Christ. And the result of that, going back up to verse 3, is that our disease is healed. So we no longer have the stench of our sin, but we have the sweet aroma of Christ. The fancy term for this is expiation, right? Jesus has cleansed us from our sin. There's no more guilt on us. An artist recently said that a new coat of paint does not remove the stain. So God doesn't just paint over our guilt. He doesn't just paint over our sin, but he completely removes it. He doesn't just pretend everything's okay, because our sin has been paid for, it has been dealt with, and it has been forgiven, and there's no stain left on us. One of my favorite movies is Shrek. It's a big, grumpy ogre. and a kind of annoying talking donkey. They go and they save a princess, and they eventually find out that this princess turns into an ogre at night. So they have to take her back to the prince, and they'll get married, and she won't turn into an ogre anymore. But donkey finds out about this. So he sees that she turns into an ogre, and so they're off talking, and Shrek just overhears them saying, how can anybody love A big, ugly, green thing. And he thinks they're talking about him. They're actually talking about this princess. So there's a big conflict, right, as happens in children's movies. And the turning point, Donkey goes up to Shrek and he says, you're mean to me. You insult me. You don't appreciate anything that I do. You're always pushing me around or pushing me away. And Shrek says, oh yeah? Well, if I treated you so bad, how come you came back? And Donkey yells, because that's what friends do. They forgive each other. And so then, all right, they get back together, right? They forgive each other completely. They go and they save the princess. And then Ogre Princess marries Ogre Shrek and they live happily ever after, right? So the forgiveness there is complete, right? They're able to completely renew their friendship and go and do what they're trying to do. So just like we're completely forgiven by God, he doesn't hold on to that in the future. It's been paid for. So to recap, thus far, David has exhorted us to worship God, and to deepen our worship, he encourages us to remember all of God's benefits, so we don't forget his grace. And to remember God's forgiveness, lest we forget his mercy. So now, in verse four, David tells us to remember God's redemption, lest we forget his love for us. This phrase, the pit, is commonly used of a place of utter despair. So literally, it's what hunters would use to capture big game. So if you think you're hunting like a tiger, you dig a big hole, an animal will fall into it, wouldn't be able to jump out, and then they would kill the tiger. Or it would be like an underground prison. So if you've seen like The Dark Knight Rises, where Bane is from, That might not do anything for you guys, but it's a prison underground. It's disgusting. It's impossible to get out of. And so David reminds us that we were brought forth in this inescapable pit. And we were only removed from that pit by the love of Christ. We could never have gotten out of that on our own. And this is where our Christian life begins. It begins by the gate being opened and letting out of this pit. It begins with redemption. So the question has to be asked, if this is the first step in our spiritual life, what room is there left for self-glorification? And from this pit that we were born into, we've been delivered into the abundance of love and mercy. So the imagery here is really striking, right? From a pit or prison, a dark place with no hope, right? There's nothing there. It's just a void. And the only thing to keep us company is the filth of our own sin. And from that, we've been brought into the love of Christ. We've been given a crown, so from prison to receiving a crown, or an abundance, from nothing to the abundance of love and mercy. Again, it's far one way to the next. So this is picked up in verses 17 through 19. This redemption is given to us because of God's everlasting love for us. And then look, it's His righteousness. His righteousness never runs out. So when we put all of this together, we see that we can never do anything to lose our salvation because we never did anything good enough to earn our salvation. Or to put it differently, we'll never get thrown back into the pit because we never earned our way out of the pit in the first place. So we can trust that this will remain true forever because no one will dethrone our king. Verse 19, God's kingdom rules over all. And the result of being redeemed from this pit, from being forgiven, from remembering God's benefits is that we can no longer draw, we're no longer drawn to what this world has to offer. We're drawn to what is good. And what could be more good than the worship of the one true God? And not only are we drawn to it now, but we're satisfied by it. I don't know if this is common, but when I was a kid, I went through a phase where I just assumed I didn't like any vegetables. And so my mom would have to tell me, like, Travis, you actually like broccoli. It's cauliflower that you don't like. I was like, oh, that's right. I remember. And I would eat it. David is reminding us that we love worship, right? We're satisfied, and it's good, because we're fighting our old self. We're fighting the temptation to say, I don't really want to worship, right? I'd rather do something else. And through this worship, we're renewed or invigorated to worship God. And as Paul says, through this, we're able to walk in a manner worthy of our calling as Christians. And I love this metaphor that David uses when he says that we're renewed like eagles. Sorry, eagles molt. Their old feathers fall off and they get new feathers and they always look like they're ready for action. So other animals, right, like if you have a dog or a cat, sometimes you can look at it and you're like, all right, not going to last too much longer, not doing well. But an eagle, you never see a dopey looking eagle. They're always ready to go. They're always ready. They look super intense. And David knows that. So he's saying that by remembering all that God has done for us, we'll be renewed with this worshipful intensity that can only be kindled by God. And then at the end of the psalm, we might expect him to focus on his own soul, on his own worship. But that's not the case at all. So we look at verses 20 through 22, and it moves outwardly. So it starts with God's angels. and His mighty ones. And then it moves on to His ministers, or people that do His will. So not just me and D and Ben and John, but all of us that do His word. And then finally it moves out to all creation. And so it might seem weird to end a psalm on worshiping with all of creation, because when we think of worship, we really only think of ourselves or this church. But this renewal that David speaks of, this passion for worshiping God because of our deliverance, is something that all of creation groans for, according to Romans 8. It's something that all of creation anticipates. Because when Jesus comes back, he's not just saving us. He's undoing the curse of sin, which is everywhere. And so our story of redemption that leads us to worship, our being drawn up from the pit and being forgiven of our sin, is a small glimpse of what creation will experience at the return of King Jesus. And so what does this mean for us? So we're going to do this a tiny bit differently. This doesn't mean that we just need to sing louder in worship. Worship is more than singing songs. So for some of us, that might be a really good application, but not necessarily for all of us. It does mean that we need to strive to engage our hearts and our minds when we sing, by remembering what Jesus has done for us. It means that we should pray passionately and diligently. All right, we don't need to do like the Twitter prayers or the same prayer we always do before we eat. We need to get deeper. When we study the Word, we should study the Word vigorously. All right, how many times have we opened up our Bible, read a chapter, and then completely forgot what it was? We need to study vigorously. In our community, we need to love each other well. We need to forgive each other freely. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and all that you've done for us. Lord, as we reflect on all your benefits, on your forgiveness towards us, Lord, and on your redemption of our lives, we're in awe. Jesus, you are our glorious Redeemer and our King, and we worship you. Lord you're so good to us and you alone are worthy of all praise and honor and glory. We pray that you would draw our hearts to you today and every day as we move forward. So we love you and it's in your son's name we pray. Amen.