Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Group Work (Psalm 34)
Date: May 5, 2024
In 2014, the Kansas City Royals made the postseason for the first time in nearly 30 years. They earned their official postseason birth in an incredible wild card play-in game against the Oakland Athletics. The game took place on Noah’s birthday. My dad was actually at the game, sitting on the front row behind the inside corner of the A’s dugout courtesy of a good friend of his. He even held up a sign wishing Noah a happy birthday that got put on camera. Watching from home, I stayed up pretty late to see the finish, but when we gave up the lead late in the game, I gave up and went to bed. I couldn’t bear to watch yet another disappointing season come to an end. In the middle of the night, though, I checked my phone and saw that the game was not yet over. I quickly turned the TV on and hit the record button to be able to watch how it actually ended in the morning. It was an awfully exciting time.
Now, rewind back a few years. In 2007, the Colorado Rockies, another team with a long-suffering past, made the playoffs for the second time in their history. Through a magical “Rocktober” season, the perennial underdogs just kept winning. Lisa and I were living in Denver at the time and got all caught up in the excitement. We managed to score tickets to game 4 of the National League Championship Series game against the Arizona Diamondbacks. A win that night would propel them on to the playoffs. Coors Field is a great ballpark, and we managed to get great seats that we only had to go in a random building downtown to pick up from a guy sitting in an otherwise empty room at a folding table. It was totally legit. Either way, we stayed through all the magic of that night. We were waving the rally towels they handed out before the game (which we still have, by the way) wildly when Todd Helton, our Hall of Fame first baseman, caught the last out to seal the victory. It came appropriately enough, at the expense of the Diamondbacks player (who had talked some trash earlier in the week about the Rockies’ chances) who was on his face in the dirt after a failed attempt to slide into first to beat the throw. We screamed and cheered until we didn’t have voices. We felt the avalanche of confetti pouring over us. We were high-fiving and hugging all the total strangers around us. We walked back to the light rail station through the celebrating downtown and got our super-early copy of the next day’s paper which already had the picture of Helton at the end of the game immortalized on its front page. And then the Rockies went on to lose the World Series in four games to the Red Sox in spite of the fact that we had tickets secured to game 5. How utterly inconsiderate of them.
Now, I can tell you that I was just as excited about the Royals’ win as I was the Rockies’. More excited, in fact. But experiencing that earlier game in the stadium, surrounded by all the other fans, was incredible beyond words—and I’m a words guy. I couldn’t possibly describe what it was like to actually be there experiencing that with those people I had never met and would never see again except to say, “You had to be there.” Doing it with other people was better than watching by myself the next morning. Some things are just better experienced together.
This morning we are in the fourth part of our teaching series, Authentic Church. For the last few weeks and with a couple more to go, we are talking about what it is that makes a church an authentic church. We’re talking about how we can know what we are dealing with when it comes to engaging with a particular church. Do we have a church on our hands or merely a social or civic club in which the members share some basically similar religious beliefs? Far too many folks have had their faith trashed or a budding journey with Jesus cut short because they thought they were dealing with a church and expected a certain experience, but it wasn’t really and the discovery of this reality did far more damage than anyone thought that it would. I don’t want anyone to have an experience like that. I want to make sure that we all know what to look for to tell if we are engaging with a church or something else. Thus this series.
We started this journey out by establishing the proper foundation for the church. The church is founded on the person of Jesus. If Jesus isn’t the foundation, then it’s not a church. Everything in the church centers on Jesus. Because of that, everything the church is and does has to be determined by who Jesus was and what Jesus did. Jesus’ driving passion was seeing people get into a right relationship with God. That’s got to be our first priority too. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. Both of those elements are essential. As we talked about last week, though, getting them there and leaving them alone simply won’t do. We have to help them—and ourselves—grow. Authentic churches grow people in Jesus.
So far in this journey, we have been talking about things we are supposed to be doing if we are going to live up to our claim to be a church. We talked about one that is fairly externally focused—sharing the Gospel—and one that is fairly internally focused—growing people in Christ; making disciples of those who are following Him. The next item on our list of things that reveal a church to be an authentic church touches on both of these elements. It is, in fact, inextricably linked to both of them. If we get this next thing right, it is going to lead us to do them effectively and well. At the same time, though, it will also be one of the results of our getting them right. In other words, it is both the beginning and the end of a circle that leads to an ever-expanding explosion of life and truth in us and through us to the world around us. This thing is worship. Authentic churches worship the Lord. But they don’t just worship the Lord. They worship the Lord together. This morning, I want to talk about worship.
Now, there are lots of places we could go to talk about worship in the Scriptures. But the place that makes the most sense to start is the collection of songs that were designed and intended to be used in a worship setting, many of them complete with instructions for how the worship leader was to lead their singing. I’m talking, of course, about the collection of Psalms in the Old Testament. This divinely inspired worship sourcebook has been a faithful guide for people wanting to give God praise and glory or to present God with challenging and emotional questions, all in the context of a worship setting, for a very long time. The psalms don’t shy away from much of anything and present all kinds of different expressions of worship including some that we’d rather ignore because they come across as pretty ugly. In their honesty, though, we can find many important pointers on why and how to worship the Lord rightly and well. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way to the Psalms. I want to look together at a profound expression of worship from King David and what it has to say about our call to worship as a church. Take a look with me at Psalm 34.
King David wrote many of the psalms in the collection. And while many of the psalms that are attributed to him don’t give us any more context other than that he wrote them, a few point to specific circumstances in his life that prompted his writing. Psalm 34 is one of these. If you look at the small print at the top of the psalm, you will see that David wrote this one “when he pretended to be insane in the presence of Abimelech, who drove him out, and he departed.” That tells us that if we really want to understand what’s going on here, we need to jump over to 1 Samuel 21 and read the story about David’s time in the court of the Philistine King Achish (Abimelech, which translates to “son of the king,” would have been a common title used for kings in that day). We’re not going to do that right now, but it would be worth your time to do it this afternoon as it’s a pretty fun story. Suffice to say now, David was on the run from Saul and had gotten desperate enough that he was staying with the leader of Israel’s enemies. When Abimelech’s advisors recognized who David was and what his background as a Philistine killer was, David basically claimed insanity so they wouldn’t hurt him or his men and their families. It was a dicey situation that could have gone a number of different versions of sideways, but God saw him through it.
As a result, David wrote a song of praise to God for it. He wrote a song of praise that was intended to be remembered and shared. Literarily speaking, the psalm is an acrostic of the Hebrew alphabet. David didn’t just want to share about his experiences with others, he wanted them to learn from them. So, he wrote in such a way that his words would be easier to memorize and pass along. The whole purpose of this psalm is to help us understand not only that God is worthy of our worship, but why He is. Check this out with me.
He starts out strong: “I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise will always be on my lips. I will boast in the Lord; the humble will hear and be glad. Proclaim the Lord’s greatness with me; let us exalt his name together.” This sets the tone for what is to come. David is praising the Lord. God had done something good for David, and he was going to glorify His name because of it. Did you catch here, though, how His commitment to worship is an expanding one? It starts with just him. I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise will always be on my lips. David is praising the Lord. But he’s not doing it just for himself. He talks about the humble hearing of it and being gladdened by it. In other words, he is praising the Lord where other people can hear about it and be impacted by it. One of the ways we can worship the Lord is to proclaim the things about Him that are true and good. We can share of the ways He has blessed us—that is, we can boast in the Lord. These kinds of things are powerful. For folks who are in hard situations or in circumstances where they are looking for hope, this reminder that there is indeed hope in the God who is good and who does good things for His people can be just the thing they were looking for to lift their spirits and to help them see beyond their circumstances.
David doesn’t stop here, though. He goes one more step forward. He invites others to join in the praise and worship with him. “Proclaim the Lord’s greatness with me; let us exalt his name together.” He didn’t want his worship to be a solo affair. He understood that it is better to worship together than by ourselves. Indeed, when more people are proclaiming true things about God together and participating in His character, the impact of their efforts will be bigger. Worship is meant to be a team sport. This way we can experience the joy of the Lord together. And some things are just better together. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord as a community.
In the next stanza, David shares more about his experiences that led him to this place of worship. “I sought the Lord, and he answered me and rescued me from all of my fears. Those who look to him are radiant with joy; their faces will never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him from all of his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and rescues them.” David is praising God here for His protection and provision. As we talked about before, David was in a hard spot with the Philistines. He was hoping they wouldn’t recognize him and that he would be able to hide out there to get away from Saul’s murderous campaign against him. But they did and he suddenly found himself not merely in enemy territory, but in the very heart of enemy territory and the enemy had figured out he was there.
Okay, but what did God really do for him? I mean, it was David’s use of his wits combined with a credulous Philistine king that resulted in his escape from the mouth of the lion. David would tell you—and indeed does so in this psalm—that his rescue had God’s fingerprints all over it. God let him come up with the idea in the first place. He made the Philistine king willing to accept his insanity. He kept the Philistine court members from pushing the king any harder to attack David and his men. Yes, you could simply say that all of these things were coincidences, but that says more about the lens you are using to see them than the events themselves. David understands well that God was behind all of these things.
And before you go objecting that David was just praising God for the good things and would certainly be cursing God for the bad things, go read some more of his psalms. He acknowledges God’s activity behind some of the hard things he experienced along with his lack of understanding of the reasons for God’s activity there. Yet he nonetheless persists in his worship of the Lord. Why? Well, here’s one thought: He was worshiping in and with a community. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord even in our hardest moments. Those times when life is at its very hardest—kind of like where David was before coming through this situation and writing this psalm of praise—are often the moments when we are most tempted to lean away from the community and try to seek the Lord on our own. We don’t want to bear the embarrassment of our problems in front of anybody else. We want to demonstrate how able we are to overcome what lies throws at us without having to rely on other people. And yet that is precisely the wrong reaction to have. Those are the moments when we most need to lean into the community, to lean into worshiping together so that we can gain all of the benefits that come from this. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord as a community as it was meant to be experienced.
When we worship together even in our hardest moments, we come away able to not only be blessed by others, but to bless them with our struggles. Look at the next stanza here with me: “Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the person who takes refuge in him!” David is able to invite others—to invite us—into an experience of the Lord’s goodness. How? Because of his own experience with it. He was the one who took refuge in the Lord and experienced the blessing of it. Now, from out of his experience, he is able to invite others to do the same. He is able to say, “You who are his holy ones, fear the Lord, for those who fear him lack nothing.” Why? Because he exercised a proper fear of the Lord and found himself lacking nothing even in a dangerous situation. He was the young lion in v. 10. Young lions are the strongest and most able to provide for themselves. Perhaps you consider yourself a young lion. And yet, “Young lions lack food and go hungry.” They can’t do it all on their own. Thankfully, as David experienced, there is one who is stronger than we are. “Those who seek the Lord will not lack any good thing.”
Now, yes, you can point to examples of people who sought the Lord and still seemed to lack something, maybe a lot of things. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when we come across verses like this that seem to be contradicted by experience. The first thing is that this was David’s sharing about his own experience. Your experience is your experience and no one can take that from you. Sharing about your experience—especially a really good one—with others and inviting them into it is something we very naturally do. What do you think a testimonial ad is all about? Why do you think they include the legally mandated part about not all experiences being equal in really small print at the bottom of the screen? The other thing to keep in mind is that the guys who contributed to the Scriptures didn’t just have this life in mind when they made statements like this. This becomes especially true when we properly adopt the new covenant lens when engaging with them. If this life is all there is, then experiences like David’s may not be broadly shared such that his saying something like this can be rejected. But if we are looking beyond just this life to the next, eternal life that God has promised us in Christ, then promises like this one take on an entirely new and even more hopeful light. If you don’t use the right lens for engaging with the Scriptures, you’re not going to be able to make positive sense out of them. Engaging with community is a great way to help us see what really is and to not be limited by the appearances of our circumstances. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord as a community.
This worshiping together that David is talking about isn’t just something we do with and for one another. This is something we have to actively teach to the next generation. That’s where David goes next: “Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Who is someone who desires life, loving a long life to enjoy what is good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from deceitful speech. Turn away from evil and do what is good; seek peace and pursue it.” He goes on to explain why all of this is: “The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry for help. The face of the Lord is set against those who do what is evil, to remove all memory of them from the earth. The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and rescues them from all their troubles. The Lord is near the brokenhearted; he saves those crushed in spirit. One who is righteous has many adversities, but the Lord rescues him from them all. He protects all his bones; not one of them is broken. Evil brings death to the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be punished. The Lord redeems the life of his servants, and all who take refuge in him will not be punished.”
Now, there’s a lot of content there worth unpacking, and we can do that another time, but let me draw your attention to something that’s fairly easy to miss when we are studying a psalm carefully. Remember the context in which all of this information is being presented. Was this some kind of a logical text that was written for purely didactic purposes? No, it wasn’t. This is a song for worship. This is a song for worship that is teaching true and right things about God and His character in such a way that anyone, but especially a kid, can memorize it. A song like this would have been put to music that was easy to sing. You can imagine children humming along while sitting and playing quietly, their minds recalling the words of this psalm. And when they rehearsed those words, what was happening? They were unintentionally reminding themselves and planting deeply in their hearts and minds what is true and right about God. They were being spiritually formed to understand more fully who God is and what God is like. There’s incredible shaping power here. There’s growing power here. Remember what we said last week about how authentic churches grow people in Jesus? Worship as a community is one of the ways that can happen. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord as a community.
I remember a godly and faithful woman from our previous church family. She was a joyful soul who truly delighted in the Lord, and for whom music had been a real passion for a very long time. She also developed dementia that advanced really quickly after her mom and dad had both passed away within fairly short order. For as long as he could, her husband took care of her mostly by himself at home, and would bring her to church every single Sunday morning. It soon got to where she didn’t really know anybody anymore. But when we sang songs as a congregation, you could look back to where she was sitting, and there she always was with a big smile on her face, singing every word of the hymns we sang on any given morning. Now, why was that? Because long ago, those deep, compelling, true truths about God had been planted into her heart and mind through worship. And now, when she didn’t know much of anything else, she knew those truths and they brought her joy. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord as a community.
Authentic churches worship together. We worship together because God is worthy of our worship. We worship together because He has commanded us to worship. We worship together because He has created us for worship. We worship together because we need the reminder of who God is, especially when life is hard. We worship together because we are teaching the next generation who God is and why He is worthy of their devotion. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord as a community.
What you can do with this, most simply, is to worship. Worship with the body. Don’t miss an opportunity to be here doing this unless you absolutely have to. Prioritize other things in your life after this. When we sing together, sing. Sing and reflect carefully on the words you are singing. Let those true and right ideas about God penetrate deeply into your heart and mind. Sing so that your kids can see and even hear you singing. Teach them that and why they should sing. Lead by example in this. Work to make sure they know the songs, not just so they can sing along, but so they are learning right and true ideas about God. When you are here for our worship service, actively participate. Stay engaged mentally and emotionally and spiritually. Resist the temptation to check out during any part of it. Participate prayerfully as well. Actively seek out the presence and attention of God while you are engaging with Him alongside the rest of the body. Let yourself feel the emotions of the affair. Receive the encouragement and strength that come by no other means. And, when you leave this particular place, remember that worship is a whole life commitment. Understand that everything you do can be an act of worship. That joy can be a constant part of your life’s rhythm. You can be the church in this way everywhere you go. Worshiping together lets us experience the joy of the Lord as a community. Let us commit to this together.