Your glorious cause O God

This is a new song we're going to be learning at Grace Church as we return to Acts.  It echoes the themes we'll be seeing again and again.

Can't stop listening to this

I came across this reworking of God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen at the weekend and I can't stop humming it...  Brilliant.

Psalm 37 -Waiting not fretting

We live in a society that doesn’t like waiting that prizes instant success and results. Samsung recently released a new phone called the Samsung Jet. The advertising campaign picked up on this desire for everything now and carried the tag line ‘impatience is a virtue’. It went on; “impatience got us faster cars, microwaves, remote controls and jets. Impatience is in first, on top, up the front, impatience wants more and more and more…’

It’s a reflection on the way our society works, what it values, and its relentless drive for immediate results.

As we turn to Psalm 37 the call is for God’s people, for us, to be different, it is a call not to judge based on circumstance, not to be impatient but to wait. Specifically this Psalm deals with the problem of injustice in the world – why do the wicked prosper? (35)”I have seen the wicked and ruthless flourishing like a luxuriant native tree.”

Isn’t that refreshing, doesn’t that give us confidence in the Bible as the word of God. It doesn’t duck the hard questions we have. Why is Robert Mugabe still in power? Why do regimes that oppress and persecute Christians grow in strength? Why in the work place do those who cheat, victimise and bully so often seem to be rewarded for it? Why isn’t there a direct correlation between actions and reward? The Bible doesn’t duck the reality of the world we live in.

The Psalmist fear is that seeing that injustice will drive people from faith to fretting(1), from faith to anxiety to anger, to bitterness to resentment. His call is to get our perspective right which will mean we will not fret and that instead we wait full of hope for God.

The Psalms are here for us to sing, we are meant to learn their truths and sing along. It’s not a lyric sheet for us to read over it’s more like a Karaoke machine; they are there for us to learn and sing its songs along with him. But in order to be able to sing this song we need to understand what he has understood.

1. What are we waiting for?
What are you like at waiting? This week sees the advent calendars come out – those instruments of torture for small children that remind them everyday of the too slow pace of the painstaking day-by-day crawl to Christmas. But what makes the waiting bearable? It is the expectation of what is at the end, that it will prove to have been worth waiting for when that day finally arrives.

There is a repeated refrain running through the Psalm, it is what the Psalmist is calling the faithful to live in the light of. It is what will make the waiting bearable. Its there in(9)
“For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the LORD will inherit the land.”
And it is repeated in v10-11, 22, 28-9 and 34. The wicked may look prosperous now but they will face God and be judged, justice will ultimately prevail. And those who live with hope, who live waiting, trusting in, looking to God will inherit the land.

Don’t judge by circumstance live by the promises of God is the Psalmists call.

It’s an interesting phrase when you think about it, because as David writes Israel do possess the land, they are living in it. So what does he mean by they will inherit the land?

The land for Israel was not just somewhere to rest their boots and pitch their tents. The land in the Old Testament was part of the promise God made to Abraham; a promise with three focal points: a. God will make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation, b. God will give them a land, and c. they will enjoy a special relationship with God. They are actually all bound up together.

The inheritance of the land that the Psalmist calls Israel to wait for is nothing less than the Kingdom of God. When they will be God’s people in God’s place living under and enjoying God’s rule.

Jesus picks up on the idea from this Psalm(11) in his sermon on the Mount as he teaches about the kingdom, how his people live with the tension of the now and not yet, as he calls them to be distinctively the people of God.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” He says. The meek person is the one who depends on God, who entrusts themselves to God. They don’t need to justify themselves they have a right view of themselves – they are sinners reliant on the grace of God and their future is secure.

What makes waiting possible amidst all the injustice? It is the conviction that God will do what he has promised and one day he will establish his kingdom where justice reigns, where we will be his people and he will be our God.

Don’t fret look to your future. Just like those in David’s day there is a danger that we look at what is around us rather than live looking to our promised future. Will we sing this song and singing it fix our eyes on God’s promises.

2. What does wise waiting looks like?
This is a wisdom psalm, it doesn’t have a clear developing argument rather it gathers together ideas and then arranges them in a Hebrew alphabetical acrostic. Wisdom is about how to live in the light of God’s revelation, it isn’t theoretical or academic but it is intensely practical. So here having called us to take up the song of waiting the Psalmist also shows us what wise waiting looks like. There are things not to do and things to do.

(1,8)Wise waiting means not fretting, not letting the injustice around about us fray away our faith, it means not becoming envious, or bitter and angry about the injustice we see.

Have you seen the programme ‘Grumpy old men’ basically a group of older TV personalities moan about everything under the sun. I discovered this week that you can now go and watch ‘Grumpy old Women’ on Tour. You sit and listen to either the men or the women and there is not just grumpiness but a bitterness about the way things have changed about perceived injustices.

The psalmist is saying don’t let the world drain away your joy and your hope, live in the light of the promises.

Positively he goes on to say that those who wait wisely will trust in God(3), they will delight in – find their joy in God, and that trust and joy will be seen in their patient waiting(7). But the call to waiting isn’t a call to inactivity, that’s not what he means when he says be still, but the righteous because they trust God are seen to be generous, content and just. Their speech is wise, they do good and they live a life of obedience to the God they are waiting for. In short they give people a glimpse of the kingdoms values now.

The wise live in direct contrast to the wicked because they know God is coming, the kingdom is theirs and that hope affects their thinking and their actions.

Am I waiting wisely? How is our hope seen?

3. How can I wait wisely?
The key to waiting wisely is trust in God. But you can only trust in God if you know him rather than just know of him.

One of our dangers is that our default setting is to think that we need to try harder. We do it on every level don’t we – playing sport if you make a mistake you try harder next time to make up for it. If its dieting and you fail to lose your target wait this week you double your efforts next week. There is a danger that we carry this across into out attitude towards God - I just need to pull my socks up.

But did you notice as we read the Psalm the Psalmist doesn’t exhort his listeners to more effort, instead he calls on them to turn to God, to understanding who God is and what he has done for them.

(39-40)The key to living wisely, to waiting without fretting isn’t our efforts it is God’s character and actions. Only when we know God and he is our delight will we be able to wait wisely.
“The salvation of the righteous comes from the LORD; he is their stronghold in time of trouble. The LORD helps them and delivers them; he delivers them from the wicked and saves them, because they take refuge in him.”

Do you see what we do and what God does?

Just look at the verses again - God provides salvation, God is the stronghold – the place of security - God is the helper, deliverer and Saviour.

What does the righteous person do, what do they contribute? “they take refuge in him.” That’s it, they recognise God is the only one who can save them, that he is the only true security and they look to him not their own efforts.

The way to avoid fretting about the injustices of the world is to remind yourself of the character of God and of what he has done for his people. It is this that will enable us to fix our eyes on the hope of a coming kingdom because we know that justice will be part of that kingdom.

How is your waiting? As we look at the world around us we aren’t meant to be indifferent to the suffering, injustice and pain we see. But neither is it meant to drain us of our joy or eat away and corrode our hope leaving us bitter and angry. Instead the psalmist wants us to join in his song which focuses our gaze on God and on the kingdom which his people will inherit where they will be his people in his place enjoying his rule, where justice will reign.

Where are all the good songs?

Following on from my reading I have been looking for a few new songs to use and learn. And I have been struck by a change in the way songs are written - they are now increasingly written by performers for performers. This makes it hard to take those songs and use them in a congregational setting, the music is complex both for those singing or playing.

There are also areas of Biblical Theology which remain scarcely touched by songwriters. Where are the songs that speak of God's judgement, or God's sovereignty, the second coming or mission? Most songs are also written for individuals and about individual response, yet when we gather as God's people we respond as God's people - where are the songs that express that "we".

As one who would not dream of writing songs, who loves singing and loves music perhaps I shouldn't raise such questions. I am not being critical of songwriters just pleading for some more depth and range in what topics they write about. Just as preachers need to preach all of scripture including the bits we may find hard so we need songs that deal with those self same issues.

Someone has said that "a persons theology is no deeper than the songs they sing."

The end of congregational singing

That was the topic in the briefing magazine this month. It was looking at whether congregational singing is dying.

It would be a tragedy if it were to die because it is a Biblical response to God. The Old Testament is full of examples of God's people bursting into song in response to a fresh recognition of the wonder of God or as a result of his actions on their behalf. Move into the New Testament and song continues to be an important part of Jesus life with his disciples and in the early church.

It is not the bread in the church service sandwich - to limit ourselves to such use of song is to miss the point. Singing is where we remind one another in song of the truths of God and his salvation history. It is where we sing of our need of God to help us in times of trouble, it is where we remind one another of the unshakable Sovereign God whom we serve. Like the Psalms it is where we express in emotion our theology and experience of God and his grace.

It would be a tragedy to see congregational singing die. we would be spiritually impoverished for its loss.