Let the Nations be Glad
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Spencer. I'm one of the pastors here with Mill City Church. We are going to be in Psalm 67 today, which is on page 275 in a blue Bible that is in front of you or beside you. If you don't have a Bible at home, please take that. That is our gift to you.
We want you to be able to have a Bible that you can read at home. We'll be walking through Psalm 67 today. We are in our gift series. Every year around this time, we pause to walk through this gift series because this time every year, collectively as a culture, we kind of lose our minds. We kind of get really materialistic and get obsessed with things. And every year around this time, we want to pause and say, no, for those of us that are called in Christ, we don't become obsessed with things.
God has called us to generosity. And then every year we walk through this to be reminded that we are called as Christians to be generous. And around this time every year, we also do a give project. And we've had different give projects over the years. A few years back, we were able to partner with a church plant in Chattanooga. Last year, we partnered with a church plant locally in Two Notch.
We've helped a women's shelter in the past. This year is a little less tangible because we are partnering with 1040 Hope, which is the organization that Ben and Patricia Johnson, who are members of our church, that you'll hear more from a little bit later. We're partnering with 1040 Hope specifically to help a church plant in Minya, Egypt, that we might cover all of next year's budget. And we're excited about partnering with this to see God bless the nations. And that's where we're going today in our text as we continue this gift series. So, Psalm 67.
You can go ahead and flip there. We'll jump to that in a minute. Have you ever pictured, ever wondered what eternity is going to look like? Have you ever thought about what heaven is going to be like? I feel like we do this a little bit. And sometimes when we do this, we picture heaven filled with some of our favorite hobbies.
Like if you like football, and maybe you're a Gamecock fan, it's like maybe in heaven, maybe in eternity, there's football, maybe there's some Gamecocks that are playing, and they actually win games consistently. Not excellent, just very good, never disappointing you. Maybe you're like me and you love music, but you're not really gifted in that department. And eternity is filled with maybe like, for me, it's like Matt Freeman invites me to come help lead worship, and I pick up a guitar and I start playing, and I can actually play. And I sing. And it sounds like poetic joy coming from my vocal cords, which is not exactly what happens when I sing now.
Maybe it's filled with food. I know that we have some biblical pictures of it being a feast, and I like to think it's kind of like Thanksgiving, except you don't feel terrible after you eat it. We fill it with hobbies. We fill it with pictures of loved ones, grandparents that have gone on, parents that we've lost, friends that we've lost, that we might be reunited with them again. Sometimes we have biblical pictures of what heaven is going to be like. We focus on what worship will be like, that we get to eternally worship the King, that we get to be in the presence of the Lord, that there's going to be a place of no more pain, of no more suffering.
Maybe we extend that picture even further, realizing that heaven is temporary, it is going to come down. There's going to be a new heavens and a new earth, and that Revelation 21 will be fully realized, that we'll be in the presence of God as He rules, and as He reigns for eternity. But we have this, and we do this. We picture what heaven is going to be like. So if you've done this, or if you haven't done this in a while, I want to give you a few moments to picture what eternity is going to be like.
Now, I want you to be honest. Who were the people that were there? What did they look like? Did they look like us? You see, often when I've done this, my picture has been incomplete. Because in my mind, I've welcomed family, and church family, which is a beautiful picture of what eternity gets to be like, and that's awesome.
But what I've failed to realize is that there is extended family, extended church family, every tribe, every tongue, every nation, that doesn't fit into my picture. That oftentimes, when I've sat down for the feast, and when I think through it, I think through the good southern comfort food that's going to be there. But what I've failed to realize is there's going to be plantains, there's going to be all kinds of other foods like curry that I don't picture in the feast in eternity. The music that I like to picture of what eternity is going to be like, it's indie rock music, which is kind of my thing.
Not some of your things, but that's my thing. But what I've failed to realize is there's going to be African drumbeats, there's going to be Indian sitars, it's going to be filled with the nations praising God. And I think that many of us have a muted picture of what eternity is going to be like. And I think that is in part to our incomplete view of mission. That we have a muted picture of eternity, and it's due to our incomplete picture of mission. So today, I want to fill this picture.
I want to fill this picture up and expand our scope for what mission is supposed to be as we walk through Psalm 67. What we're going to see is God's purpose in salvation is to claim all the praises from all the nations. That all people groups, that all nations will be in the presence of God joyously praising who He is for eternity with us. And because of this, as we walk this out of the church family, may we be motivated to see Chechens and Tibetans and Uzbeks and every tribe and every tongue being glad in the presence of God because we join God in the mission to see Him reach every tribe, every tongue, every nation with our focus, with our prayers, with our time, and with our money.
So I'm going to walk through Psalm 67. I'll pray. Then we'll jump in. Verse 1, May God be gracious to us and bless us. May His face shine upon us. Selah.
Selah, as we walk through in our Psalm series, we don't really know what it means. It could be a pause. It's just in the Psalms regularly. That your way may be known on earth, that you're saving power among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God. Let all the peoples praise you.
Let the nations be glad and sing for joy for you. Judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Selah. Let the peoples praise you, O God. Let all the peoples praise you. The earth has yielded its increase.
God, our God, shall bless us. God shall bless us. Let all the ends of the earth fear Him. Let's pray. God, I pray that you would fill this picture up for us, that our picture of mission may be expanded in such a beautiful and joyous way as we look at how your heart and your hope is that all the nations may be glad. God, help us be present this morning and speak to us and go to work on us.
In Jesus' name, Amen. All right, so verse 1 says, May God be gracious to us and bless us and make His face to shine upon us. I love what the psalmist does here. He's getting ready to take this Psalm and show God's heart for the nations, but what he does is he takes a traditional Jewish blessing that was meant only for the Jewish people. This, may God be gracious to us and bless us, make His face shine upon us. This comes from number 6.
It was a priestly blessing for the people of Israel and what he's doing, he's taking a traditional Jewish-only blessing and he's expanding it for the nations. He's getting them to pray bigger, to think bigger. In college, a buddy of mine, we were praying specifically for a fraternity called Pike, which was notorious for having the most, the wildest, really the most just lost people and Matt Freeman, who was voted four years in a row the worst fraternity member, Pike. But we were praying that God would go to work and I remember praying something that I thought was so bold. I said, God, may you, homecoming weekend was coming up and a lot of alumni were coming back and I was thinking, God, may you change Pike so much, may they be turned over for the gospel so that when the alumni come and see it, they'd be disappointed.
They'd be disappointed because it looked nothing like they used to remember. And then my buddy, he one-upped me and he said, God, may you also change the alumni that they would love Jesus and come back and be glad to see the fraternity be changed by the gospel. And when he did that, I was a little bit offended because he just dunked on my prayer. But it just, it reminded me how small our prayers can be, that it needs to be expanded to pray bigger and that's what the psalmist is doing here. He's inviting them to think bigger, that God is going to bless all of the nations and we need that too because I think we're really good at praying for the person across the street but we don't pray for the lost people across the world.
So, comes to verse 2, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. Now there are two really important words in this verse that help us understand what God is doing here. The first one is the word that. That is a big shift here. That is a word of purpose. May God bless Israel so that they may be a blessing to the nations. that they may display God's saving power to the nations because Israel was chosen and raised up to be a nation that would be an ambassador of God's saving power.
That's what you get from Isaiah 49, 6 when it says, but I will make you, Israel, a light to the nations so that all the world may be saved. They were supposed to be an ambassador of God's glory. Ambassadors are supposed to represent the best of where they come from. The best of their nation. We've sent out really good ambassadors. I think of John Huntsman and Nikki Haley who we've sent out to be ambassadors of our country to foreign nations.
But we also have some bad ones and some unofficial really bad ones. I don't know if you know this, but Dennis Rodman is our unofficial ambassador to the People's Republic of North Korea. He hangs out with King Jumun and they talk and watch basketball and laugh and he speaks on behalf of the American people which is kind of scary because Dennis Rodman's crazy. I don't know if you don't know who he is. He won titles with Michael Jordan. Also married himself.
Very crazy person. If you don't know who Dennis Rodman is, go back, Google the 90s. It's more than the Backstreet Boys and Friends. There's a whole lot going on there and Dennis Rodman was a big figure in the 90s and he represents unofficially our country. That's a little scary. He's a poor ambassador for what we stand for and Israel fell into the same trap over and over again.
They were driven away by idols. They did not represent God's glory well. They were chosen that this is what we walk through in Genesis when God raises up Abraham. They were chosen as a people that might reflect the glory of God to the surrounding nations and that's the second big word we need to understand is the word nations. Decades ago there was a movement in theological studies to understand what this word means because generally what it's been understood to mean is bigger nations like the United States like Nicaragua. But as they studied this more as they zoomed in more on this word what it actually came to realize is it's more specific.
It means people groups. People groups. Peoples that are unified by a common language by a common culture. So it's not just God is going after the nation of Indonesia that has 242 million people most of them who are Muslim. He's not going after Indonesia. He's going after the 300 plus people groups that make up the country of Indonesia.
God is specific. Hear this. He's specific in his battle plan. And taking back ground from the kingdom of darkness God is very specific in how he goes to war. In World War II and the Pacific Wars both my grandfathers fought in the Pacific Wars. One of them was a boilermaker on a ship.
The other one was an original member of Navy SEAL Team 6. The dude was bathabony. He'd jump off ships and swim for miles and scout out bombs. But they were both a part of the Pacific Wars and what was cool about the Pacific Wars is we didn't have this general plan that we're just going to fight the Japanese and win it. Then it was really specific.
It went sea by sea we're going to conquer ground. Island by island we're going to take back islands all the way to Tokyo because that's how wars are won. They are won with specificity. And God is taking back ground people group by people group. He is taking back ground from the kingdom of darkness. It is the reason why Ben Johnson who you hear from in a little bit was called over a decade ago to go to Lebanon to go to a foreign place that he might proclaim God's saving power to the Lebanese people.
It is the reason why church planting teams are raised up that they might plant churches in darker places like the region of Chechnya to see Chechnyans experience the glory of God. It's the reason why teams are raised up that they might smuggle Bibles into the hands of Tibetans which is one of the hardest to reach places in the world. It is the reason why translators spend 26 years translating the Bible into people groups into the language of the Alun people in Indonesia that they might actually have a Bible that they can read in their own language. God is taking ground people group by people group and he is very specific in how he is reaching this whole world.
We see God's specific plan and we see it all the way back to how the psalmist is describing this here. He says, that your way may be known on earth your saving power among all nations. Verse 3 Let the peoples praise you, O God. Like, take a minute and soak in that. The psalmist is overwhelming with joy that God's saving power might make the nations be glad. He says, let all the peoples praise you with an exclamation point.
There's so much anticipation to see this gospel advance. Like a kid on Christmas morning who's looking forward to seeing what's going to happen. There's so much anticipation to see God's mission unfold. That was the hope that comes all the way back to Psalm 67. But as we've seen before in the nation of Israel they did not fulfill this hope well.
They were driven by idols. They abandoned God. And that the light that they were in reflecting God's glory started to go away. Light was being snuffed out. Hope was starting to grow very dim until at the darkest point of creation in a town of Bethlehem light entered the world. And then what we see is that Jesus' entire life is the fulfillment of Psalm 67.
That when Jesus was born he had three foreigners three magi who came and visited him declaring that he was the king. And it starts to tip the hand that this blessing is going to expand further. It's the reason why Jesus in his ministry he specifically goes to a Samaritan woman and reveals to her that he is the Messiah that he is God and that the Samaritan people are going to be brought into this faith. It's the reason why when he looks at a Roman centurion the very person who represented the oppression of the Jewish people and points to a Roman centurion and says who has more faith than this man here?
He starts tipping his hand. He takes all of that work to the cross where he dies for all peoples everywhere. And he conquers death at the resurrection. And then after the resurrection before he ascends he tells the disciples and the followers of Jesus go make disciples of all nations of all people groups. and then the Holy Spirit falls upon the church in the book of Acts and then we start to see God's plan unfolding. Then in Acts 8 we see northern Africans the Ethiopian unit get exposed to the gospel.
In Acts 10 we see Romans like Cornelius who get exposed and believe in Jesus. We see Syrians who trust in Jesus in Acts 11. We see Cyprians in Acts 13. We see Greeks in Acts 17. And people group by people group let the nations be glad becomes the refrain of the mission of God. And the psalmist continues in verse 4 it says let the nations be glad and sing for joy for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth.
Selah. Let the peoples praise you oh God let all the peoples praise you. And nations are reached and churches are planted and new people groups are exposed to the gospel and there's a succession of believers and church plants that gets all the way to how we are in this room today. And then over time what starts to happen is that for those of us who have been exposed to the gospel churches denominations and people groups what happens over time is we start to forget that we are called to join our father in this mission to make all the nations be glad. And guys we are missing out. We are missing out on this mission.