to Psalm 32. And as you're turning,
listening to The thanks that was given in that prayer made
me think of the fact that the older I get, by the way, I asked
my grandson Sam this morning how old he thought I was, he
said about 80. Well, that's close enough. Some
days you feel that old, don't you? But I find myself forgetting
more and more, but sometimes remembering some things and thinking
about some things. And I find myself realizing all
the people to whom I ought to be thankful that maybe I've never
said thank you to. And listening to Mike over here
play the piano and sing that chorus this morning, I thought,
I don't know that I've ever said thank you, Mike. for 40 years
nearly of blessings and hearing him play that piano and sing. We have a lot to be thankful
for, don't we? And I'm grateful to be here this morning. Many
of you are in the first church family I ever knew. I'm very
grateful. Rebecca, sorry she couldn't come.
She was all set and woke up sick Friday, so this is how it is. All right, Psalm 32, if you look
here, It says right under the heading in my Bible, a Psalm
of David. Psalm of David, and then you
notice that little word afterward, a shield. Caused me to look that
up. You know what that means? This
is a Psalm of David to give instruction. Well, I'd like to have David
instruct me, especially from the word. David is just the conduit
through which God speaks to us. So this is instruction from God
through David. And perhaps the greatest disservice
of my generation to young people and our children is promoting
our do your own thing philosophy. And our absolute disdain for
being given much less receiving instruction. And that's a curse
that we're paying for now and will continue to pay the consequences
of. Because great sorrow awaits all
who will not be instructed, especially children. But us as adults, too,
awaits all who will not be instructed, children or otherwise. So let's
pray that the Lord will instruct us this morning from his word.
You see verses one and two says, blessed is he whose transgression
is forgiven, whose sin is covered, lest it is the manner to whom
the Lord imputeth not iniquity." You notice there's three things
there, three very specific things. There's a trinity of trouble
that we all have. Do you see it there? It's transgression,
it's sin, and iniquity. You say, well, what's the difference?
You know, I didn't see any point in trying to figure all that
out. We all know we got plenty of transgressions and plenty
of sin and plenty of iniquity in us, don't we? But for this
trinity of trouble, there is a trinity of help. God the Father,
God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Doesn't that fit just
right? God never sends trouble for which
he does not also send the solution or the benefit. You see, the
Son's execution of God's purpose and the plan of God's purpose
from the beginning and the Spirit's revealing of the purpose is the
Trinity that's the solution. And you notice it says here that that the iniquity of God's chosen
people is gone, that it's imputed. You see that word impute? Don't
let that word be a problem. The best I ever heard about that
is something Pastor Todd Nyberg talks about. You know, imputation
is not simply some legal transaction where in the high courts of heaven
all this stuff is going back and forth like the lawyers of
our day. No, it's not that Christ died
and put away our sin as if we never sinned. It's not that Christ
lived perfectly and gave us a righteousness as if we're now perfectly righteous. That's not what imputation is.
No, imputation is this. Christ's life and death accomplished
two things for every one of his children. If I'm a child of God,
it's not as if I never sinned. I never did. You see the difference? I never did. God can't look at
you and go, well, I know he sinned, but let's just sweep that under
the rug. No, no. He looks and says, you know,
you never once sinned ever. And when we, it's not as if I'm
righteous. He looks at his children and
goes, you are perfect. You are absolutely righteous.
What did you see the difference? Imputation is such a blessed
thing and it's so certain. There's no as if to it. But then
you notice this little phrase that says, in whose spirit there
is no guile. No guile. There's nothing tricky
or clever or cunning required of men and women in order to
be saved. You know, is it required that we do anything to be saved?
No, only believe. Every believer desires to daily
live as we ought to, but not in order to be saved, but because
we have been saved. You see, doing something in order
to be saved, that's guile. That's like, I'm going to trick
you into thinking that I'm as good as I'm trying to look. No,
we don't have to do that. God looks at us and says, you're
perfect. You never sin. Come in children, come on in.
This is a good thing. And the greatest folly there
is, is to deceive ourselves before God in the matter of salvation.
But without instruction, it's an easy thing to do. So easy
to get it all wrong. Look at verses three and four
with me. When I kept silence, my bones
waxed old through all my roaring all the day long. For day and
night thy hand was heavy upon me. My moisture is turned into
the drought of summer. Now somebody here is in great
distress. That's obvious. And some of the
writers said, well, David wrote this psalm right after Psalm
51, which was his expression of great sorrow and repentance
concerning what he did to Uriah and what he did with Bathsheba.
And the consequences of sin, even in this life, are very real.
There's no point in lying to our children and saying, you
know, there's no good in sin. No, they know this principle
that's in the Bible, which is, there is pleasure in sin. Just don't let them forget the
last part, okay? There's pleasure in sin for a
season. Then come the consequences. Turn
to Hebrews 12 with me. These verses, while David wrote
them and they apply to him, these verses also apply to our Lord
Jesus Christ. They describe his suffering and
shame at Calvary when he took on himself, listen to me, the
sin the transgression and the iniquity of his people. He took
on himself the threefold problem we have, and he bore the consequences
of our sin. Do you see in Hebrews 12, 2,
how plain can this be? We are looking unto Jesus, who's
the author of salvation and the finisher of the faith, who for
the joy that was set before him endured the cross. despising
the shame and is set down at the right hand of the throne
of God. He endured what's being described
here. He kept he kept silence while
his bones were while he was abused on the cross and crucified. He
kept silence. Why he was enduring it because
it's what we deserved and he was taking what we deserved so
we wouldn't have to. Now look at verse 5 with me here. I acknowledge my sin. Whose sin is this? I acknowledge
my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said I will
confess my transgressions unto the Lord, and thou forgavest
the iniquity of my sin. The importance of, there's a
time when guile, and we're all guileful by nature, you ask a
child, We had a funny thing happen at breakfast this morning. Carrie
made some cinnamon rolls, and one of the children kept saying,
you want another cinnamon roll? And he turned to me and said,
you want another cinnamon roll? And I said, no, I'm done, and
kept asking. And finally, everybody but Carrie
and the child yelled into Carrie, who was getting ready, Mom, you
want another cinnamon roll? And she said, why did you ask? Like she didn't know. And she said, I don't care how
many there are left, you've had enough. And I turned and said,
boy, that took an ugly turn, didn't it? You see, we're all
guileful by nature. It just, boy, you know, you can't
raise children without seeing depravity, can you? I mean, it
just, we'll lie when there's no point in it. It's easier for
us to tell a lie than to speak the truth. But, you know, these
verses here, this particular verse, there's a time when guile
goes out the window. It's one thing to talk about
sin and generalities and all men being sinners. It's quite
another matter to have God send a messenger to us, an instructor
who speaks the truth and says to me, as he did to David, Nathan
came in and said, Nathan, thou art the man. Thou art the man. Oh, when he says, Bob, you're
the man. Dale, you're the man. That's
another matter altogether, isn't it? No room for guile there.
It's not like that woman made me do it. No, I'm the man. I'm
the man. So let's teach our children. It's my sin, it's your sin. It's
not just as big general umbrella we all fit under, although it
is. All right. Acknowledgement is the key. Everyone who finds out they are
a bonafide double-died sinner will pray it's not too late to
find the one and only true savior, Jesus Christ. Now look at verses
six and seven. For this shall everyone that
is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found. What's
that time? When we realize I'm the man,
I'm the sinner, I'm full of iniquity and sin. And that's when we'll
pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found. Surely
in the floods of great waters, they shall not come nigh unto
him. Thou art my hiding place. Thou shall preserve me from trouble,
thou shall compass me about with songs of deliverance. Did you
notice that in verse five, three times it says my transgression,
my iniquity, my sin. And down in verse seven, there's
three thous, the father, the son, and the Holy spirit. You
see, there's a solution for all the problem we have. And it's
the Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation is found in him. He
will reveal the father to us and the spirit and himself. So
there is this time when the Savior may be found. Thank God for that. And it won't always be so. The
flood didn't come in Noah's day for hundreds of years, but it
came, didn't it? It did come. And when it comes, we need a
hiding place in the ark. And Christ is our ark. He's delivered
us from all our sin. Do we have songs to sing or what?
You see that there in verse, Seven, it says, thou art my hiding
place. Thou shalt preserve me from trouble.
Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. You know,
it used to really, really bother me when I'd be in a, in the congregation
and we'd be singing hymns and you, you, you notice somebody's,
they may not even have the book open the song, but, but they're
not singing. The truth is it still bothers
me, I guess, but Mike's shaking his head, yeah, it bothers him
too. But you know, the more I think about it, what that is is it's
sad. It's heartbreaking, and I'll
tell you why. It means they don't have anyone to sing to. They
have no one to sing about, because all who have had revealed to
them who we are, that I'm the man. Oh, I need to sing to the
man Christ Jesus, praises and honor and glory. I don't have
any problem singing, holy, holy, holy. My voice is awful. It's
just, I can't carry a tune in a bucket, but I still want to
sing. I'm not ashamed to be heard.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And you know, I
don't have any problems. Sing an amazing grace, that's
what I need. So those who have had this revealed
to them, we sing, we sing, don't we? Songs of deliverance. Now
look at verse eight, it says, I will instruct thee and teach
thee in the way which thou shall go. I will guide thee with mine
eye. You notice that what it says
here, it says I will. A wise man submits himself to
be instructed. A wise pastor teaches and submits
himself and urges others to be instructed. Why? Because of what
this is saying right here. It doesn't say God might instruct
you. God wants to instruct you, won't
you let him. It doesn't say that, does it?
It doesn't say he's going to try to instruct you. He might instruct you. He'll
instruct you if you let him. No. It says, he will instruct
you. Tell you what, I'm not gonna
try to instruct your children, Sean. They're not my children. They're not my grandchildren.
Not gonna do it. When you were little, I didn't
try to instruct you other than Sunday school and Bible school,
because you were Cecil's son. But now mine, I will instruct
him. And our Lord says, all that are
his, he said, I will instruct you. I will instruct you. Now,
the key to this is to understand that since God says, I will instruct
you, that's how clear the command is here. I will instruct you. The question is, will we be instructed
the easy way or must it be the hard way? You say, what's the
difference? Well, the easy way is the joyful
way. We can come sit under the word. We can seek the Lord Jesus Christ
in his word and by the preaching and teaching of the word and
We can and should pray for revelation and instruction through God's
word. That's the easy way. We get something on our mind
and we don't know what direction we ought to go, what we ought
to do, what we ought to say. Pray about it. The Lord will instruct us.
He will. Ask some of these old ones that
have been around here a while. He'll instruct us. He will. And that's
the easy way. Now there is this other way called
the hard way. I confess to you that I know
way much more about the hard way than I do the easy way. But
if we're determined to resist the easy way, the smooth path,
God by his spirit will employ the hard way. And here's the
best illustration I could think of to give about this. Luke was
in junior high, my son Luke, and I came home from work one
evening and Becky was fit to be tied. I mean, she was walking
around there and just, And I said, what the world's wrong? She said,
Luke. And I said, what about him? And she said, he did such
and such. I don't even remember what he
did now. And she said, man, I marched him up to his room and he wouldn't
admit he did it, much less be sorry. And boy, I spanked him. And she said, he didn't cry.
He didn't even say he was sorry. And I said, well, where is he
now? And she said, I told him to sit up there in his room and
stay there. And I said, OK. She said, I'll
take care of this. And I went up there and I walked
in the room and here he is sitting on the end of his bed just, you
know, and I said, hey. He said, hi. I said, I hear you
did so and so. Yep. And I said, I hear your
mom said she didn't like that. And he said, yep. And I said,
I hear you wouldn't admit you did it. And he said, nope. And
I said, much less that you're sorry. He said, nope. And I said,
and you didn't cry. And he said, nope. And with that,
I went like this. I went, I'm here to fix that. And I mean, his eyes got big. And I said, just drop those jeans
down and lay across the bed. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean
to do it. But I tell you, he had to have
it. He had to have it. You know what that is? That's
the hard way. That's the hard way. And it's
not, I'm in trouble now. My glasses just fell apart, but
I can get through this, I think. He had to have the hard way.
Just was determined to have it. Does that sound like us sometimes?
We just got to, you know, Noah could have just gone to Nineveh.
But oh no, he had to have the hard way. Had to get on the boat
going to Tarshish. And we know where that led, don't
we? Spent three days in the belly of a fish. Wow, that's the hard
way. And notice the Lord didn't kill
him. Put him through all that and he vomited out on dry land.
And you know what he did then? He went to Nineveh. All right,
now. We don't have to be as stubborn
as a mule or as dumb as a wild horse in order to be instructed.
You see that in verse 9? Be ye not as the horse or as
the mule, which has no understanding, whose mouth must be held in with
bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee. It doesn't have
to be that way. You know, we can dig in our heels
if we want to. We can be determined not to come
to be instructed if we want. All that shows is one of two
things. Number one is we won't be instructed because we're not
his children. The other thing is that we'll
be instructed but are determined that it's going to be the hard
way. I was about 14 years old and working at a Boy Scout camp
in the summer and we always came a week early. and did some jobs
around the camp, and there was this creek that ran through the
camp, and when the water got high, it swept out the bank,
and it was going to undercut a cabin eventually if something
wasn't done, so they had a fellow bring a truckload of railroad
ties and dump them by the side of the road. Well, it didn't
matter how hard we tried, we couldn't carry them across this
field to the bank of that creek. So they called this farmer and
he came over with a truck with a mule in the back of it. And
he would chain two or three of those railroad ties and drag
them down there and got them all down there. And then he got
ready to leave when he couldn't get that mule in the back of
that truck. He said, you fellas come up here with me. And he
took the bridle of that mule and he put one rope through this
side and one through that side and ran it up the ramp and through
the side rails of that truck and he put about three of us
on each side. We pulled and pulled that mule and he's not going
anywhere. So the farmer went around, back
of his seat he pulled out a two-by-four and he walked down the side behind
that mule like this and he got behind him and he went WHAM and
took the side of that two-by-four and hit that mule in the rump.
He shot up in the back of that truck just like that. You say,
okay, what's the point here? The point is that farmer knew
how to motivate that mule with no permanent damage. If we're
determined to have it the hard way, the Lord can do it without
any permanent damage. But we are going to be instructed.
We are going to do as he instruct us. And it's much better to get
wisdom and instruction imputed to us than imparted to us. Imputed is the easy way. Imparted
is the hard way. And our Lord will always, always
instruct by the word rather than by the rod. It will just receive
the word. Now, it's important so we can
conclude that every, you know, can we reach a conclusion, well,
everything that goes wrong is our fault, that we, you know,
there's some problem that I'm resisting instruction. Well,
when there is trouble, we ought to ask ourselves, is that the
problem? Is it, am I refusing to be instructed? And if that's the case, then
stop refusing. That's, that'd be easy, wouldn't
it? But on the other hand, we say, well, my problem is not that I'm, let
me summarize this. What I'm trying to say is this.
My problem is not that when I've got trouble that I'm too hard
on myself. I'm going, well, if I just listen
or if I do this or I do that. No, that's not my problem. My
problem is when you've got a problem. When one of your kids just gets
into something you ought not get into, what have you, the
problem is I'm not too hard on me, I'm too hard on you. I'm
looking down my nose if I'm not careful, my self-righteous nose,
and I'm being critical or, you know, I'm looking at you going,
well, you know, if you just do this like I do, you know, then
you'd be all right. And you see where I'm going with
this? That's not, it's, I don't have the rod and the carrot,
okay? The Lord does. And what we need
to do is that when we're in trouble, and somebody else is in trouble,
especially, all right, let's not look down our nose at them
and get all high and mighty and self-righteous and whatever.
Let's pray for them. Let's use whatever means we have
to maybe make it better. If somebody's got big financial
trouble, well, maybe we can help out. If somebody's struggling
with something, let's pray for them. Do you see the point I'm
making? That this is an area that we
need to concentrate on. All right, look at verses 10
and 11. Many sorrows shall be to the
wicked. And that's saying, listen, there's nothing you and I can
do for the person who's just determined to, as they say, hell-bent
There's not much we can do there. But many sorrows shall be to
the wicked, but he that trusts in the Lord, mercy shall compass
him about. Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice,
ye righteous, and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart. Now I want us to see one other
thing here, and then I'll be finished. You notice back up
here to verse eight, you know, the eyes tell us a lot. You fellas got some advice for
you here, it's free. You know, instead of just going,
yeah, I love you, you know, stop for a minute, look your wife
in the eye and say, Those eyes will communicate some things
that, you know, the words by themselves don't. You ever been
sitting around a table with a bunch of people and you get to telling
a story or something and all of a sudden, if your wife can't
kick your reach, you look over there and she's going, I'll tell you what, if you have
to hang yourself from the chandelier, stop. Don't say any more. For whatever reason, you may
not understand, she does not want that told, whatever you're
about to say. Eyes can communicate. Do we understand
that? We used to play a game when Adam's
children were little called Tickle Monster. I'd chase them all over
the house and tickle them and then they'd get away again. And
the way the game started, I'd say, hey guys, and they'd look
at me and I'd go. And man, off they went. You know,
the eyes can communicate a lot. You know what the eye of God
is? It's the word of God. You see what it says here in
verse eight? It says, I will guide thee with mine eye. Oh, we want to know the easy
way? Look in the word. Get up in the
word. And we'll find the easy way. He'll reveal it to us. It doesn't
have to be the other way. That's where you say, well, you
know, boy, there's a lot I don't understand. You're right. Me
too. And a lot I don't know. Yeah, me too. But I tell you
what, we might not understand everything and certainly not
what we'd like to. But let me tell you what we do
understand. We understand what we are by nature, don't we? We
understand who Christ is by nature, right? Who he is. We understand
what he did, right? We even understand why he did
it. And we understand where he is now. You know what? That's
the basic instruction we all gotta have. And if we keep our
eye on the word, he'll reveal more and more and more about
those things to us over time. David said, that's what I learned.
And boy, he learned some of it the hard way. May the Lord impute
to us the wisdom of David. Okay, we'll stop.