Good to be back with you again.
I pray that the Lord would bless today and bless his message to
the hearts of his people. And those who do not know Christ,
my prayer is for their salvation, that God would use this message
to give life as well as sustain it. To bless us. To cause us to love Him as He
is worthy to be loved. The title of the message is,
The Benefits of Blessing. The Benefits of Blessing. Psalm 103, verses 1 through 5
will be our text. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and
all that is within me. Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and
forget not all His benefits. The first thing that I want us
to see is believers are learning to bless the Lord. I have not
fully blessed the Lord as I should. And so, as we go through this
life, And we live by faith in this life. Believers learn by
experience two very important words. Yes, Lord. Those are two important words. Yes, Lord. The other one is help. Yes, Lord, and help. So if you
if you want to know the main words that we should cry in prayer,
those are the ones that are used the most. Yes, Lord. God teaches
us these words through trials and difficulties. We may struggle
to have our own way, our own plan. We can plot and scheme
to make people or things the way we want them to be. But if our desire contradicts
the sovereign will and decree of God, know this, your plans
are canceled. Our plans, if they do not coincide
with the sovereign decree of God, He will destroy our wicked
inventions. And that's what they are. If
they are not according to the sovereign decree of God, our
wishes, our decrees, our desires are nothing but wicked inventions
of our mind. And we have many of them. We
are always planning something. Now, I'm not one to plan so far
ahead, because I don't like to do much anyway. But I know, ladies,
y'all have a difficult time. Y'all plan. Y'all have a plan. When you married a man, you had
a plan for him. You have a plan for that guy.
You're going to make that thing work, whatever it takes. You got a plan. Well, eventually, God breaks those
plans and what do we say? Yes, Lord. Whatever you will. Yes, Lord. The believer in Christ,
we are always, we are free to approach unto our Father's throne.
I want you to understand this. To have plans is not sinful.
To have plans or thoughts of what you think you would be right,
according to the Word of God, it is not sinful. And so what
do we do with these things? Do we keep them to ourselves?
No, you should take it to your Father. You should boldly go
before the throne of grace and make your request known unto
God. Now, making your request known
unto other people is not going to hell. It is unto God. We make our request known and
we come boldly and ask the desire of our heart. Our Father is not
like us, begrudging. We are begrudging people. I know that when my son asks
me, Dad, I know there's a catch. So I'm already got defense mechanisms
up, so I'm not going to have to give up too much money. Whatever
it is he's going to ask for. God's not like that. He knows
what you are going to say before you say it. He knows what you
thought. And how foolish is it to think we're hiding anything
from Him in this mind of ours? And we do. We think that somehow
if we just don't say it, we're not really thinking it. No. He
hears it. He knows it. He knows what your
motive is more than you do. More than I do. So bring your
cares to Him. Bring your concerns to our Heavenly
Father who is kind and compassionate. Not like our earthly fathers.
He's glorious and gracious. He's willing to hear our cries. But understand this, the gracious
Father that He is, He will not give us anything that hurts us.
His will is to do us good and not evil. And so many of our
designs, though we think them good, are evil towards us, would
be bad for us. And so the Father denies them. He denies those things. And when
He does, we have the example of the Lord Jesus Christ before
us. It's what we were talking about
in the first message concerning Christ as an example. Here's
an example of faith right here. When the Lord Jesus Christ was
about to take our sins and to be charged with our sins, and
God was to pour out His justice on Him, He prayed. He asked His
Father the request of His heart. And this is what it was. Father,
if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." That's kind of strange. It seems
a strange request, because this is what he came for. He had known
from eternity that this is what he had came for, and yet he's
asking something that he knows himself to be impossible. Well,
let me ask you this. What else could a righteous man
ask for? but to be without sin. That's what a righteous man wants.
That's what a righteous man desires. And it's a good desire. It's
a great desire. But in order to save us, he had
to have been charged with our sin. It was not possible that
this cup of suffering should pass from him. It was not possible. He tells Peter, when Peter cut
off the ear of that servant, he said, put away your sword.
He said, the cup which my father hath given, shall I not drink
it? You see, he knew he must drink this cup. But yet as a
righteous man, he knew that the desire of his heart was true.
He was not desirous of this. He was not desirous of what was
about to happen. Yet it was not possible that
this cup of the dregs of our sin pass from Him. It was not
possible because God must be just and the justifier of the
ungodly. And the only way that can happen
is if the redemption price was paid. The only way God could
be merciful to us is that God pay the redemption price. If salvation would come by the
law, then Christ would not have come at all. There would be no
reason, if salvation is by the law, if it's possible for us
to be saved by the law, God wouldn't have sent His Son. But God sent
His Son because it was not possible for us to be saved by any law. He must have drank the cup that
was drawn from the brook, Kittron. Remember this scripture. He shall
drink of the brook in the way. What was the brook in the way?
It was that filthy brook of Kittron. That's where all of the dung
and that's where all of the entrails flowed from the temple down into
this brook. It was a filthy sewer is what
it was. And yet He would drink of the
brook in the way. He would drink of the dregs of
our sins. The filth of our sins. And He
must suffer. This is a picture of how He was
to have our sins imputed. And the suffering that He was
to endure under the wrath of God to pay double for all our
sins. Double. Therefore, what was the response
of Jesus Christ when He knew it was not possible? Lord, if
it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, yes,
Lord, Thy will be done. Not my will, but Thy will be
done. What an example. Pray for what you want at the
desire of your heart, but this should be the end of the result.
Not my will, but Thy will be done. Thy will be done. Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. The believer, whatever you've
purposed, whatever you've decreed, I know that's best. I trust God
and not what I feel or see. I trust God no matter what happens
to me. Whatever God has purposed and
decreed to come to pass, if our plans are not His will,
then we pray His will be done and not our plans. Let us pray and make our requests,
but keep this at the foremost of our thoughts, that God's will
shall be done. You know, if you pray that, you
have what you asked for. That's a sure prayer. That is a sure
prayer that never says no. God never says no to that prayer.
Lord, thy will be done. That's a surety. You got it. Well, this is the same idea of
the psalmist here. The same idea of yielding unto
God is what the psalmist is getting at when he says, bless the Lord. The same idea of blessing the
Lord, O my soul, believer in Christ, let us kneel down before
the sovereign God and say, Thy will be done. This is what it
is to bless the Lord. to kneel. That's where the root
word of this word blessed to come from. It's not how we picture
blessings. We don't bless the Lord in the
same way we may bless each other. You may bless me and I may bless
you by adding something to you. If I give you something, you
say, I needed that. What a blessing. You see, I've
added something to you. We don't bless God in that way. The lost man, they bless God
in that way. They think to bless God is to
add something to the righteousness of Christ. To add their own righteousness
in some way. That He started this thing and
now then I've got to somehow add to it to finish it. That's
a lost man's thought. If you think that, you're lost.
If that's your hope, you're lost. That you're going to bless God
or add something to it. You know the righteousness of
Christ never added one thing to God? His righteousness never added
anything to God. It added a lot to us, but it
added nothing to God. God is perfect and needs nothing. He needs nothing. If your God needs you, your God's
not God. God does not need me. By grace, he chose to save me,
to care for me, to love me, to redeem me, and all of those things,
that was by mere grace, simple grace, without anything else.
Not because of me. But men would try to add something,
some happiness to God. They think if they do something
religious, God is all of a sudden happy with them. Why? Because they feel happy. They
feel happy and think, well, hey, I blessed God, so He made me
happy. I made Him happy. I did what God wanted. They believe
it's some religious work that they can change their standing
before God. This is not how we bless the
Lord. We bless the Lord by kneeling down to his sovereign will and
by faith and obedience toward Jesus Christ. That's how we bless
the Lord. To kneel. To bow down before the sovereign
God of heaven. And say, yes, Lord, thy will
be done. We are to bow down to God because
he is worthy of such praise and honor. God is worthy of this
blessing. So this is how we bless the Lord,
is to kneel down. Second of all, the blessing is
personal. The blessing is personal. To
bless the Lord, O my soul. This is not a call for someone
else to bless the Lord. This is a call for me to bless
the Lord. Personally. You to bless the
Lord. Personally. You must bless the
Lord. You must kneel before God. Now, the truth is we can't get
anyone to bow before God. That's just the honest truth.
You will never get anyone to bow before God. You can't trick
them into bowing. You can't force them to bow.
And you can't even bribe them to understand spiritual things
as to why they must bow. You can't bribe them to know
their need of mercy. And we can never argue them into
blessing our Lord Jesus Christ. Never. Stop trying to argue with
folks. The Lord Jesus Christ never did
that. He spoke the truth in love when
the opportunity availed itself. When God opened the opportunity
for Christ to speak, He spoke the Word of God. Most of the
time he spoke to the lost was because they interrupted him.
He was teaching and they interrupted him or they tried to trick him.
That's the only reason he even talked to them. We're not going to get anyone
to believe and not anyone to bow. That's not our job. It's
not our business. I pray for my children, but I'm
not going to make them bow. I'm not going to trick them into
anything. If God saves him, that's his business. If God passes him
by, that is his prerogative, not mine. I have no say-so in
this. When Jesus talked to those lost
men, how did He speak to them? Well, with that woman taken in
adultery, He said, you that are without sin, cast the first stone. What did He do? He appealed to
their own conscience. That's all He did. And they had to put the stones
down. Not one of them could have thrown a stone. Because their
own conscience condemned them. Not because He saved them. Not because He spoke a word of
salvation to their heart. They went away because they knew
they were sinners. When the Lord Jesus was preaching
to the publicans and the sinners, the Pharisees asked, why does
your master eat with publicans and sinners? And Jesus heard
and said, they that are whole need not a physician, but they
that are sick. Now, is that not simple? Where
are you going to find a doctor? You find a doctor in the hospital.
What's in the hospital? Sick people. Sick people. You don't find well people desiring
to go to the hospital. I don't like going to the hospital
when I'm sick. But I know this, if that's where you're going
to find a doctor, you'll find a doctor among sick folk. You
won't find him among the well. This is obviously true. It's
simple. He simply told them the truth
that he came to call the righteous, not the righteous, not the self-righteous,
but sinners to repent. He came to call sinners to repentance. Jesus gave them the gospel of
His grace and they hated it. They did not believe themselves
to have a need. Even though the gospel was preached
by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Is that not something? The Lord
Jesus Christ told them the gospel and they did not believe Him. What makes us think that we are
going to get anyone to bow before God? No. Stop trying to get everyone
else to bow. Bow yourself. Bow yourself. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and
all that is within me. Bless His holy name. Kneel down before God, myself. We who have been quickened to
life, we know our need. Let me ask you this. Do you expect
the dead to know his need of a doctor? Does the dead need
a doctor? No, he needs God. The dead man
don't need a doctor, does he? He's not alive. You could cut
open his heart. He wouldn't ask for a doctor.
He's dead. You cut him, he doesn't need
stitches, he's dead. He needs God to give him life.
And when a man's alive and you cut him, he'll need a doctor.
When God gave me life, I knew this, I needed a doctor. I needed
a doctor for my sin. I needed one who could heal me
of my spiritual disease. I needed one who could give me
a new nature that I didn't have before. I needed one who can
forgive me of my sins and pardon me and give me life. That's what
I needed. Because He gave me life, I blessed
the Lord. I'm able to kneel down before
His throne and love to hold His feet. Oh, if I could just be
the one holding His feet, You know, hugging Him the way I hug
you, I'm not worthy of such a hug of Him, but I just want to hold
on to His feet. Just to admire them. Just for
eternity to look at them. Those pierced feet. Not worthy
to look up at His beautiful face. Just to hang on with all I have. Withhold that's within me to
hold fast to that man, my beloved. We've been quickened to life,
have the power of the Spirit through the preaching of the
gospel. We know our condition. I know. I know my condition. Do you?
Do you know your condition? Do you know what your old man
is? Do you know how wretched and filthy He is? I'm not found
an end to my wretched and false, my evil desires. I'm not found
an end to them. We know we have a need of God's
power and mercy to heal us and forgive us. I know my need of
mercy and that Jesus Christ is the only source by which I can
obtain mercy from God. The only physician, there's only
one, the man Jesus Christ. So by grace, the grace of faith,
I bless the Lord with all my soul. All that's within me, I
want to bow down and thank Him for His grace. How many have we seen that have
come and sat with us and heard the same message and have gone
away? I'm thankful I'm here. By grace, I'm here. Mercy. Right now, I bow myself before
God. Have you been sensible of your
need of righteousness? Of atonement? And just shut up and bow down.
No, excuse me. Just confess and bow down for
mercy. Fall down. When we fall down, It doesn't take
much, does it? The only thing it takes is humility. When we fall down, what's the
first thing we do? We look around and see if anybody saw us. And
we could have a broken arm, a broken leg, we could have anything,
we fall down. But we got to make sure, did anybody see me fall
down? When you fall before Christ,
you'll be broken. But you won't be looking up to see who's looking
at you. You'll be too busy eating the
dust at His feet, begging for mercy. This is the experience of all
who bless the Lord. All who bless the Lord will also
find Him to be merciful. You that bless the Lord, have
you not found Him to be merciful? I have found Him to be full of
mercy. Full of mercy. This is something
every believer experiences. But we are very prone to forget
the mercy of our God. Now, are you prone to forget
the mercies of God? Because I am. The psalmist here
reminds his soul of this. He said, Bless the Lord, O my
soul, And forget not all of his benefits. Why did he say that?
Because he forgets the benefits, the blessings of blessing the
Lord. What are the blessings of blessing
the Lord? There is benefits. And how often
do we forget what God has done for us? How foolish are we to
fall into unbelief and not believe God's Word? Our lack of faithfulness to God is because we forget what God
has done for us. We're too busy being concerned
about what's going on with everybody else that we're not so concerned
as to what God has done for us. The benefits of God, the benefits
of His grace. Therefore, we need to be reminded
of these benefits. This is why you're here this
morning, I hope and pray, is to be reminded. I'm not telling
you anything that I haven't told you before. Nothing I've said
is not something I've said before and it's not original with me.
The gospel is not something we go to and we try to find something
brand new or to look up something kind of cute or special. No.
It's the same old path. The same old path. Tried and
true. The gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm
not preaching anything new. You come to be reminded. You
come to be reminded because you feel your need to be reminded.
I do. Bow down before the Lord and
let's bow down before God and see His great benefits here. First of all, bless the Lord
who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases.
Now, only sinners have need of forgiveness. Now, people who have made mistakes,
people who have, you know, done some bad things, but not really
totally bad. They need partial forgiveness,
maybe, but they don't need absolute forgiveness. They've done some
good things. No, the benefit of bowing before
the Lord is that he forgiveth all thine iniquities. You see,
I need that because all I've done is iniquity. I've not done
any good. So I need all my iniquities forgiven. I need what men would call good. I need that forgiven because
that was evil. Everything I do is mixed with
sin. He forgiveth all thine iniquities. Don't be confused about this
fact. God is holy and he will punish all sin. And believe me,
God has punished my sin. God has completely and utterly
punished my sin. But not in me. He's punished
my sin in Jesus Christ. He's taken all my iniquities and gave them to His Son. He
bore them in His own body on the tree. He became a curse for
us. And God poured out all the wrath
that He had against my sins on His Son. And so God truly was just to
punish my sins. But now He is just to forgive
me of all my sins, because my sins are justly punished. You
understand that? Does that make sense? Because
that sounded maybe like I was going in a circle. God is able to forgive me of
my sins because He already paid for them. They're already paid
for. My sins have been punished. God
in grace was not willing to charge my sins to me. Look at this in
verse 10 of that text. It says, He hath not dealt with
us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our
iniquities. Isn't that great? Isn't that
a blessing? A benefit? I think that's the
greatest benefit in the world. That He's not going to reward
me with what I deserved. I don't want what's fair. I need
mercy. God give me mercy. And He has
not dealt with me after my sin. He's dealt with me as a son.
And not a bastard. Praise God for His grace. Who
forgiveth all my sins. For as the heaven is high above
the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. As
far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions
from us. That's just an obvious, infinite
thing. The East is infinitely far away
from the West. They're in two opposite directions.
You go for eternity, East and West. That's how far God has
removed my sin from me. In the eyes of God, I am as righteous
as His Holy Son is righteous. My sin is gone. Now, have I experienced
it? No. By faith, I believe it. Because Christ is risen from
the dead, as he said. Forget not this benefit. And
notice this benefit. Who forgiveth? I've told you
before that the King James Version is a good version because of
this. If anything else, it's this. You should read the King James
Version. I'm not opposed to anything else, but this is why. Because
this word here, with the ETH ending, tells me a lot about
this word. It's a present perfect tense.
In other words, it means, it was, it is, and it shall be.
He has forgiven. He is forgiving. He shall forgive. Now, is that not a blessing?
It's an infinite forgiveness that never ends. He never stops
forgiving us our iniquities. O sinner, believe in Christ and
His perfect salvation, and He will forever forgive your sin. Now, to sinners, that means a
lot. Self-righteous folks, it don't
mean so much. Second of all, we who bless the
Lord, he says, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, who
crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies. Believer,
we must never forget that we are not our own, but we are bought
with a price. I think that we forget that too
often. That we think that we are our
own. That Christ made us to be free
by ourselves. No. We've exchanged yokes. That's what we've done. When
God saves us, we've exchanged one yoke for the other. The yoke
of the law. The yoke of self-righteousness.
that would condemn us. And we have taken the yoke of
Jesus Christ. He said, come unto Me where I
am meek and lowly in heart. And He says, take My yoke upon
you and learn of Me. That's what we're to do. We're
to take His yoke. His burden is easy and light. But it is
our burden. We are His servants. We are the
servants of a king. And we should not forget this, that He has bought us with a
price. You're bought. Slavery has a
negative connotation because men are wicked. But I'm a slave
to a King who's benevolent, who loves me more than any earthly
father ever could. I'm glad to be His prisoner.
May God ever make me so. I like that song. It says, bind
my wandering heart to Thee. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel
it. Prone to leave the God I love. Take my heart and seal it. Seal it for Thy courts above.
Bind me to You. That's what I want. When I kneel
before Christ, I want Him to bind me there so I go nowhere
else. I'm His. I belong to Him. I shouldn't forget that. In Isaiah 43, verse 1, God says,
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee. I have redeemed thee. I have
called thee by thy name. What's thy name? Sinner. Sinner! We have the same name, don't
we? Sinner. Called thee by thy name. Jacob,
you wicked, evil man, trickster, Called you by your name, why
thou art mine? You belong to Him. You belong
to Him. To bless the Lord is to recognize
that He has redeemed us and bought us with His precious blood and
we are His. And not only that, He crowneth
us with tender mercies. We who are crowned with death
by nature are now crowned with all the love and mercy of That
word crowneth, it means surrounds. Envelops. His mercy envelops us. It surrounds us. When you're a kid, and you're
scared, you hide underneath the covers as though that would make
you safe. But friends, we are safe in the
mercy and love of God. We are safe. And that mercy He
gives us freely. Do you realize it's God's delight
to have mercy? Now, that just automatically
from the human naturalistic brain just goes awry. My brain is going
nuts right now because I just said that. The old man doesn't
compute. There's never been a time the
Lord has not loved me. Never. And there will never be
a time He does not love me. He crowneth. There it is again. He has crowned. He is crowning. He shall crown with loving kindness
and tender mercy. Which He delights to give you.
He loves to give it to you. But I don't deserve it. Exactly.
That's why it's called mercy. It's called mercy. This is a
benefit of bowing before God. That's in Micah, chapter seven,
verse 18. It says the Lord delighteth in mercy. He delighteth in mercy. Number three, forget not the
benefit that satisfies our mouths with good things and renews our
strength. And we are in the dust, we are, as the scripture says
here, like dust and grass. The Lord remembereth our frame
that we are but dust. For he knoweth our frame, remembereth
that we are dust, for as man his days are as grass in the
flower of the field, so he flourisheth, the wind passeth over it, and
it's gone, and the place knoweth, shall know it no more. God knows
what we are in our weakness. He knows you're weak. We're not hiding anything from
Him. He knows you struggle. But none of this has anything
to do with His mercy. None of that has anything to
do with His mercy. None of that affects His mercy toward us. He's always had mercy. He always
will have mercy. Why? He knows what we are. He
knows what we are more than we know what we are. And yet, He
still delights to have mercy. He still delights to have mercy.
Remember, when you are weary and filled with doubt, Remember
where our strength comes from. Where does our strength come
from? Well, when I get done here, I
want to eat. That's where my strength comes from for this
body. I need to eat. The strength of remembering these
things and blessing the Lord is the preaching of the gospel,
the reading, the study of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and this
It satisfies our soul. This satisfies me. This satisfies
my soul to say Christ is enough. If I have Christ, don't I have
enough? What more do I need? If I have
Christ, I have everything. And so what do I do? I bless
the Lord. I bless the Lord for all his
benefits he's given to me. If you are a sinner in need of
these benefits, then come and kneel down and bless the Lord. Come and believe on Christ and
you shall be saved. That is so. You can enjoy these benefits
with us. Now be wonderful. May God bless
this to your heart. May God help us not to forget
what wonderful things he's done. And bless him for it. Let's stand
and be dismissed.