Okay, well welcome to the service
tonight. We're looking at Psalm 103. We're
just doing a series where we're looking at well-known passages
of the scripture and often when we dig deep and see them again
we actually come to realise that God's promise about His Word
that it's living and active and powerful is actually true. So
Simon is going to open in prayer for us. Heavenly Father, thank you again
that you've gathered us together and that you walk amongst us
and just praise you for your blessings in our lives. The blessings
we know of, the ones we experience, and the ones that you may manifest
to us, but the myriads that you keep from us and yet continue
to sustain us by. Father, just pray for our brothers
and sisters that aren't here, the ones that are on the road,
please bless them to safe travel. The ones that aren't able to
make it tonight, I pray, Heavenly Father, that you will just draw
near to them and strengthen them by your presence. For those that
stand opposed to us, Heavenly Father, I pray in time you'll
break that hard, stained heart of theirs and draw them to us
and gather them with us and bless them in fellowship with us with
your blessing. Father, I thank you for tonight
and I pray that you can bring us a boldness in the pulpit that
lids speak through his lips and that we bless our hearts tonight
as you do every time. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you.
God bless you. This is a remarkable psalm. It
has some very, very familiar verses in it and some very familiar
references to extraordinary parts of the history of God dealing
with His people. But there's a wonderful beginning
to this psalm and the word bless in verse 1 and twice in verse
1 and verse 2 and down in verse 22. So the psalm begins with,
Bless the Lord O my soul, and it finishes with, Bless the Lord
O my soul, and the word to bless is to kneel, it's an act of adoration,
and it might rightly be translated as praise as it is in a lot of
our translations. And there is a proper place for
us to preach the Gospel to ourselves. And here we have an opportunity
to see into the life of David, into the spiritual life of David. It's said that this psalm was
a psalm of his when he was an old man. is laid before us here is just
a wonderful declaration of the Gospel. A wonderful way for us
to be caused by God to have our souls lifted away from the things
of this earth and lifted to Him. And in a sense like David we
are called upon by God to think about what it is for Him to be
our God and for us to be the children of God. And there are
times in our lives where God causes us to deeply reflect on
who He is and who we are. No matter how busy life gets,
there are times of quietness when we lay our heads on our
pillows or when we wake up in the middle of the night, or when
we're on our own walking or things are stirred within us, there
are times of quiet reflection. And as we know so well from the
life of David, he was the man who God said was the man after
his own heart. We know that he was loved, chosen,
called and blessed by God in the most extraordinary ways.
But also the wonderful thing about David is we know that he
is a man, a real man, just like us. And he says these wonderful words,
Bless the Lord, O my soul, all that is within me, bless his
holy name. All that is within us. The scriptures
never hide the fact that salvation involves, at its essence, a real,
vital, living relationship with the Lord Jesus. It's a relationship
that's experienced. It's a relationship that is felt. It's a relationship which is
longed for when it appears as if God has hidden His face from
us and He's so far from us that we wonder if the darkness that
has come upon us will ever leave us again. But these things are
always founded in the revelation of who God is in the Lord Jesus
as He is revealed in this book we have before us. Christ in
you is the hope of glory. All that is within me, all of
what it is to be Christian is wrapped up in who the Lord Jesus
is. And so three times David uses
these words to stir his soul, stir his soul to remember who
God is, to praise the holiness of God's name. And in a sense
that's my prayer for us tonight, that as we come to these words
from our God to us, they'll be living words and they'll be a
place where we can go and return again to stir our souls as David
did. Bless His holy name. Bless all of what it is for God
to be who He is as He's revealed in the scriptures. Bless His
holy name. As someone said, His holiness
is His wholeness. Everything that God does is related
to the holiness of who He is. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord
God Almighty. And this is the blessing. that
David wants for his soul as he contemplates his God. Bless the Lord, O my soul, all
that is within me. Bless his holy name. Bless the
Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. What a shame
it is that we need to be reminded not to forget all the benefits
that we have to remember. And what a mercy it is from our
God that He calls on us again and again to remember the things
that He has done. As we'll see as we go through
this psalm, we remember the things that He has done for Israel,
but also we remember the things that He has done in our lives. Just think of what God has done
in your life in this last few years. Think what He's done in
your lives in the last 20 or 30 years, because all of it,
all of it is part of God's good and wise purposes. And so often
we forget, so often we forget what He has done. we do have
selective memory. And David is pleading with his
soul and pleading with God that his selective memory would be
adjusted. But David was an honest man.
If you just turn back in your Bible, it's just one psalm. Just
listen to David's cry in Psalm 102. Hear my prayer, O Lord,
let my cry Come to you. Verse 2. Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my trouble. Incline your ear to me in the
day that I call. Answer me speedily, for my days
are consumed like smoke. My bones are burned like a hearth. My heart is stricken. and withered
like grass so that I forget to eat my bread. Because of the
sound of my groaning my bones cling to my skin. I am like a
pelican of the wilderness. I am like an owl of the desert.
I lie awake and am like a sparrow alone on the housetop. My enemies
reproach me all day long. Those who deride me swear an
oath against me. For I have eaten ashes like bread. I have mingled my drink with
weeping. Because of your indignation and
your wrath, you have lifted me up and cast me away. My days
are like a shadow that lengthens, and I wither away like grass. And yet here in this very next
psalm, as he does at the last part of Psalm 102, he wants to
remember how good God has been to him. And he has a list in
those next few verses of the wonderful things that God has
done for him. And the first one is in a sense
the most significant one for us, isn't it? Bless the Lord,
O my soul, and forget not all His benefits, who forgives all
your iniquities. It's not that He forgives your
iniquities when you do something, or do something on your deathbed. he forgives all your iniquities
and he keeps on forgiving them. There's a famous story of Constantine,
the first Roman emperor who supposedly embraced Christianity, and he
refused to get baptized until right at the very end of his
life when he knew he was dying, and so he got himself baptized
and then got himself dressed in a white robe. It's no wonder
that the religion that came out of him causing Christianity to
be the public religion has spawned so much that is so dishonouring
to God because it's based on the works of men. He forgives
all of them, all the time, and He keeps on forgiving again and
again and again, over and over and over. He forgives all our
iniquities, and never on the basis of our activities. He forgives
on the basis of what the Lord Jesus has done. David is a man
who could say, blessed is he whose sins are forgiven. and
the Lord will not remember them again." And this is what it is
for David, who was a man whose sins were evident before us. We know about David's pain with
Bathsheba. We know about the pain that he
had as he prayed for that son who was going to die. David who saw that the sword
shall never depart from his house, and he lived most of his life
knowing that most of his family were not Christians. They were
not walking as he walked. He saw the rebellion of his son
Absalom. He was publicly shamed by his
son's activities. And yet David can say here, As
he knows that these things came upon him from the hand of God
in response to sin and wickedness, he forgives all your iniquities
and heals all your diseases. Very obviously he's not talking
about physical diseases here. David is still talking about
his soul. God, as he is forgiving continuously,
he's healing continuously the diseases of our souls, the sins
that would drag us down to hell if it wasn't for God's hand upon
us again and again and again. He keeps taking away our sins
and He keeps healing us. And the healing of God is a healing
of our souls. It's a weaning us away from the
things that our flesh wants to cling to. And He cuts away in
our lives, He cuts away the props that we cling to because He wants
us to be found at rest in the Lord Jesus. There's a remarkable
verse in Hebrews 9, verse 14, which we'll refer to a couple
of times tonight. It is just mind-boggling, the
Gospel, as it's declared in Hebrews. So Christ, verse 11, Christ came
as a high priest of the good things to come with the greater
and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is,
not of this creation, not with the blood of goats and calves,
but with His own blood. He entered in the most holy place,
once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the
blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling
the unclean sanctifies for purifying the flesh, Just read these next
words slowly and carefully. How much more shall the blood
of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without
spot to God, cleanse your conscience from
dead works to serve the living God? It is just the most remarkable
verse. I don't know about you, but like
David, our consciences, come with some extraordinary justification,
condemn us again and again and again. But here we have this
remarkable word, don't we, to cleanse your conscience, to purify
your conscience from dead works. This is the healing that David
is talking about here. We are forgiven, we are healed
and we are redeemed. And I think that's the order
in which it comes into our lives, isn't it? We know that we are
forgiven. We feel the healing. And then
we know this is redemption. Who has redeemed your life from
destruction. We talk often about redeeming.
The only people who are redeemed are those who are owned by God
and they are bought back at a price, a price set by the judge himself. Forgiven, healed, redeemed. And that's how healing grace
is experienced. Destruction is what we earned. and healing is what we receive
by grace. We're redeemed at Calvary. He's attained, as I just read,
eternal redemption. And not only that, He crowns
you with loving kindness and tender mercies. God has made
us through Christ to be kings and priests, and he's crowned
his children as kings with God's constant, never-ending, loving
kindness and tender mercies. As David said in Psalm 23, surely
goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. crowned by God." The next word
is remarkable, isn't it? "...who satisfies your mouth
with good things." How many of the people of this world are
satisfied people? To be satisfied is to be at rest,
is to say like Jacob said when he came back to Medesor, I have
enough. I have everything. And so, at the end result of
these things in David's life, David, now an old man, has reason
to look back in trepidation at his life, but actually wants
his soul to praise God for the spiritual things that have happened
to him. And so that your youth is renewed like an eagle. Your youth is renewed to keep
flying like an eagle, to have new feathers like an eagle, to
have all of what God says coming to us again and again and again.
He keeps forgiving, He keeps healing, He keeps supplying redemption,
He keeps crowning us, He keeps us satisfied, and He keeps us
renewed. And then David goes on to explain
the basis of this. He wants to bless God's holy
name. These are the things that God has done in David's life
and in the lives of all believers. And now we have what God does
in the life of his church and how he makes himself known. The Lord executes Righteousness. Always God is working things
which are righteous and justice for all who are oppressed. There may not seem to be justice
now, but we know from God's Word that He is working justice and
we can rest when we see things in our lives that seem unjust. We know that God is going to
execute righteousness and there will be justice for His people. We just have to wait. He made
known His ways to Moses. The God of this universe is a
God who reveals Himself and only reveals Himself to chosen people. He will only ever reveal Himself
to His chosen ones. They are the only ones who will
ever see Him as He is. And an unknown God is an unpraised
God. And the whole purpose of this
creation is that the praises of God should be sung out. One day the praises that are
going on now in heaven will be the praises of all creation.
And he's axed towards the children of Israel. He's made himself
known. He revealed himself. He raised
up Pharaoh, hardened Pharaoh's heart, so that God would reveal
His glory to the whole world, and especially He would reveal
His grace and mercy to the children of Israel. The Lord is merciful
and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in mercy. These are
the words that Moses heard when he asked to see God's glory on
Mount Sinai. This is the Lord, the Lord, merciful
and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in mercy. It's so easy for us, isn't it?
living in this world, living in this flesh, to miss the fact
that God is gracious, that God is merciful, that God is loving,
and whatever comes to us comes from that throne of His, where
mercy and grace abide. And when He comes to deal with
His people in verse 9, He will not always accuse us, There will
be times in our lives where we are made to be aware of God's
seemingly heavy hand upon us, but He will not always accuse
us. There is just a limit, nor will
He keep His anger forever. He has not dealt with us according
to our sins, nor punished us according to our iniquities.
And the reason is in verse 11. For as the heavens are high above
the earth, so great is His mercy toward those who fear Him. His mercy is great to a particular
group of people, the people who fear Him. There is a real sense
in which God generates an awesome respect for the holiness of His
character to the people of His love. And so often we come away
from discussions with people who are opposed to the Gospel
of God's free grace and the Lord Jesus. And they say they'll go
away and look at things and they'll examine things again. And it's
just fearful to think that they go away having heard not words
from men, having heard words from God, having had scripture
read to them. And yet it's almost like water
off a duck's back again and again and again. And you keep thinking,
why? Why do they treat God so lightly? Why do they treat things of eternity
with such scant regard for the fact that they have eternal souls? Why is there no fear of God before
them? The end result is that at this
stage in the lives of so many of them, they just haven't met
Him. They just haven't met God. His mercy is great, great mercy. And as far as the East is from
the West, so far He has removed our transgressions from us. The North and South have a beginning,
don't you? If you're actually on this globe and you walk North,
eventually you get to a thing called the North Pole, a stick
up there or something, and then if you keep walking, you actually
start walking South again, don't you? East and West have no end,
have they? You start walking East now, You
just keep walking east and swimming east and you can keep going east
and east and east forever and ever, isn't it? There is no place
on earth where east ends or west ends. God's praise and God's
praise that He wants in our hearts comes from the fact that this
is how far He has taken our sins away from us. There are no bounds
to where they've gone. It's like this picture of the
scapegoat, isn't it? They are taken away, carried
by a scapegoat, in the hands of a fit man, never ever to return. God doesn't remember them anymore. They're forever removed from
us. As a father, And the word in
your text there is pity, but a better translation is has compassion. As a father has compassion on
his children, so the Lord has compassion again on this particular
group, on those who fear Him. Have you felt His compassion?
It's got to be felt by God's people. Not all the time. We don't live on the mountaintops.
We grow like the good soil in the valleys. But we know of His
compassion. He strengthens us when we are
weak. He comforts us, according to
2 Corinthians, He comforts us in our troubles and in our sorrows. And He does it with just the
most extraordinary things, the most amazing acts of grace. It might just be a word, a phrase,
just a little thing and all of a sudden, through the darkness,
God's light of comfort shines again. He has compassion. He has compassion. The fallen He helps. Those who
are cut down by their sin, He just reminds them again of who
they are. He knows what we are. We spend so much of our lives
trying to make ourselves appear to be something that we are not. He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like
grass. As the flower of the field, so
he flourishes. For the wind passes over it and
it's gone, and its place remembers it no more." So often we see ourselves as
mighty cedars in the forest of this world, great attainments
and all sorts of other things. We're not mighty cedars, we're
just grass. We're not solid rocks, we're
just dust. for the wind passes over it and
it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. We live in an old
house down at Tarere that all of you know well. That old house
was owned by a fellow called Ettingen de Mester. Anyone ever
heard of him? No? You don't need to, do you?
He's forgotten and gone. Can any of you remember much
about your great-grandfather? Forgotten, gone. This world is
just vanity, isn't it? Etting and Demester was, for
a time, when Australia was a little country. It was only ever called
New South Wales in those days. He was one of the richest guys
in this land. He had a huge house in Sydney
with a ballroom and hot and cold running servants, and he had
shops in George Street down in Circular Quay. He had 1,300 acres
of land at Tarrera, the best land in all of Shellhaven with
the most cedar trees on it. And he's gone, forgotten. We think that we are building
things forever. We are dust. We are like grass. The wind will pass over and it's
gone, and its place remembers it no more. But, one of the wonderful
buts in scripture, but the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting
to everlasting on those, this particular group of men, on those
who fear Him. and His righteousness to His
children's children, to such as keep His covenant
and to those who remember His commandments to do them." What's
the covenant that David's talking about? We often quote it, don't
we? 2 Samuel 23 verse 5. This is the covenant that David
kept. Although my house is not so with
God, He looked around at his house and it looked a bit like
our houses. Pretty jolly ordinary in a whole
bunch of it, wasn't it? Although my house is not so with
God, yet He has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered
in all things and secure. For this is all my salvation
and all my desire. Will He not make it increase? It's not about David. It's not
about the things that David did. He kept the covenant in the Saviour. God made a covenant with David,
an everlasting covenant. God made a covenant with David
before the foundation of the world. And God says to David
and to all who have faith in David's Messiah, that we actually
do the things that God's commanded. We look at the Ten Commandments
and we look at that law of God and God smiles on us because
we're looking at the Lord Jesus. We're looking beyond the law
to the lawgiver. That's the eternal covenant.
It's not about the things that we do. The Lord has established
His throne in heaven and His kingdom rules over all. This is our God, isn't it? He
has established His throne in heaven. It's not going to be
moved by the things of this world. It's not going to be moved by
anything other than God making it move. and His Kingdom rules
over all. Absolute, perfect sovereignty
in all things. It's wonderful to know that God
is perfectly, absolutely sovereign. Because if He wasn't sovereign,
then all of these remarkable promises would fall down and
we couldn't rest our souls upon them, and we'd have no rock to
build our lives upon. And David, like all of God's
children, is never satisfied with just the praise of his own
soul. God's children in this world
are hungry and thirsty to see the Lord Jesus praised. It should
cause us great grief that so few in this land of ours praise
our God. David's not happy just with praise
on earth. He wants the angels to sing along with him. Bless
the Lord, you His angels, who excel in strength and do His
word, heeding the verse of His word. Bless the Lord, all you
His hosts, you ministers of His who do His pleasure. Praise the
Lord, bless the Lord, all His works, in all places of His dominion. Bless the Lord, O my soul. And so David has looked his life
and he looks at his God. He sees God in his holiness. He sees God in his activities
of grace and love. He sees who he really is, just
grass and just dust. and he remembers God's eternal
sovereign covenant purposes. As Bhajan said, thanksgiving
can become thanks living as we look upon God and we see Him
on that throne and we see those angels worshipping Him now and
they acknowledge as God's children do here His grace, His goodness,
His dominion. And that's the place of praise
for the souls of sinners like us, isn't it? Isn't that the place of praise?
Forgiven perfectly and completely. being healed by God, redeemed
from destruction that's all around us in this world, crowned with
loving kindness and tender mercies and satisfied because we are
renewed. That's our Redeemer. That's our
God. May our souls, like David's,
praise him. Let's pray.