We're returning this evening to the Psalms of Ascent, and as we're returning there, Psalm 131 will be our focus. We've been going through the Psalms of Ascent, and we began this several weeks ago, journeying through the 15 consecutive psalms located in the middle of your psalm book under the heading, Psalms of Ascent, or Song of Degrees. And these psalms begin, as you remember, back in Psalm 120. And they stretch forward all the way to Psalm 134. So we're kind of in the home stretch, if you will. Just by way of review, why these psalms came together, each year those that were traveling to Jerusalem would have traveled three times a year for the feast in Jerusalem. And those pilgrimage would have taken place at the Passover, the Feast of Weeks, or the Feast of Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. And so they would be singing these psalms as they went through on their journey. Pilgrims coming from Galilee had at least a two or three day journey to get there. And the last leg of that journey would take them to the steep road from Jericho to Jerusalem. Along the way, they would pass the time and prepare their hearts in worship, singing these various 15 psalms that we're going through in this series. A kind of commentary notes on it noted, if you sang one psalm every 30 minutes, or every half hour rather, on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, those 15 psalms would fit perfectly at walking pace. So they might repeat themselves as they kind of got through that last leg. Now we've come, we've already looked, beginning at Psalm 120. And we are coming now to Psalm 131. And we just have four psalms left. And as you come to the end of the Psalms, you'll note that three of the last four remaining Psalms are very short. They only have three verses each. Psalm 131 is the first of those very short Psalms, just three verses in length. And this three verse Psalm has a very simple theme. It's easy to understand the theme. It's very hard to apply the theme. Charles Spurgeon put it this way about Psalm 131. It is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn. It's a very simple theme. The theme is contentment. Are you content with where you are in your life? Are you anxious? Do you feel that your deepest needs are being met? Or are you searching for something else? Again, a short psalm with a very difficult application. Pick up our reading in verse one. It says, Lord, My heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty, neither do I exercise myself in great matters or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself as a child that is weaned of his mother. My soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the Lord from henceforth and forever. You know, the temptation to be discontented comes at you every day in all various forms. It might just be an advertisement that you saw that all of a sudden weaves into your heart a discontented spirit. You look at that neat stuff and suddenly there's a temptation to think, I wish I had that. It might be an old friend that appears to be more successful than you, and you think, man, I wish I was like that individual. I wish I had his kind of success. It might be the vacation that you went on to a beautiful location, and you come back home, and suddenly the climate you had back there isn't as cool as the climate you have here, and now you're discontent. I mean, if I continued down that road, we'd be here for a while. The danger of discontentment is that it robs you, however, of present joy. Benjamin Franklin was right when he famously said, content makes poor men rich, discontent makes rich men poor. The discontentment of a person has often been a result of a disquieted soul. He is constantly seeking to have better things and his pursuit of that ladder and trail of life to get better is always focused on other temporal things, never on eternal things. So the question is, is your soul quiet or is your soul disturbed today? Are you content with your lot in life or are you ever trying to get more? And one of the most precious experiences in life that the Christian ought to know is that of a quiet soul in God's presence and to know God's peace, to know God's rest and his comfort. And God makes that available to us, but our problem is we pridefully live our lives focused on here instead of there. And the psalm we are about to read together is a psalm about being fully content in the Lord. In fact, I titled it, The Secret to Contentment. In fact, Eugene Peterson had in his notes on Psalm 131 in his book entitled, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, which is a discipleship in an instant society, a commentary on Psalms of Ascent. I thought that would have been a great Psalms of Ascent title for this series, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. But he already took it, so I couldn't steal it from him. He writes about Psalm 131 and says, as you read it, the Lord prunes away two things. The Lord prunes away unruly ambition, the pursuit of the clamor of life, and the Lord prunes away infantile dependency. Just in other words, the idea is I have to have someone else do this for me. If you would be content today, you must humbly surrender to God. Psalm 131 only has three verses, but each verse has a simple and clear instruction for us to follow. Verse one teaches us to surrender our questions to God. Verse two teaches us to surrender our passions to God. Verse three teaches us to surrender our ambitions to God. And in this way, the text illustrates the submissive temperament that should be present in the heart of every child of God and the secret to contentment. Number one, he says in verse one, to be content, you must humbly surrender your questions to God. And life is full of questions. And some of these questions, we're not always privy to the answers. There's a temptation we may encounter here on Earth, or we may observe in this and others. I'm talking about an ambition to occupy ourselves with things that are beyond our reach. Now when I say this, I understand that I'm going against the grain of modern thinking. The world says nothing is beyond our reach. And the new age, the new spirit of humanism sends the message that man can do and be anything he wants to do and anything he wants to accomplish he can do. But the Bible teaches a message of faith, and within faith, there are truly things that we shouldn't do, and there are things we ought not be so enamored with or concerned about. In fact, David takes a not so subtle poke at the popular brand of skeptical scholarship that has been encroaching the church, at least since the dawn of modernism, And he clearly understands that the wisdom of the world, whatever they think is wise, is foolishness to God, it is folly. The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, if you will, and they are foolish thoughts. Faith then has a great deal to do with trust. Do you trust God enough to let God be God? Do you trust him that much? Well, certainly David did. And he understood that you must trust God for the mission that is in front of you. The pulpit commentary was right when it speaks of our temptation to try and control our lives rather than leave them in God's hands when it says, quote, our temptation is to long and to labor for that which is beyond our capacity, for which we are not created and endowed to know, which would exalt us, but which we should not adorn, end quote. David acknowledges that in his mission on earth, he has removed any obstacles that would cause him to block God out of the picture. Look what he says in verse one. Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty. Your pride, friend, is often the main obstacle between you and God. That pride is what caused Satan to fall. Pride is what caused Adam and Eve to listen to Satan in the garden. And pride is most often the root of every sin. And the proud man finds it impossible to let God take control of his life. The Proverbs say that a man who is lifted up in pride will fail. In fact, the Proverbs put it this way, before destruction the heart of man is haughty and before honor is humility. And what the Bible calls sinful pride and selfish ambition, our society calls good character. In fact, our society teaches that you should look out for number one. You should rise to the top. You should be all that you can be. And such ambition is striving to build a new tower of Babel wherever it takes it. The idea is simply, I want total control of everything that will be and everything that can be. The great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon had a compelling illustration in his sermon on Psalm 131 about the pride of man. Here's what he said. The petty sovereign of an insignificant tribe in North America every morning stalks out of his hovel, bids the sun good morrow, and points out to the sun with his finger the course he is going to take for the day. Is this, Spurgeon continued, arrogance more contemptible than ours? when we would dictate to God the course of his providence and summon him to our bar for our dealings with us? How ridiculous does man appear when he attempts to argue with God?" Too often our ambitions and plans are self-seeking and sinfully proud. What I'm asking you is not if God is important to you. I'm asking if God is sovereign to you. Is God all to you or just a big part of the next step in your plan? Do you come to God and say, now God, I've written down my list here and here's everything I want to do and if you would approve that, that's what I'll do. Or do you say, God, this is my life. Use it however you see fit. How often have we even heard, and I think well-meaning at times, when you ask a recent graduate from high school, you say, what would you like to do with your life? And then they say whatever it is that they would like to do with your life. And honestly, if you think about it scripturally, that's a very inappropriate question. The question ought to be, what does God want to do with your life? What is it that God wants to use your life for? Are you willing to humbly surrender your questions to God, trusting him and the mission in front of you, and trusting God with the mysteries around you? If you ever want a Bible passage that it forbids intellectual arrogance, this is a good passage. Here's what he says at the end of verse one. He says, neither do I exercise myself in great matters or in things too high for me. David was completely content to say, there are mysteries that I simply don't know the answers to, but I am content to let God be God in those matters. I've yet said it before, but I love the quote from Dr. Les Olala, who used to say, you can have so many degrees that men call you Fahrenheit and still not be hot for God. There is a grave danger in seeking to know the answers to the mysteries of the universe without seeking to know God's will. Those who are awed or captivated by scholars that have no Bible knowledge are treading on dangerous ground. And those who skirt the simple principles of scripture and would rather debate deep theological issues are wading into scary waters. Those who are guilty of intellectual arrogance are a byproduct of just plain old pride. Does this mean that we are not supposed to diligently study the scriptures? Of course not. As I've said before, God never bypasses the central processing units that reside between your ears in order to lead you to salvation. But there is an intellectual arrogancy that can creep its way into the church where we'd spend more time debating theological minutia under the fingernails of our fingers rather than just getting out there and winning the loss to Christ. That is a very real danger. Spurgeon in his sermon on this text said in Psalm 131, if you know two things, it's all you need to know. That man is a sinner and God is a savior. And Spurgeon said in his sermon on this text, if you know enough to know that man is a sinner and God is a savior, you are a scholar enough to enter heaven. You need to keep arrogance out of your heart and away from your eyes and away from the church. Titus three verse nine put it this way, avoid foolish questions and genealogies and contentions and strivings about the law. They are unprofitable and vain. Then there's that famous preacher that I won't mention who wrote a whole book on humility. It was a good, it was a best-selling book on humility until he got fired from his church for being proud. I'm not making that up. It is a true story. I just won't name his name. Humility is a tough, evasive thing to pursue. Because we could become proud of our arrogance. His title of his book was simply Humility. It might as well have been the 10 most humble people in the world and how I trained the other nine, right? That's kind of how it works. David is learning that there's sweet quietness that God would have us to have, then that sweet quietness is found in humbly surrendering to God. Saying, God, you are God. I'm asking you, are you content to humbly surrender your questions to God? By the way, it's not humility to pretend that nothing is clear or certain. That's the postmodern corruption of humility. Lots of people today have the false idea that everything we believe about God is a matter of personal opinion. And nothing is really settled and certain. And therefore they think to say someone else's religion or worldview is wrong is inherently arrogant. And we shouldn't be dogmatic about anything. And I'm here to tell you that's not humility at all. It's spiritual suicide. Because it's a denial of the authority of God's word to say that God's word isn't settled. It is settled. Humility is saying God said it, that settles it. And so we humbly surrender. That's a secret to contentment, but secretly, to be content, you must humbly surrender your passions to God. The first verse of this psalm tells us the plan to be humble, and the second verse tells us what happens when you actually practice humility. Now, over the course of your life, God has various ways to test your contentment. He takes away things, or he doesn't give you things that you want. And sometimes he arranges things so that you can see you are never going to get those things, even as desperately and as badly as you want them. And God does this, not because he is cruel or a spoil sport. He does this because he loves you and he is pushing you to understand what really matters. Essentially, God does this to teach you to surrender your passions, what you think you want, to him because he knows better than you know. In other words, you surrender and you rest in God. David is learning to be humble is to let go of the steering wheel, so to speak, and let God guide his life. And as David lets go, he is finding a peace that passes all understanding when he says in verse two, surely I have behaved and quieted myself. The word behaved in this verse means stilled or calmed. You could say it this way. Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul. And notice the wording here, that word calmed or behaved means to make still, to level, or to smooth. And here it refers to ceasing from motion. And here David is saying that he has let go of those things that have agitated his soul, those very things that we looked at in verse one, that just keep him up at night, wrestling back and forth. And he has now experienced a peaceful tranquility because he's let go of those things. They're no longer clamor into his ears. They have been stilled. By the way, do you know that noise, they've done studies on this, noise really does affect human behavior? In experiences in Los Angeles, for example, researchers found that children who lived in neighborhoods near the airport could not complete certain tasks undertaken when jets were landing and taking off as easily as children who lived in quiet neighborhoods. I don't know why they needed to have a study to prove that, but they did. Some studies of prisons indicate and show that high levels of noise cause more complaints by prisoners than food or prison conditions, just noise. One recent study found that restaurants who played louder music had people eat their food more quickly as a result. So the next time you go into the restaurant and they turn up the music, they may be trying to get you to hurry up and get out of there. But just as noise on the physical plane will affect activities, so a noisy soul will affect spiritual duties. And what noise does is it allows when it's creeped into your life, it will cause distraction that will keep you from doing what God would have you to do. But a quiet soul only comes from God as a gift. Psalm 62 verse 1 says, truly my soul waiteth upon God, from him comes salvation. Psalm 46 verse 1 says, be still and know I am God. Part of being still is acknowledging, again, the same truth. God is God and you are not. And you surrender then and you rely on him. And David continues his dialogue on surrender by describing the relationship of a dependent child on his mother. He says in verse 2, at the end of that verse, as a child that is weaned of his mother, my soul is even as a weaned child. And when a child first enters the world, he or she cries out and demands feedings no matter what time of day and no matter what time of night. Even if it's for a short time ago that they were just fed, it doesn't matter to that child if mom hasn't slept a little bit. Nope, doesn't matter. That child has to get fed right away. But as a child grows and is weaned, he learns that mother will feed him and he need not cry out always every time he has the smallest hunger pain in his belly. And yes, dads, that does happen. I wanted to help at night. I'd say, Rachel, I want to help whatever I can do, but you're going to have to wake me up because I don't hear it. Any dads like that in the room? I'm sorry, I just slept right through it. I was not trying to be mean, I wanted to help, my heart was in the right place, my ears were not, right? I can't hear anyways, right? It is possible for the Christian to swerve, though, towards the extreme of infantile dependency. And the Christian is not to be like an infant crying out loudly for his mother at all hours of the night. Christian ought to learn to be like a weaned child that rests by his mother's side, happy to just be with her. And no desire should come between a Christian and his God. It's clear that God does not want us to remain in a state of helpless dependency. He wants us to grow and to be weaned, whereas the Apostle Paul referred to it as going, and we talked about it in the growth group class that I taught this morning, going from milk to meat. You're growing and you're learning and you're growing to know God more, and as you do, there's a contentment that should leak its way into your soul. That's the secret to contentment. And David is showing us in this brief psalm that if you would be content, you would surrender your questions to God, you would surrender your passions to God, and thirdly, and finally, to be content, you must surrender your ambitions to God. Now as David learned to live for God, he is also learning to leave his future up to God. And David closes the psalm with a word of blessing or prayer for Israel. And borrowing from the language of three earlier psalms, Psalm 121, Psalm 125, and Psalm 130, David encourages and invites all of Israel to put their full confidence in the Lord now and forevermore. And whatever carnal ambitions you may have had before, you should leave them by the wayside as you fully commit to surrounding even your future in the Lord's plans. And the image David draws for us is a weaned child peacefully asleep in the arms of his mother, fully satisfied. well past the fidgety, restless stage of infancy, now at peace knowing that there's a variety of flavors to his food. He's no longer just eating, drinking milk. There's more to his diet. But as he's weaned, and man, I'm learning this with my boys, they eat a lot, don't they? They went from milk to now it's like, they just eat all the time. And that's the picture David's painting. As the child grows and gets introduced to more flavors, there's an appetite that's also being woven in there. And there's a desire. And now the ambitions that used to be so infantile and silly and consume our passions, now our ambitions change. And we say, I want more of the word. I can't get enough of that word. I've had these different flavors, and I still got to eat. And so we hope in God for the future. God expects you to fully cooperate. And here we add something else to the spirit of the passage and the practical influence of it, we add hope to our faith. We can now have a rest assurance that God is in control. We hope. Oh Israel, he says in verse three, put your hope in the Lord. And what this means is that there must be on your part a conscious shift, choice, from discontented cravings to contented hope in Jesus. And the idea is picked up from an earlier Psalm. In Psalm 130, verse seven, he said, let Israel hope in the Lord. Why? Well, Psalm 130 said in verse seven, for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him there is plenteous redemption. You could describe it in three ways. Hope is the desire for something good in the future. Hope is the good thing in the future that we are desiring. And hope is the reason why our hope might indeed come to pass. And so we hope, in a sense, in three ways. A desire for something good in the future. A thing in the future that we desire. And the basis or reason that we are thinking that is because we know it will happen. That's our hope. We know that the God who gives all good things will bring good things to past. A man approached a little league baseball game one afternoon. He asked the boy in the dugout what the score was. And the boy responded, 18 to nothing, we're behind. 18 to zip. The boy said to the spectator, I'll bet you're discouraged. And he said, well, I don't think I'm discouraged. And the inspector said, you're losing by 18 runs. And the boy said, yeah, but I haven't been up to bat yet. Now, there's an optimism there that is silly in a child. But there is and ought to be that kind of optimism in the face of difficulty in this world. Are you discouraged today? Does it feel like the weight of the world is pressing upon your back? Hope in God. Psalm 42 verse 5 says, why are you cast down? Why art thou disquiet in within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. And hoping in God does not come naturally to sinners. It comes abnormally. It's no wonder then Psalm 42, I find great hope in that Psalm, because I see in it, David almost preaching to himself. Don't you see that? Why are you doing this, self? Don't do this, self. I feel like I have to do that to myself. You see the discouragement of this world, and you have to remind yourself, God has a better, bigger plan. And so I hope in God forever. As David closes his psalm, he stresses the importance of keeping on keeping on from henceforth and forever. This picks up on the truth found in Psalm 121 and again in Psalm 125. In Psalm 121, verse seven, it says, the Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth even forevermore. In Psalm 125, verse two, it says, as the mountains are round about Israel, so the Lord is round about his people from henceforth even forevermore. You ever ask yourself, what's the best way to honor God? It's to serve him forever, to glorify him. And persistence through trials comes as a blessing as we look at our trials as an opportunity and often a conduit through which we can serve our God. We don't have to be defined by the trial. We can be victors over that trial because of God. You ever read the book of Job? I'm sure you have, I hope you have. What I find fascinating in the book of Job is just how many questions are there. I mean, it is like Job and his buddies are just asking, just ad nauseum, all these questions about what's going on and why is that happening and maybe, you know, is God in control or not. Even his wife at one point, you'll remember, says, you know, just curse God and die, Job. And then God does come into the picture. And he begins to converse with Job. And what's interesting is if you kind of outline all the questions that Job asks, and then what God says, God never answers Job's questions. Instead, God takes him out and says, look at this. See this sky? I made that. See those trees? I mean, they are huge, Job. Oh man, they're huge. I made that. You see that dinosaur? I think he's talking about a dinosaur. I made that. And Job at the end of the passage comes to the same conclusion that you see strung throughout the whole book. I hope in God. I trust in God. And Job comes to that conclusion pre-conclusion to his trial. Because I know you read the rest of the book and you know he gets all that stuff back and he gets more kids and it's pretty awesome. But Job came to that conclusion before all of that stuff. In fact, Job had that conclusion in the middle of those trials. He hoped in God forever and for his future when everyone else, including his wife, was saying, give up! Psalm 131, I believe, would be, if you were gonna say, like, is there an example of someone who lived Psalm 131, I could give you no better example than Job. Here is a man who understood a simple but profound truth. Those who practice humility before the Lord find contentment and rest. But in our arrogant hearts, when we are arrogant towards God, when we're arrogant towards others, when we have to know it all, we will be restless and discontent. Charles Spurgeon was right when he says, this is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn. To be content, you surrender your questions to God, you surrender your passions to God, you even surrender your future ambitions to God. Lord, he says, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty, neither do I exercise myself in great matters or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself as a child that is weaned of his mother. My soul is even as a weaned child. Israel, hope in the Lord, from henceforth and forever. Would you rejoice in God, the greatest treasure for now and