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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.
God’s Shining Face and the Church’s Global Mission
Series Summer Bible Conference 2023
| Sermon ID | 87231452427814 |
| Duration | 38:34 |
| Date | |
| Category | Conference |
| Bible Text | Psalm 67 |
| Language | English |
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