Open with me and your copy of the Word of God to Psalm 67. Psalm 67. I do bring you greetings from Greenville, South Carolina. I've been at Heritage Bible Church since 2017. Right away, I got to work visiting every small group. It took about two years. And I can think of this as part of my tour in getting to know my own church. I've been there long enough to hear stories of God's work in other places where many of our members have come from, including our elder chairman at the moment, the former preacher, married his wife who grew up here. You know these folks, many of you. Serious, sweet, and sacrificial. That's how I would describe the members that we have that came from InterCity Baptist Church. Now, thankfully, I get one of my own now, because we sent you one. I'll take credit for Timothy here. Timothy Martin is enrolled in seminary. He'll be here for a number of years. If you don't know him already, you will get to know him. You can call him Tim Tim. That's the name given to him by the middle schoolers that love him very much, or the staff. Any more, Tim? Any more names I need to drag out? All right, that's all I got. We'll leave you to get to know Tim. Timothy is a faithful teacher of the Bible, a partner in ministry, one of the best church men his age, I'd say. There was a thing we called the Timothy effect, and that was people showing up because Timothy said, you need to come to church, and you need to be involved in church. And I give thanks to God for him, as I do for you. Well, thank you for this invitation, Pastor Doran and InterCity Baptist Church. We come now to Psalm 67. It's good to see your faces. Now let us seek the face of God. May God be gracious to us and bless us. and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon the earth. Let the peoples praise you. Oh God, let all the peoples praise you. The earth has yielded its increase. God, our God shall bless us. God shall bless us. Let all the ends of the earth fear him. You began your summer series with an invitation to come to the Lord to be satisfied in him from Isaiah 55. And as I get to preach on whatever I want, there are lots of passages that are glorious to preach. It just seemed fitting that we would end our, your preaching series this summer with your invitation to the nations to come to your Lord and be satisfied in Him. This is a sermon on a song. I'm not terribly comfortable doing this in a way I set out to do all of my normal things on a passage to discern what it means and consider how I may preach it. And it seems like every tool I get out kind of breaks it a little bit. It's a song. You know, most songs, if you break them down, they lose their shine, their beauty. They're meant to be sung and heard and read just like, just like that. I don't want to kill it by dissecting it. You usually have to kill a thing to dissect it. Well, we won't do that. Nevertheless, it's for us in the church to give ourselves to the word, to understand it, for teachers to study it and to explain it so that when you go and read it and pray it and sing it, you can do so with more interest and insight. Freddie Mercury from the band Queen said, I don't know what my words mean. They mean something to me, and they can mean anything you want to you. That's, you know, hey, if you're writing songs, you can do whatever you want with your words. Thankfully, the songs that God writes, he has very particular meanings in them and means for us to discern what the meanings are in his songs. So how about we get about dissecting Psalm 67. There's another reason I'm uncomfortable up here with this song in front of me is because, you know, we kind of make fun of those songs that keep repeating themselves. He kind of does that. What am I supposed to say? He says, praise God, everyone. Or now that I'm from Greenville, praise God, y'all. You need a word for the plural you, second person. Well, there's more to it than that. And I pray that our time this evening and this Psalm will enlarge your vision for God's work among the nations. Secondarily, that it will energize you to pursue your mission given you by Jesus for the nations. And we'll take this in three movements or three meditations to fill our tank, to seek God's praise to the ends of the earth. You're a church busy with all manner of things, including sending and going to the ends of the earth. My hope is that you would not forget your energy source for all of that great missions activity. We'll consider where missions begins, where it leads, and how we know it will happen. Outline will be God's beaming smile, God's singing sovereignty, and third, plants. That should hold your interest. All right. God's beaming smile. is where missions begins. May God be gracious to us and bless us and to make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. This is a prayer for God's shining face on his people. In 2020, I thought about faces way more than I saw them. How do I make a theological argument for seeing the face? It was a hard year. But I thought about how many muscles, and I researched what can the face do, and why do I need to see the face? And I started to appreciate the gift of the face. Some 43 muscles in the face takes 10 to smile. God put them all there just in order so that we could express ourselves to one another with all kinds of specificity. God created the smile and he created the face to communicate through the face what we're feeling and thinking with the most subtlety of nuance. It's a great, great gift. No face is boring. Every face carries untold, infinite meanings, given off in the seconds and moments at a time. The face is a gift from God so that we might express ourselves to one another. It's also a gift that we might understand one another. I have five kids, 15 at the top and then a four-year-old and a three-year-old at the bottom. My four-year-old Nora is hard to read. She has a resting poker face, we say. Even adults are kind of insecure around her. She doesn't like me. What is she thinking? And I say, she's thinking of me and wishing that I was here, you know, whatever. So my son, my son has a resting smiley face. Dude's always happy. Always happy. He's in trouble and he can even be happy while he's in trouble. I thought that he might be like me. He is my only biological son and he is not like me. I was a fairly unhappy kid. My three-year-old is a very happy kid. Easy to read. Faces are a gift so that we might understand one another. The Lord shines his face on his people. Now, Jesus had a face face, physical face. The father doesn't have a physical face, but we know what's going on here. It's poetry. May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us. What does that mean? But a prayer for God to beam with joy over us. The Lord's face is his presence with us. Our Lord is personal. He is not a God who made the world and then walked away. He's not a God who made you and placed you in the world and then sits there and watches as things just go. Our God is involved and he is present in this covenantal prayer. This prayer for God to shine his covenant love, his shining face on his people is a prayer for God's presence to be known among his people. You don't need to turn there, but I'll turn to just a few other places, even in the Psalms that mention his face. Psalm 13, verse one. How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? Well, how else can he put that? How long will you hide your face from me, the hidden face of God? Another way of saying, it feels like you're forgetting me. His face is a sign of his presence with us. or Psalm 119, 135. Make your face to shine upon your servant, a prayer, and teach me your statutes. God's face, a sign of his favor and presence among us. It's a sign of His blessing over us. This is an audacious song to read in the middle of the Bible after Genesis 3. We're under the curse, justly under the curse of death, banished from the presence of God. Who would have thought that this prayer could be prayed with the knowledge that God wants to hear this and means to answer it. Be gracious to us and bless us. Who? Sinners? Under the curse? And Adam, yes, something has happened. God is at work to come to his people, to make it possible to redeem them and to bring them to himself. He is the one who has initiated that plan. He is getting about it. And he has given promises to his people so that this psalmist could burst forth with this prayer in song. And it's inspired here for us to sing just the same. the Aaronic blessing. Oh, we have to read that. Of course, that stands behind this passage from Numbers chapter six. Aaron blessing the people. The Lord spoke to Moses, giving to Moses what he is to say to Aaron, to say to the people, God is sending down a benediction that his people will receive because he wants them to know of his intention to bless them. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel, and you shall say to them, The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. And the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. So they shall put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them. The psalmist here is praying this song, doing good on that Aaronic blessing. God gave him those words, he has internalized them, and he is singing them for the people of God in his own way with roughly the same words, but with an addition of prayer for the nations as we've noted. Oh, a father's smile on his family can make or break the day. I'll confess that I have gotten a text message from my wife some five minutes before leaving the house. I could search my texts. I'm sure it's there. You ruined the day. Now, I might not counsel a wife. Now, you need to text your husband. You ruined the day. But I provoked her. I was in a rotten mood in the morning. And apparently I ruined the day. To which I would say, my day was already ruined. And the kids were too loud or whatever it was. Point is, Mom can kind of be in a bad mood, I'm all right. If I'm in a bad mood, no one's all right. So fathers work at getting your sleep, know yourself, be in the word, order your day in such a way as to be a blessing to your family. Point is, we need God's face to shine on us and it makes all the difference. His face is life for us. It's his presence with us, his blessing over us, it's his grace toward us. God came to Abraham of his own initiative and promised Abraham that he would be a blessing to the nations, that through Abraham all the families of the earth would be blessed. Among other things he blessed Abraham with, it was that the knowledge that God's glory and his blessing would extend to the whole earth. What a great promise. Humans had kind of had a hard time with that. In the days of Noah, Tower of Babel, all that, but God hadn't given up. And as Abraham would get the backstory and the story that he was now a part of, oh, what grace that God had brought to him and had given to the earth through him. This is a prayer for God's blessing. And the shining face of God is also the purpose of God's smiling face is also revealed here in a certain logic that I don't want you to miss. It's the logistics for God's mission in our global mission. May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us. the psalmist has said. And then he says, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. Israel was the people of God. We could even say the pupil of God. Think of school to be taught the law of God and how to live with God and covenant as the child, if you will, goes to the front of the class at the marker board. And it is an example to the rest. except Israel failed in her example and failed to learn and failed to obey. Oh, God's plan has always been for salvation to come through the descendants of Abraham. And so it has in the Lord Jesus Christ. But Israel at her worst and apart from regeneration did not have a proper posture toward the ends of the earth. Oh, it's reflected beautifully right here. There's a movie, Oppenheimer. It's a little research I've done. I wouldn't recommend it. You have your own approach to what movies you go see. But there are a few spots in this one that would mean it's off limits for us unless we know where to skip. It's worth mentioning. It's on the radar. It's in the news, Oppenheimer. I lived in New Mexico and Los Alamos was this famous city to the north. and it had been moved in on by the United States government in order to conduct their work in kind of a far away place with the right weather and away from human traffic. And there's a story of the acquisition of a certain land, a letter of eviction sent to the director of the Los Alamos Ranch School. Went like this, imagine getting this letter if you're a school. Director, dear sir, you're advised that it has been determined necessary to the interests of the United States in the prosecution of the war that the property of the Los Alamos School be acquired for military purposes. Therefore, pursuant of existing law, condemnation proceeding will be instituted in the district court for the District of New Mexico to acquire all of the school's lands and buildings together with all personnel personal property owned by the school in connection with its operation. You're done. Although the acquisition of the property is of the utmost importance in the prosecution of the war, it has been determined that it will not be necessary for you to surrender complete possession of the premises until February 8th, 1943. It is felt that this procedure will enable you to complete the first term of your school year without interruption. A great blessing. You are further advised that all records pertaining to the aforesaid condemnation proceeding will be sealed by order of the court and public inspection of such records will be prohibited. Accordingly, it is requested that you refrain from making the reasons for the closure of the school known to the public at large. Now that's a leadership challenge. Whoever wrote that isn't a pastor or an elder at their church. That is a government bureaucrat arresting property. And we can give thanks to God for human government and to our own, and all of that's a complicated story, no judgment on the matter. But that is what I would call an eviction letter. That is, please get out, and on my terms. Israel at her worst looked at the nations and said, get out, had an eviction posture toward the nations. At her best and at our best, and according to this Psalm and the story of scripture, we must have an invitation posture toward the nations. What does all this mean for our global missions work as a church here at InterCity? Well, in the first place, if God does not smile on the local church and local churches like this, then his praise will not go out to the ends of the earth. They are connected. And so church, seek the smiling, beaming face of God. It is job number one in your missions planning and strategizing and activity and logistics. It is what happens in this room on the Lord's day in the singing of praises to God and in the seeking of the face of God and his blessing on the church through the Lord Jesus Christ. The name, his name will not go to the ends of the earth if his shining face does not bless your church. Seek his face. Secondly, the mission, the church's mission is emphatically and thoroughly God-centered. It begins with God, not man. And so in our appeals to go and to send generously, let us be God-centered in those appeals and not man-centered. If we begin with human need, we will rely on mere human resources, we will give human reasons for going, and we will elicit human excuses for not going. Like, it's hard, or, but they're my children, or what about the grandchildren? The gospel doesn't get anywhere without sacrifice and wholehearted dependence on God to keep his own promise to do just this. Let his face shine upon us that his way may be known on the earth. He will do as he has promised, and we will give ourselves to it. The mission starts with God. That's where it begins. Now, where the mission leads. Move from God's beaming smile to his singing sovereignty, verses four through five. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and you guide the nations upon the earth. Singing sovereignty. Two words we don't typically put together. Sovereignty. The caricature of it is a chilly doctrine, a matter of control. It's kind of a back-end, fine-print doctrine. Well, right here, we see, sing for joy, and then, why should the nations do that? For you judge the peoples with equity, and you guide the nations upon the earth. You are sovereign, and that's why they ought to sing for joy. Hard to imagine that nations singing for joy for that reason. The people groups of the earth. And for good reason, it's hard to imagine. Because his way is not known on the earth. His way concerning what a boy is and a girl is. His way concerning his very gift and invention of marriage. His way concerning human government and its role in his plan. No, we call evil good and we call good evil. And it is very difficult to imagine. all the peoples of the earth singing to the Lord with joy, because he is judge. But we should practice. We should practice imagining. My son, I love my son, he's 15. He's made for cross country. I say, you should do cross country. He says, I don't want to do cross country. I was like, trust me, go to this camp. He comes back from the first day. I love cross country, dad. Let me tell you, whoa, timeout. You remember you said you didn't love it. I just wanted to let you know, whatever you're about to say, I get credit for. We're talking about credit tonight, I guess. He's into it now. What was the deal? Well, he thought, I would have to be real fast right away. Like, well, first of all, it's not exactly about speed. And then secondly, you train for it. Sometimes a young man needs to learn that important things take some work. This vision right here, imagining this together, it's gonna take some work. Practice imagining all the peoples of the earth singing to God because he's a righteous judge who guides the nations on the earth and does it as he pleases because he's in heaven and that's where he is. It's hard to imagine because this earth is jerry-rigged. Jerry-rigged means organized or constructed in a crude or precarious manner. Exercises in human government are all jerry-rigged, checks and balances of various kinds, and just experiments in human governments, the best they are. Is God really guiding the nations on the earth? Read the book of Genesis 10 times and tell me God isn't in the mix, when it seems like he is not in the mix. Oh, he is, and we sing for joy to him for that reason. Yes, some will bow down in the end to God, acknowledging his righteous rule and judgment, being under judgment themselves. But this Psalm tells us that many will sing to God because of his righteous judgment. The very structure of the Psalm insists on this. The book of Leviticus has a center in chapter 16, the day of atonement. The book of Habakkuk has a center in that line, just shall live by faith. This Psalm has a center in verse four, let the nations be glad and sing for joy for you judge the peoples with equity and you guide the nations upon the earth. They will sing of the sovereignty of God. And what does this mean for our global mission? Let us not hesitate for a moment to call peoples in foreign lands who in turning to Christ would lose everything, family, vocation, social status, name it, everything. It's kind of hard for me sometimes when a missionary comes off the field and tells me the costs involved for the unbelieving among a foreign peoples to turn to Christ. And I kind of hesitate to pray they would, I hate to say it. But this Psalm tells us that the only happy place in the world is under the righteous rule of the Lord of heaven. It's the only happy place. The only reason it's hard for somebody in a Muslim country to leave their Muslim faith for the Christian faith is because they might lose everything on earth, even their life. But what is that? They're under a wicked ruler. and the tyrannical rule of idols. And so we can joyfully and confidently call a person to give up their very life in order to receive Christ without any hesitation. So that the nations might sing for joy because God is a righteous judge and he guides the nations upon the earth. And under his righteous rule, we find satisfaction and the joy we were made for. Don't hesitate in calling your neighbors, by the way, to Christ, no matter the costs. Seek his face, church. Seek his face in worship. Seek his rule and receive his rule as joy in obedience in your daily life. For if you can't do that, what are you doing calling the nations to sing for joy because God is a righteous and just ruler? And so it begins here at home with your worship and with your obedience. Now, third, plants. This is how you know that the things we've been reading will happen. Plant life. You might not be good at plant life, bad at plant life. I've got a plant that sits behind me in my office. It's been sitting behind me for several years. I think that I should throw it away. But it's been with me for a long time. And I texted my friend who keeps plants for businesses. I said, bro, how can I save them? He sent me a YouTube video. And a day later I said, do plants have feelings? I'm kind of joking, but I'm kind of attached to the plant. And it actually came to me at a very important time in our church's life. There's a story there, and I think I actually probably should keep it. There's a story there I should keep. I'm bad at plants. You might be bad at plants. Plants are good at plants. They're really good at plants. The earth has yielded its increase God our God shall bless us. Why? What does that even mean? My conclusion is, he's saying, look around at the world. It is teeming. It is teeming with fullness. It is bursting with food. I picked up a strawberry recently and saw all the seeds on it. A single strawberry has maybe a hundred seeds. This thing has been copy and pasted so many times, and it keeps going. Strawberry. Pick your plant. God has constructed the world in such a way that plants will keep on coming. We build machines to get more out of the ground, and we science the ground, and we make more food than all the humans on the earth can eat. It's teeming with life, with plants, with fullness. That's what plants picture. It's a picture of fullness. It's a picture of life. I keep putting grapes in my son's mouth and he keeps getting bigger. It's all he eats. I don't get how it works. A little girl eats pizza all the time. It's grapes and pizza. It all comes from the earth and food. The whole earth, the sky and the rain and the sun and the ground and the dirt and all, the whole thing works. You learned it in fourth grade and I forgot it, but it works, right? Look around at the earth. It's teeming with fullness. It's teeming with life. And all of that speaks to the God's sheer determination to bless his people. Neglect a city or ruin an auto industry, and the plants will take the thing over. Take buildings down, take over cement patches, just give it time. It's amazing. Neglect a property and you won't see the home in a matter of time. Plants break cement. Shall. God shall. God shall. Three times in this Psalm. God shall. He begins with a prayer and he begins, he ends with a declaration. May God be gracious to us. Ends, God shall bless us. Let all the ends of the earth fear Him. We can't do better than Charles Spurgeon on this one. That God shall bless us is our single confidence. He may smite us, he may strip us or even slay us, but he must bless us. He cannot turn away from doing good to his elect. This is a song. It's a prayer. It's an invitation. Let me ground that exegetically. This comes in the middle of book two of the Psalter, book of Psalms, five books in the book of Psalms. Lord is typically used when speaking of our covenant Lord. And book two is dominated by more gloomy, dreary, dark Psalms. Thank God we have Psalm 150. It ends well. But in the middle, we have this Psalm and a few others that are sunny and bright prayers like this. And this one in particular uses Elohim, the generic term for God, instead of Yahweh, God's covenant name. And the commentators all have to say something about it, and it's a bit of a head scratcher. And let me give you my best guess, which is just derivative of the commentator whose answer I thought preached the best, and that convinced me the most. Why Elohim instead of Yahweh, a generic name for God here? Could it be that this song functions something like a gospel tract to the nations? in their language, kind of. It's sung with them in mind, not just us in mind. So not may Yahweh, our covenant God, be gracious to us, but may Elohim be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us that your way may be known on the earth. A gospel tract for the nations, and here's what this means. When you sing, church, sing as to be heard to the ends of the earth. seeing as to be heard forever, everywhere. your songs and your singing on the Lord's day. And what we're about to do is God's gospel tract to the nations. It's the engine room, the flux capacitor, 80s kids, for all of God's work in the universe. He shines his face on his people and his people sing to him. And out of the overflow of that song, they go and they preach and they sing and they translate the Bible. foreign places in Asia as James and Katie from your own church are doing among an unreached language group. Good job sending them out. Pray for them and don't forget them. And when you sing, pray for them and pray for those nations and know that they're there singing too. A gospel tract for the unreached. Let me end with the words of Jesus. Aaron, gave his high priestly blessing, and the psalmist prayed and sang his prayer, but neither could bring about the fulfillment of what they said. The Lord Jesus, our great high priest, comes to lay down his life to take the curse that we deserve, So that after his death and resurrection, he speaks a word of blessing on his disciples. Perhaps he raised his hand over them, as Aaron would have done over the people. Luke ended his gospel with these words. Jesus ended his time with his disciples with these words. And it seems best that we would end our time in the word with these words. As Luke records, he led them out as far as Bethany and lifting up his hands, he blessed them. And while he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple, blessing God. waiting for the gift of the spirit so that they would go out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. And so they have reached Detroit. And so they have reached Greenville with your help. And so through your good work, the gospel continues to go out. Let us pray. Oh, Father, we give you thanks for this good word from the psalmist down the ages for us, We pray that this word would enlarge our vision as we meditate on it, empower us to make the kinds of hard decisions and sacrifices that mission will require, and to energize us spiritually. And we need great spiritual energy to pursue this mission to the ends of the earth. May this be a church centered on your glory that cries out to you for your face to shine on them, that knows the warmth of your shining face as their father and seeks the praise among the nations to the ends of the earth. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.