Summary
Pastor David preaches out of Psalm 73, showing how Asaph wrestles with a crisis of faith when the prosperity of the wicked seems to contradict God’s goodness. Through honest lament, corporate worship, and divine perspective, Asaph is reoriented to the truth that nearness to God is the believer’s true refuge and reward.
Transcript
Good morning church, please open your Bibles this morning to the Psalter actually. We're going to take a break just for one Sunday from the Gospel of Matthew. And we're going to be in Psalm 73 today. Psalm 73. [Music] And as you open your Bibles, I'm going to be reading verses 25 to 28 in Psalm 73. And then we will pick up there and move through the whole Psalm. Hear the word of God. [Audience "Our ears are open"] "Asaph writes, Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold, those who are far from you shall perish. You put it into everyone who is unfaithful to you. But for me it is good to be near God. I have made the Lord my God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works." This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Let us pray. Our Father in heaven, we come to you knowing that Asaph's crisis of faith is often the seasons of our lives. And I pray today that everyone in this room would open their heart to your word and would not try to duck and weave, not try to get away from the word chasing them, but would stop and let the word read them. And the Lord, as the word reads us, may it read us to you. May it read us away from our envy, away from our bitterness, away from our crisis of faith, and may it lead us to leave off living by our feelings and living by what we see and living by faith in the God who has revealed himself to us in the face of Jesus Christ and in the gospel. We would see Jesus today. He would be the one who has our hearts, oh Lord, we pray, in Jesus' name, and amen. This is the Psalm 73. If you look at the beginning, the title is, "It's a Psalm of Asaph." And Asaph was the John Mink of his day. He was one of the temple worship leaders and the writer of sacred music. He probably lived after the days of David and Solomon and right towards the time of the exile. He is responsible for 12 of the Psalms that we have in the Psalter. And today, Psalm 73 is the beginning of Book 3 of the Psalter. And Book 3 of the Psalter is clearly an Ecclesiastes world. And Book 3 is a book, a dark book in the Psalter. It is the darkest book. The Psalter follows the pathway of the life of Jesus, descent and then ascent. We are at the descending point into darkness here in the Psalter. We are at a season of judgment awaiting, and you can just feel it all the way through Book 3 of the Psalter. And in Asaph and in Psalm 73, we meet an honest man, a man who is in a severe crisis of faith. He's in a severe crisis of faith that does not deconstruct. I think this is important for us. We live in a day in which deconstructing from the faith is all the rage. Deconstructing from the faith is the thing. It's a badge that people are wearing. And I think that one of the problems that people have is they think that if you go through a severe crisis of faith, if you don't deconstruct, it's not authentic. But the fact of the matter is, is that Asaph is going through a real crisis of faith that is legitimate and it is severe. But he does not deconstruct. The Asaph understands that the life of the believer is the life of faith. It is not a life of sight. Doesn't live off of what it sees, because what it sees is limited. And it doesn't live off of what it feels, because feelings are fickle and they lie. But it lives off of what is true concerning the Lord and His will and His ways. Asaph would have been able to identify with this hymn. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart. The heart's the issue. Oh, take and seal it. Seal it for by courts above. You see there are three dangers that are revealed to us in this Psalm about what can lead to a crisis of faith living off of your sight and your feelings. The first is when we come to envy the wicked. When we begin to envy the lives of those around us who seem to have it all together and have everything at their fingertips, the healthy, the wealthy, that the world promotes for us. Look at verse three. Asaph says, "For I was envious of the arrogant." He was envy with green. When he looked around, he saw the way that the people who were not followers of the Lord, when he looked around, he saw the way that the rebels were living. Those who live as if there's no God. Those who live for their own will and way. When he saw their lives, he looked at their lives and he wanted that life. He wanted that life for himself. He was envious, not just jealous. Jealousy is I want what you have. Envious is I want what you have so bad I'm willing to take you out for it. Green with envy. This is Asaph and he finds himself in that place. He looks around and he sees that everybody who seems to be dishonoring to the Lord, everybody who seems to live in unbelief seems to have life go their way. And then he looks at his own life and he's seeking to be a faithful follower of Jesus and it's suffering after suffering after suffering. And so he makes it clear. I was envious. I looked at what the world had and what the worldings had and I wanted what they had and I wanted it badly. How badly? Well, so much that Asaph would say that he got bitter with God. His soul soured with God. Look at verse 21. Verse 21 he says, "When my soul was embittered and when I was pricked in heart." He actually came to a place where his inner man was actually soured with God and soured with the way God was doing things. And bittered at the way which God was running things for him when God seemed to be throwing out blessings to all the people who were not following him. And so he circled, he spiraled into a place of bitterness against God. When he got to the bottom of it, he wasn't really bitter with anything else at all. He was bitter with God. And this led him to say, "Why am I even doing this Christian thing at all? Why am I even doing this Christian thing? Why am I praying? Why am I reading the Bible? Why am I going to church? If this is the way that it is, that those who are wicked, prosper and those who are right to suffer, why am I even keeping my spiritual disciplines?" Look at verse 13. He says, "All in vain I have kept my heart clean. I've done all of this and it's absolutely led to nothing. It has gained me nothing. It has got me nothing. It has not returned back on me any blessing. I have kept my heart clean in vain," he says in verse 13, "and washed my hands in innocence." All of this I have done, it's been simply, there's been no return. There's been no advantage for me to follow God. The advantage seems to be for those who don't follow God. They're the ones who seem to have all of the advantage. This is where he found himself, Asaph found himself in this crisis of faith. What he sees, he doesn't like. What he feels is not good and he's not living by faith in the God who is his God at this point in time. The conflict, of course, is the credo that surrounds this Psalm. If you look at verse 1, he begins with a credo. In verse 28 he ends with a credo. Look at it. Truly, God is good to Israel to those who are pure in heart. In verse 28 he says, "But for me it is good to be near God," and there's the crisis. How is it that it is good for me to be near to God? And how is it that God is good to Israel when it seems like everybody outside of Israel and everybody other than me has the shalom of life? And I have the suffering of life. You see, his creed clashed with what he saw. His creed clashed with what he felt. They came up against one another and when they came up against one another, they crashed. And the crash almost led him to walk away from God. Almost led him to deconstruct. Almost led him to say, "I'm done with this." Look at verse 2. And as for me, my feet had almost stumbled. I was there. I was at the almost point. And then he says, "My foot nearly slipped." I was at that point, nearly almost. The crisis pushed me to the edge. I was almost at the place of taking my faith and undoing it, throwing it away, and walking out with the wicked altogether. I was almost there. But as we will see in the end, the credo will hold because the psalmist is gripped. He will continue to confess, but it will be on the other side of the crisis. Church, I just want to be pastorally honest with you. Do not try to dodge these seasons. If you live in this world that we live in, you will have in your life seasons and times where you have a crisis of faith, where it seems like everything in your world and in the Christian world and in the church is absolutely absurd looking, and the world is simply is enjoying the next celebration and party free and easy. Don't dodge the seasons. The other side of this, the other side of these seasons, if you wrestle through like Asaph will, will mean that your faith is stronger. Your faith is seeing things clearer, even if it's murky right now. And don't freak out when your covenant children go through this more than once in their lives as well. It's part of wrestling inside the covenant. It's part of making the faith more and more their own as they go through these. But what is it that caused the crisis? Verse 3 says it. Look at what it says. "For I was envy of the arrogant when I saw." You see it's all about what he saw. It wasn't what he believed by faith that was revealed for him. It was what he saw when he opened his eyes and looked around him. And you want to know what he saw? Here's what he saw. He saw the wicked getting what he believed the righteous should get. What he saw was that the wicked were getting what the righteous should get. Now how do we know this? Well this is an Ecclesiastes Psalm, but then there's the book of Proverbs as well that sometimes people take his promises. And when you do that, life's going to be really, really hard. Verse 3 he says, "I saw the prosperity of the wicked and that was my problem." And you wonder what that word for prosperity is in the Hebrew? It's shalom. The shalom. The wicked have it all going their way. And shalom is like God's thing for us. Whoa, wait a minute here. How is it that the wicked are getting what belongs to us? Shalom is promised to us, not to them. Why are their lives shalomed? Why does everything go their way? Why does it work out for them the way that it does? And when Asaph sees that, when he sees the shalom of the wicked, he envies it. That's what moves him into the problem. I want what they have because I think I deserve what they have. It's our gig to have shalom from God. And so this is really important. This is what his eyes see. This is the 10th commandment that was read this morning. This is the lust of the eyes. What do you see? Look off what you see with your eyes. And you see, our exposure is even greater than theirs. I mean, Asaph wasn't running around with TikTok and Insta. He wasn't running around. He wasn't being bombarded like we are through all of our media opportunities that we have to have the shalom of the wicked presented to us. I mean, we are simply bombarded by it all the time. It's a suffocating way of living. He didn't have that. It was enough for him just to see it generally. For us, I wonder if we can even handle the waves of the apparent shalom of the wicked that come our way through the media that we subject ourselves to. Some of us, this is massively self-inflicted on our parts. And notice the metaphoric way he unfolds the way that the wicked live. I'm just going to roll through these, but I want you to see these. I want you to see these. Verses four through nine is like a staccato machine gun of unfolding all of the ways in which the shalom shows itself in the lives of the wicked. It's actually an anti-shalom, but it's shalom according to the wicked. Look at what he says, verse four. "For they have no pangs until death." They have an easy life. Life is easy until they die. All the way up to the end, it just rolls their way. And then if you have the ESV, the next line is absolutely hilarious. If you don't have the ESV, it's not nearly as hilarious. But four B says this, "Their bodies are fat and sleek at the same time." This is my life verse. I am both of these at the same time, sleek in my own mind, a little pudgy on the other side, right? How does that work? That you'll be fat and sleek at the same time, right? Well, how is it that all these people in the world have all these great bodies and they all eat whatever they want to eat? I've been on all the diets that all the cool people have. I don't look like that. Here somehow it works. You can be sleek and fat at the same time. I don't know how it works. It's a miracle, but it doesn't happen to believers. Or not all believers anyways. So you see this, they can have it all and then have the six pack abs. They can have it all and have both. They can feast up and look great all at the same time. It's amazing. Verse five, "They are not in troubles as others are." Everything goes their way. They are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Nothing goes against them. Verse six, "Therefore, pride is their necklace." They parade their hubris. They strut around. Their pride is their bling. They walk around as if all that they have is because of them in every way. Violence covers them like a garment. They will take you down if you don't follow them. Their eyes, it says their eyes swell out through their fatness. It's just a life of excess. A life of crazy excess is what they have. And the imagination of their hearts run wild. Anything they want to do, they just do it. They have the resources to just do whatever their imagination tells them to do. They got the money to do it. It's amazing. Verse eight, "They scoff and speak with malice. Loftily they threaten oppression. They run everything with their mouth." Anything they want, they just run their mouth at it and it happens. They get it. It's oppression and malice. It comes from a dark, dark place. Verse nine says, "They set their mouths against the heavens and their tongue struts through the earth." They speak against God as if He is not and they are. Their mouth struts through the earth as if the earth is theirs. And you want to know what people follow, what they say, wear what they wear, eat what they eat, drink what they drink. These people just roll through life and it looks like everything is going to the way in which the whims, their lusts, their evil and their wickedness wants and nothing stands against them. Everybody bows to them and tells to them and follows them and wants to be them. And do not think that this is not a temptation for you. Verse 10 says it. Now watch this. It says, "Therefore his people," that's God's people, "turn back to these people, to them." God's people watch this life that's being lived by these people and God's people just turn away from following God and turn towards these people. Now the next line in the Hebrew is really difficult. In the ESV it says, "And find no fault in them." And if you look, there's a footnote there and every other translation has something to do with drinking up the words of these people. And so this is an important verse. God's people turn their back on God and His words and begin to lap up like a dog the words of these wicked successful people. I've been a pastor for 40 years almost. And I've watched this happen. My wife and I have watched this happen. And every time we've seen this happen, this person has walked away from the faith. They begin to adopt a different language. Maybe it's the language of high psychology. Maybe it's the language of the marketplace. Maybe it's the language of a new movement. Their language starts to change. They start to sound maybe a little woke. They start to sound a little psychological. They start to sound a little bit worldly. They start to see things and define things and look at things and make excuses for things that two years ago they would have never made excuses for or defended at all. And you're beginning to watch it happen. You're lapping up the words of the world that are contrary to the word of God. You can see it. You can begin to detect it. When you see that bad things are on the horizon because it means they're getting their words from somewhere else than the word of God Himself that can be trusted. They lap up those words. And then verse 11, they just like, look, God's not even, who cares? God's not even involved in any of this. Look at verse 11. And they say, how can God know? Is there knowledge in the most high? It's as if God's not even witnessing this. It's as if God does not exist. He's not taking notice of this. He's just letting all of this happen. He's letting all of this shalom come to the wicked. He's letting all of this temptation come to the righteous. God Himself, where is He in this entire situation? And then the summary verse, verse 12. This is the summing up of the way in which Asaph sees things with his eyes. This is the summary of the way he looks out. And this is what he sees, verse 12. "Behold, these are the wicked." Always at ease, always increasing in wealth. That's the definition. Always relaxed, always everything going their way, always on a seeming vacation. And just their wealth just continues to build up every time they blink. That's the definition of the wicked that he is envying right now. The wicked who have everything go their way and who have their wealth built up. And then he says this in verse 13. Just as this shook the people of God in verse 10 to have them kind of turn away from the Word of God and lap up the words of these people. It shakes Asaph. We've already seen this, verse 13. "All in vain I've kept my heart clean." Why in the world would I seek to be pure in heart when it doesn't bring to me what the wicked have coming to them? They've got the ease. They got the wealth. My purity in heart doesn't get me ease. Doesn't get me wealth. "All in vain have I done this and washed my hands in innocence." As a matter of fact, in verse 14, he doesn't find the book of lamentations like you do. How many of us say this? New mercies every morning. Thy mercies are new every morning unless you're Asaph. If you're Asaph, he's not finding mercies new every morning. Look at what he's finding every morning. He's finding a fracas. To get out of bed every day for him is a fight. Not new mercies waiting. It's a fight waiting for him. For all day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. Every morning when I wake up this stuff just keeps coming at me. The life of the wicked just attacks me. I can't even get out of bed from morning until night. And all the day I can't escape my envy, my bitterness. I can't escape the way in which these people live and how I do all of this seek purity of heart and there's no gain for me. No gain for me. And then in verse 15, the apparent deconstruction starts to become reconstruction. And I want to admit just how much I wonder about our hearts and this verse. Because what stops him in his tracks first, he doesn't have an answer yet. But what stops him in his tracks is his concern for what would happen to the other Christians, to the other followers of Yahweh around him, to the other believers around him if he were to put his deconstructive issue out there and glorify it and magnify it. But that's exactly what happens in our own day. Look at verse 15, "If I had said, I will speak thus." If I had said, this is what I'm going to go with. Everything that you've heard me say to this point is my new confession. It's my new creed. We lose, they win. They have the best life, our life stinks. This is what happens in their world. This is what happens in mine. If he's saying, if I would have put my envy out there, put my bitterness out there, this is what would have happened. I would have betrayed the generation of your children. I would have betrayed the generation of your children. The first thing that stops him in his tracks from moving forward are the people around him that could be affected, that could be led to walk away from God if he decides to glorify this crisis that he's in. He says, if I do this, if I speak thus, if I make this my recounting, if this is what my credo becomes, I betray God's people. Does it ever concern you that the way that you're acting and the way that you're speaking and the way that you're leading your life is not always just about you? It's about the impact that your face and your life and your soul and your body is having on the people around you, the generation of the children and God's people around you. Or is it just about you? This is such a Hebrew moment, right? Because the Greeks are all about me and me and I and the individualism. But what stops him in his track is his Hebrew understanding that he's a part of a people. He's a part of something more than himself, bigger than himself. And if he goes through with this, he might swallow up, he's the worship leader. He might swallow up, he's got standing in Israel, he's got credibility in Israel. He leads the worship at the temple. If he goes through with this, how many people will follow through with him and that stops him in his tracks? The effect that it will have on others is the first thing that stops him in his tracks. Then he says in verse 16, he says, "But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me to be aware of some tasks." Well, well done, buddy. Read the book of Ecclesiastes. He's well done for all of us, right? You're never going to be able to do the math on this. If you sit around and try to do the math on why it is that the wicked are seemingly blessed and the righteous suffer, that math is Christian math that is lived by faith and will never be seen by sight as a 2+2 equals 4 equation. And it'll simply wear you out. If you're one of those people that lay in bed at night trying to do the math of Providence, you're going to go nuts. You're going to lose your mind. Okay? Providence is only ever understood in the rear view mirror. It's never understood looking forward. It's never understood looking forward. So he says in verse 16, "I thought how to understand this and it seemed to me," and the Hebrews, listen to what the Hebrews, now the Hebrews not wearing some of the Hebrews and it was troubled to me. Sorry, Mrs. Deutsch, you were troubled to me. This is trouble to my eyes is what he says. When I try to look at this, calculate it and figure all this out, it's trouble to my eyes. So what really changed him? Verse 17. Verse 17 is the transformative point where he moves from deconstruction to reconstruction, we might say. And you want to know what the simple answer is? I went to church. I went to church and I got my head on straight and my heart on straight. That's what happened. I went to church and because church is not about my feelings and church is not about what I see, church is about my faith, everything that exists from pillar to post in the church is about resetting the faith of God's people and reorienting God's people to himself. So look at verse 17, "Until I went into the sanctuary of God." I went to church. I went to where the means of grace are. I went to where the worship of God is. I went to where reality is. See everything around us, all this other stuff is unreality, what appears to your eyes. What you see here, what you hear here, what you learn here, what's visible here, what's on display here at church when you gather with God's people, that is another folding of what is real. That is the real that you need. That is the real that faith needs. So he says, "All of I was this complete wreck until I went to the sanctuary of God, until I went to church." And it all came home for me. And then finally what happened was, the thing that he needed to happen was this. He says, "Then I discerned their end." In other words, what it looks so blingy and glassy and wonderful for the wicked, when I went to church, I was reminded of how this ends for them. It ends badly. It ends really badly. I went to church and I discerned their end. And then their end is explained in verses 18 and 19. This is what's coming to those people who put all of their leveraged life onto ease and wealth. Verse 18, "Truly you set them in slippery places." All this stuff looks stable. All this stuff that the wicked have looks like it's going to hold. But all of it is like wet moss on rocks and a river. I know this. Back when I was a kid, a human lake actually had water in the lake. And maybe it does now too. And then there's water up the river. And Denny and Jason and I, we'd go climbing up that river and then we'd like try to walk across stupid kids, stupid boys. But we were stupid and that's what boys are supposed to be. You learn, right? You try to walk across that thing. And the next thing hit a piece of moss and down that thing you go ripping, scratching. We got scars to show this, man. This is a man's world, okay, that we were living in. But that's the thing. The moment you hit moss in the water, you go, "Well, that's what this life of ease and wealth for the wicked, it's slippery moss, man. It's gone. It's not a stable place to be. You go and it goes. It doesn't last. It's not worth wanting. It's not worth envying because it's not stable. It doesn't last. All of their ease, pleasure, health and wealth is cotton candy. It's on sand. It can't hold them. They can't hold it." Look at what he says. You make them fall to ruin. The end of this is ruin, people. It's ruin. And in verse 20, verse 19, he says, "How they are destroyed in a moment." This stuff can be gone in a moment. And they can be gone in a moment. And they are swept away utterly by terrors. Notice how their ease up to their end. Then it's terrors. Then it's terrors when they meet death. And so this is what he discerned when he went to church. Why would I want that life? Because this is the way that life ends. It ends in ruin. And it ends swiftly. And it ends in a hurry. And it ends in terror. And it ends completely. And then verse 20, it says, "Like a dream when one awakes, oh Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms." This is not like the Lord hasn't been a part of this. Like up in verse 11, this is how can God know? No, no, no. It's going to be like a bad dream. And God himself is going to show up. And he's going to despise their life as a phantasm. It was a fantasy. It was never the real deal because it was disconnected from him, you see. And then he reminds himself of where he was again. Look at it. Verse 21. "When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant. I was like a beast towards you." So he's remembering just how deaf, dumb, and blind of a condition he came into spiritually when it came to the Lord. His heart was, his soul was embittered. His heart was pricked. He became like an unthinking animal. He was relating to God like a rat relates to God. He was relating to God like a cockroach relates to God. That's how dehumanized he became through his envy. Envy destroys the one who is envious. This against God destroys and makes brutish the one who is embittered against God. And he realized that that's the condition that he had come in. But why didn't he go all the way? Why did he not go all the way and deconstruct? Well, we're expecting him to say something about himself, right? Because he, no. The reason is because God. Because he was one of the Lord's. And I love this because look at what it says. He says, "Nevertheless, even though I was behaving like a brutish beast towards you, like an unthinking beast, nevertheless, I am continually with you. This is what's true of me. I am with my God always. How do I know I am with my God always? Three G's. I love it. You grip me, you guide me, and you glory me. That's why I couldn't ultimately go anywhere. That's why I couldn't get away. That's why I wouldn't leave. That's why even when I was brutish and stupid, I actually didn't go away from you. And I didn't join the wicked. The reason why is because you grasp me. Look at verse 23. "Nevertheless, I am continually with you. You hold my right hand. You got me gripped. I belong to you. You're holding me. You grasped me. You got me. You gripped me. That's why I'm with you. You don't let me go. Secondly, I actually have your word. Verse 24, "You guide me with your counsel." Instead of those words that come lapping up those words like a dog laps of water from the wicked, it's your counsel that guides me. I stay with your counsel. Your counsel moves me in a particular direction. And afterwards, when the terrors come and the ruin comes and the end comes to the wicked, I have glory waiting for me. I have a different end waiting for me. I'm gripped. I'm guided. And afterwards, you will receive me to glory. You see, my end is not like the end of the wicked at all. And the reason why he doesn't go all the way is because of God for him, not him for God. God keeps him close. Which means God lets him go through this crisis. God's got him gripped even when he's going through this. Which is why I'm telling you that sometimes when we have the seasons of doubt and the crises of faith, it doesn't have to lead to deconstruction. It can lead to stronger faith on the other side because God is the one that holds us when we go through these seasons many times. And this brings us almost to this conclusion. At the end of the day, it leads into this doxology. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. At the end of the day, what matters is if you have God, you have Him and you have enough. Without God, you could have everything and you have nothing. Because God is the reward for God's people. God is the reward for God's people. Saint Augustine said this of this verse, "He is the God of my heart and God is my portion for eternity. My heart has become chased for now God is loved for the reward that He is Himself." Not what He can give me. You see the Psalmist comes to a place where he loves God disinterestedly, not for what he can get from God, but for God Himself is his great reward. Vadi Bakhm said this. This is a Shari statement right here. This will be another one you want to keep for your Bible. Vadi Bakhm said, "God is not against you having things. He is against things having you." God is not against you having things, but He's against those things owning you. That's what the issue is. And so the Psalmist here finds that ultimately he's landing in the world of Shalom if he has God. And so in verse 26, he recognizes his own frailty. Look at verse 26, "My flesh and my heart may fail." Like I don't have the strength of myself to do this. I don't have the capacity to do this. I don't have the wherewithal to do this in myself. My flesh and my heart may fail, but that's okay because God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. God, God will keep me. God will strengthen me. God will hold me. God will be to me. For behold, those who are far from you will perish. You put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you. This is the end. Everyone who is unfaithful to God and everyone who is far from God, it ends in perishing. Verse 28, notice how he regathers his credo. He is back where he began. You see, the crisis didn't ultimately lead him away from God. The crisis led him around back to being saturated with the goodness of God and the God of goodness in his own heart. You see the stabilization of his own heart because this is about our heart. Living with the eyes of our heart, my faith versus seeing with our eyes and living by feelings, you see. That's the difference here. And so he says in verse 28, "But for me, it is good to be near God." Can you say that? The nearness of God, you're good. The presence of God, you're good. The closeness of God being your good. I have made the Lord my God, my refuge where I go and dive and I'll go dive into a bottle. A bottle of hooch for this. I don't have to go buy a bunch of stuff and consume a bunch of stuff for this. God is my refuge. I find refuge in God, not in this stuff. That's where my refuge is. And then he says this, "That I may tell of all your works." You see, the end game for me is watch this. This is the reversal of verse 15. Instead of speaking thus and betraying the generation, he speaks of the goodness of God and is faithful to his generation. You see, he tells of all the works of God. That's where he ends. Where was the turning point? I can't betray God's people. Where did the light come on? When I went to church and God spoke to me. And what happened? I spoke back to tell others of the Word and of the God that is the true Shalom and refuge of his people. And you say, "But what if my," this morning, my flesh and heart are failing. Who's going to speak for me? If this morning I'm kind of in the season and I can't find my voice. That's the beautiful thing about the Lord's Supper. It's because the Bible tells us that when you eat and when you drink, when we eat and when we drink, you all proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. So if you can't speak this morning, let the table speak to you. Let the table speak for you. Come to the table and receive the refreshment that you need to be reoriented to the God who is your refuge and strength. Amen. Let's pray. Our God in heaven, we thank you for the miracle of a long-winded pastor getting through 28 verses this morning. And we pray that you would seal unto us the good Word that you gave to us in Jesus' name. We pray. Amen.