Sermon: The Agony and Ecstasy of Faith

Good evening, friends.

Good evening. As Jason said, tonight we begin a new sermon series on the Book of Psalms, and for me personally, this is a great joy and privilege, and I'm absolutely convinced that we should be just thrilled and thankful for the Book of Psalms. I want to start by just sharing two quotes from two giants of church history as they weigh in on how they looked at the Book of Psalms. St. Ambrose of Milan in the 300s AD said, "It is medicine for

our spiritual health. Whoever reads it will find a medicine to cure the wounds by his own particular passions." And then John Calvin in the 1500s said, "I've been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, an anatomy of the soul, for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror." So we have the Psalms as medicine for our wounds, and we have the Psalms as a mirror for our

hearts. For me personally, as the years have gone by, the Psalms have become my very good friends, and some of the Psalms my best friends. Places that I can run to quickly when I need to talk to God, when I need to lament or praise him. And it's so beautiful that God not only invites me, he gives me words to do that, words which are always appropriate. I love to use the Psalms in counseling. It is a great joy when I'm talking with someone and they're experiencing great

suffering and pain, and maybe we find a short section of a Psalm, and they say, "That is exactly how I feel. I can pray that." And I love to say this to them: "The Lord loved you so much that 3,000 years ago, he inspired David or whomever to write those words because he knew that you would need them today." So thankful for the Psalms. Our series tonight begins with Psalm 73. I confess when I first heard that, "Pat, you're opening up a new series on the

Psalms, and we're starting with Psalm 73," I thought, "That sounds a little random." But then I was reminded, and Jason mentioned this, that Psalm 73 is the first psalm in the third book of Psalms. Now, you may not be familiar with the fact that there are five books in the Book of Psalms. They were written over approximately 500 years from about 1000 BC with David, who is often attributed as the psalm writer. And they were collected for about 500 years, ending probably after the Babylonian

exile. They were collected in collections, probably somewhat chronologically, and added to through the years, and ultimately written down in five books. We are starting in Psalm 73. I believe there's something like 17 psalms, so we'll be able to go through this book together. So tonight, we begin book three with Psalm 73, and I'm going to pray once again, and I invite you to take out your Bible and turn to Psalm 73. But as we do that, let me pray for God's blessing on our time tonight.

Lord, tonight we come to your holy word. This word is your very power to save to the uttermost each person who comes to Christ. It's a lamp unto our feet to show us the way to walk all the way through whatever valleys, home to your house. This word is spirit and life. It's new life. It's new creation life. It's eternal life. So, Father, we pray that you would give us ears to hear tonight, hearts to treasure this word, and the will to trust and obey, and we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. So if you'll turn to Psalm 73, I'm going to read the psalm, and then I'll tell you how we're going to walk through this together. Book three, "God is my refuge and portion forever. A Psalm of Asaph. Truly, God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs until death.

Their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are. They are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore pride is their necklace. Violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out through fatness. Their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice. Loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. Therefore his people turn back to them and find no fault in them.

And they say, 'How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?' Behold, these are the wicked, always at ease; they increase in riches. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I've been stricken and rebuked every morning. If I had said, 'I will speak thus,' I would have betrayed the generation of your children. But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome

task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. Truly you set them in slippery places. You make them fall to ruin. How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors. Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms. When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant. I was like a beast toward you. Nevertheless,

I am continually with you. You hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there's 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 an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you. But for me, it is good to be near God.

I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works."

Before we work through the psalm, I want you to just keep your Bibles open to the end of the psalm. I want to tell you where we're going. Here's where I would like us to end up after having gone through the psalm. The very last verse is a realistic but radiantly hopeful verse. And my prayer is at the end of this sermon, we will be able together as a congregation to say these words together. "But for me, it is good to be near God.

I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works." So that's where we're headed. We're going to get there in five points. Psalm 73 is a wisdom psalm meant to instruct us in godly living. And in this case, how do we maintain our faith in God when faced with the distressing mystery of the prosperity of the wicked? And how do we overcome the agonizing temptation to envy them and walk away from God? And so the first point here is I'm calling this psalm the agony

and the ecstasy of faith. And my first point is the agony announced. It's in verses one through three. "For truly God is good. God is good to Israel. God is good to the pure in heart. This is Asaph's prior conviction. This is what he is taught, what he's learned probably from his childhood. He believes deep down that God is good to the pure in heart. But then he says, "As for me, I was envious. My feet had almost stumbled." I almost slipped away from God.

So you notice right away the Psalm introduces two themes that are kind of in dissonance. God is good, but I was envious. Notice the dissonance. Notice the struggle he has to maintain his conviction that God is good to the pure in heart when he looks around at the world and he sees the wicked prospering and the righteous suffering. But as for me, I was envious. So verses one through three set out the thesis. God is good. I was envious.

There's a struggle here. The rest of the Psalm will flesh out this dissonance, flesh out the agony of faith, and then lead us to a surprising and beautiful resolution to the problem. So that's point number one, the agony announced. Point number two, this is in verses four through 12. The prosperity of the wicked is a distressing mystery. This whole Psalm, an underlying theme is the prosperity of the wicked, and it's a

distressing mystery because the prosperity of the wicked contradicts what God said in the Torah. In Deuteronomy 28, verses one and two, God said, "If you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above the nations, and all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you if you obey the voice of the Lord." God is good to the pure in heart.

In verse 15 of Deuteronomy 28, he says, "But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do his commandments, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you." That's his fundamental belief about God, about life, about justice, about how things are supposed to work. But far from seeing the wicked cursed, he sees them enjoying, in capital letters, the good life. They are experiencing what looks like

the blessing of God. Now, I'm going to paraphrase how Asaph tells us, what he tells us about the wicked and how they're prospering. First of all, he says they don't have any afflictions or cares that they can't handle. Maybe they handle them by good life skills, willpower, and a fat bank account. It's not that they never have speed bumps, but they can handle them. No overwhelming afflictions or cares. They enjoy robust good health. Unlike me, they only have

one doctor's appointment all year. It's their yearly checkup, and they always get a beautiful, clean bill of health. They're not afraid to die. They're not troubled or burdened with guilt or shame. They sleep well at night. These are the famous elite celebrities of the ancient world, and they love to credit themselves. They're famously successful in everything they do. They love to take credit for their success. As one person says, they dream big dreams and they know how to take positive steps

to achieve them, and it works. Conversely, they look down on others with contempt. They aren't afraid to step on them. They're not afraid to manipulate or oppress them or even kill them if it will further their triumphant march through life. They are practical atheists. They ignore God. They defy him. They even mock him. They say, "Is there knowledge in God? How can God know?" They dare God to prove his existence and knowledge and

judgment. And then Asaph summarizes the wicked this way. "Behold, these are the wicked. Always at ease, they increase their riches." And again, this contradicts and threatens to destroy the foundation that he's built his life on. And if we take time to apply this to ourselves, like Asaph, the contradiction that we experience sometimes between what God promises in his word and what we often experience in our lives, it tempts us to call into question all our fundamental

beliefs about God and about justice, and this is distressing. So that's the second point. The prosperity of the wicked is a distressing mystery. Hard to figure out, hard to get your head around. The third point is in verses 13 through 16 and then verses 21, 22, and the third point is that the prosperity of the wicked brings agonizing temptations. Not just a distressing mystery, but agonizing temptations. Now, the main temptation that Asaph is facing is the temptation to doubt

God, to turn away from him, and even to encourage others to doubt him by what he says. But let's break that down for a minute into maybe four different temptations that he's facing. The first temptation that Asaph is facing and that we face is what I would call shortsighted entitlement. Because of our sinful nature, we tend to see certain things very clearly. We miss a whole bunch of other things, and we misinterpret the whole thing.

Specifically, we are often blind to the holiness of God, and therefore, we're blind to our own sinfulness. We believe that we are the righteous who deserve blessings from God. We are the pure in heart, and so this really rubs against us. Judy and I have been watching a lot of tennis lately because the US Open is on, and we enjoy that. And as we watch these tennis matches, Judy laughs at me because I not infrequently point out, "Oh, unforced

error. Unforced error." That means a really good tennis player hit a bad shot, and that's what we think we are. Morally and spiritually, we're really good tennis players, and occasionally we hit a bad shot. That is not the case at all. We are blind to our own sinfulness. We're blind to a dynamic that transpires in our heart that has six parts, and I'm going to just list them to you, and then we're going to go through it with a little

example. We desire certain things, but that morphs into I need them. That morphs into I have a right to this. That morphs into a demand, which morphs into a complaint and ends with some kind of punishment. These are things that have helped me as a biblical counselor to help people think through what's going on in their hearts and lives. So let's use an example. Let's say a husband desires respect from his wife. Now, that's a perfectly good thing.

Most of our troubles come not from desiring bad things, although that's certainly possible. Most of our troubles come from desiring good things too much. So let's say a husband has an over desire for respect, and his ears are perked up, and he's super sensitive to every tone of voice and every expression. He desires respect from his wife, but it doesn't stay a desire. Our culture is obsessed with needs. There's whole psychologies built on that.

And he might say to himself, I remember back in the '90s, there was a book on marriage called "Love and Respect," and the title said that wives need love and husbands need respect. And so he reasons, this isn't just something I desire. A very good Christian writer has told me this is a need But even that doesn't stay. It becomes a right. It becomes something I'm entitled to, and that's not hard to back up because scripture says, "Wives, respect your husband." So he's

just using the Bible. You need to respect me. It often morphs then into a demand, and it might sound something like, "Don't you dare use that tone of voice with me." It becomes a demand, and then it becomes a complaint. "You're just like your mother. You don't know the first thing about respect." And then often it morphs into some kind of punishment. It might be some kind of verbal abuse, or it might be just a passive-aggressive, he just shuts her out for a week.

So desires morph into needs, into rights, into demands, into complaints, and into punishments. The fact is, brothers and sisters, and Jason just led us in prayer, and every Sunday morning we have a prayer of confession because often we are not the pure in heart. We're an impure mixture at best, and this morphing dynamic hidden in the heart is a well-worn path to all kinds of sins. The second agonizing temptation that Asaph is facing is

worldliness. He's become really obsessed with temporal, worldly pleasures. We're tempted to measure God's goodness and our own happiness by how many earthly temporary goodies He gives us. We're tempted to believe a Christian myth, which is we can have heaven now. Of course, we want Christ, and of course, we want to go to the real heaven, but we think that we can have a really pretty comfortable good life now. We want some heaven now. Christopher Ash, who's a commentator on the Psalms,

writes this: "Beware the temptation to move from faith to sight, from spiritual and eternal to worldly and transient." So one temptation as we look around is we're often-- We want things, and we don't like that other people have them, and that leads to the third temptation, bitter envy. We feel cheated sometimes when we look around. Not just at unbelievers. Sometimes we look around at each other and we think, "They've got it pretty good." Jason mentioned this this morning.

We can just project on them. They're doing great and I'm doing lousy, and I feel cheated, and we feel sorry for ourselves, and instead of fighting that self-pity, we hug it. We hold on for dear life, and we kindle a slow-burning resentment for others because they have what we have, and a resentment towards God because of the sheer injustice of it all. Envy flows from a deadly combination of two things. One is self-righteousness and the other is comparisons.

Self-righteousness says, "I'm basically a good person. I work hard at obeying God." Asaph said, "I keep my heart clean and I wash my hands in innocence." I'm trying really hard. And then this underlying attitude of self-righteousness looks around and compares. And I confess to you that comparing is one of my besetting sins. I'm always conscious of who I'm with. Could be in church, could be at a staff meeting, and I'm always kind of scoping

it out. How do I measure up to these people? In every domain of life, marriage, family, spirituality, ministry. I realize I have strong biblical convictions, but I have other convictions that aren't biblical that compete with them. So for instance, I am and have been for 50 years a convinced Protestant, and I believe and I am a champion for the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

I did my master's thesis on it. I love it. I teach it. It's a part of my counseling training. I'm justified by grace through faith. But I realized in recent years, it's not that it just started happening in recent years, I was just able to articulate it, that I have a competing belief, and that is I am justified, I'm okay, I'm enough by favorable comparison with others. I don't always have to be the best, but I got to be in the mix, and that is a

deadly lie. That is not how I'm justified. That dishonors Christ. It robs me of joy, and it will shortchange you of my love. The fourth temptation is apostasy and betrayal. Asaph said, "If I had said, 'I will speak thus,'" in other words, if I were to speak publicly all this complaint, I would have betrayed the generation of your people. Asaph realizes he has a dangerous opportunity, a dangerous power to lead others astray by simply voicing all his doubts and complaints.

Now, it's not wrong to wrestle with those things and see a pastor or an elder, a counselor, but what we're talking about here is just sort of publicizing them. It's one thing to personally wrestle with faith or even to temporarily or maybe even permanently lose your faith, but it's a completely other thing to open your mouth and destroy others' faith as well. A commentator on the Psalms, W.S. Plumer, said, "We do great wrong to believers,

especially weak ones, when we speak our foolish thoughts and doubts and complaints. Instead, we should take them to God." Asaph is not alone in this temptation. There have been others throughout church history, and we can all point to people we know of in our own generation who once seemed to believe and teach the truth, but eventually they apparently lost faith and then started speaking publicly about this and writing books, and they influence

a whole generation of people, and then those people influence another generation. Pretty soon, unbelief is trickling down the generations. Jesus warns us sternly against influencing others, especially the young and the vulnerable, to believe or do anything against the truth. So we need to pray for the Lord to protect our hearts so that we can protect the truth. The fourth main point, and here's where things turn from negative to positive. We're working toward the resolution of the

distressing mystery and the agonizing temptation. In verses 18 through 20 and verse 27, the mystery, again, the mystery of the prosperity of the wicked, is resolved in the light of eternity. Let's state the mystery one more time. God is a holy God who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, but that's not often or sometimes anyway, it is not the way the world seems to be working. Asaph says this about the wicked: "They set their mouths against the heavens, and

their tongue struts through the earth. And they say, 'How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?'" The righteous. "All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning." There's the mystery and the agony. In other words, Asaph's saying, "What is going on here? This isn't the way it's supposed to be. What good is it, Lord, if I try hard to obey you and this is how my life turns

out?" That's the temptation. There's a story of an ancient saint, a woman way back in church history. She was traveling in a carriage. Her carriage broke down. She was thrown from the carriage and fell into the mud. Now, she must have felt very comfortable with God because this is what she said: "If this is the way you treat your friends, it's no wonder you have so few."

But praise God, this is not where He leaves us. It's not where He leaves Asaph in this psalm. It's not where He left that woman or us. Even if we feel like we've wandered away into doubt and bitterness, there is light to illuminate, to resolve, and there is hope. There is hope. And here's how Asaph said it I went into the sanctuary, then I discerned their end. And here Asaph is making a main point in this Psalm, and it's a main

point that we need to remember. Life makes no sense, and we will not persevere in faith unless we see things in the light of eternity. He says, "When I went into the sanctuary of God, then I discerned the end of the wicked." And what did he see? They're in slippery places. They're about to fall to ruin. They're destroyed in a moment. They're swept away by terrors, despised as phantoms. The mystery of the seeming injustice and

contradiction that we seem to face and experience resolves when we see the end of the story. I'm going to tell you something embarrassing about myself. I love Victorian murder mysteries. That's not the embarrassing part. I love them and I read them all the time. I reread them because my memory is really bad, and so I can keep rereading it over and over again. Woo-hoo. I love the stories. I love Victorian England. I have a couple favorite writers.

I love the way they write. But sometimes, I just start getting tired of it, and so I actually just stop reading it, and then I say, "Well, I'll read another one." Now, when my wife hears that, she will look at me and say, "I knew it. You are the village idiot." "You don't even know who done it. Why would you stop reading the book before the end? You don't know what happened." But brothers and sisters, that's the way we

read the Bible sometimes. We forget the end, and that's what happened to Asaph. He forgot eternity. So what does the Bible say about reading to the end of the story? What does the Bible say about looking to eternity? Here's what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4. He's just laid out all his apostolic labors and sufferings, and at the end of chapter 4 he says, "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away," maybe talking about just aging, "our inner self is being

renewed day by day. For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen," all the chapters up to the last chapter, "but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient," they're passing away, "but the things that are unseen are eternal." Paul looked beyond the struggles and the agonies of his own life and the church. He looked at the unseen things.

He looked at an unseen weight of glory that will far outweigh all suffering. He was greatly encouraged to persevere. That's why he says, "We don't lose heart." And he wouldn't say that if there wasn't a temptation to lose heart. And then he wanted to pass that encouragement on to us. So here's another point. In order to live faithfully in this life, we have to think often about the next life. And Pastor Jason, sometime in the

past last few years, talked about Richard Baxter, an English pastor, and an example of doing this, of looking to eternity. It's written about him that during a severe illness in 1646, Baxter was confined away from home, and as he wrote, quote, "He began to contemplate more seriously on the everlasting rest, which I apprehended myself to be just on the border." So he's very sick. He's away from home. He takes that opportunity to look to eternity.

He says, "I'm just up to the border." To keep his thoughts focused, he recorded his reflections to review later. After recovering, he continued this practice for the rest of his life, about a half hour each day, often while walking, before dinner, focusing on the joys and realities of heaven. The mystery resolves and the agony begins to be reversed when we keep eternity in view. So where do we find this light of eternity?

How do we know the end of the story? Asaph said, "I went into the sanctuary of God." So what is that? Well, the sanctuary of God is simply the presence of God, coming into His grace, His truth, and His perfect perspective. And we know that we have opportunities to do that every day and every week. Every time you open your Bible, you're coming into the sanctuary. You're coming into the presence of God. And you have the whole story, the whole narrative from Genesis to Revelation.

You know how it started. You know where we are now. You know that Christ has come, and you know how it ends. So daily time in the Word and prayer, it's just such a staple, but it keeps us in light of eternity. And secondly, we come into the sanctuary when we come into the sanctuary, like we are right now. We're with brothers and sisters. We're singing praise to God. We're also encouraging one another as we hear each other singing. We have time for fellowship.

We pray together, and we are treated to exposition of the Word of God. So the mystery is resolved when we come into the sanctuary and remember eternity. Final point, verses 23 through 26 and 28. The agony of the suffering of temptation in the midst of all this is not just resolved, it's actually reversed in the joy of God's presence. Here we have it. In verse 23, one of the most significant words in the whole Bible, nevertheless.

Nevertheless, what a great word. I once read a whole book years ago that was called "Nevertheless." "All in vain," Asaph said, "have I kept my heart clean. For all the day long I've been stricken and rebuked every morning. I was brutish and ignorant. I was like a beast with you. Nevertheless." Nevertheless, in spite of the seeming injustice that he sees all around, in spite of the distressing mystery of how to understand this, in spite of the

agonizing temptations to doubt and walk away from God, Asaph said, "God is offering me something so amazing, so breathtaking, that all the distress is swallowed up in joy." What did God offer Asaph? He says,

"Nevertheless, I am continually with you. You hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory." What is God offering Asaph and you and me? He's offering the most intimate, personal relationship with the most beautiful, glorious person in the universe. He's offering us continual security. He's got us by the right hand. He's offering us personal guidance. He guides us with His counsel. And Asaph says, "And you will receive me

into heaven." What does that mean? It means we have the assurance not just of being let into heaven. We have the assurance that we will be welcomed into the infinite goodness and greatness and beauty and love of God in Christ. And Asaph, when he comes into the sanctuary, he sees the end of the wicked, and he realizes who God is and what He's offering him right now and in the future, Asaph responds with what I consider the most beautiful expression of saving faith in the

whole Bible. He says, "Whom have I in heaven but you? As he looks forward to glory, as we look forward to glory, it's not pearly gates and golden streets. It's not even seeing our loved ones or being able to talk to St. Augustine or Peter. Those will be wonderful. They'll all be real. But the thing that makes heaven heaven is Jesus, and Asaph says, "That's all I'm looking forward to. I want to see you, Lord." Like David, "I want to gaze upon your beauty." And then

he says this, and this is even more amazing, "And there's nothing on earth I desire beside you." Who would say something like that today? Nothing I desire besides Jesus. Tim Keller says we have a number of very loud desires, and those come and go, but if you're a believer, you have a deep underground desire that just keeps flowing in the same direction. Underneath everything, Jesus is better than anything life can give you. In fact, if there's anything you enjoy, it's

Christ that is the most enjoyable thing about that. Then he says, "My flesh and my heart may fail." Literally, it just says, "My flesh and my heart fail." There's times when all of us are just weeping on the kitchen floor. We've just had it. We just don't feel like we can do it. Our flesh and our heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. What Asaph is saying is you can have the whole world.

Give me Jesus.

God offers us himself, his counsel, his security. He offers us glory in heaven, and when that strikes us in the gospel, that's what we're looking forward to. And even tomorrow, what I want more than anything else tomorrow is to walk with Jesus. This is what Jesus died for. He didn't die to make you and me nice people or even good people. He died to make us lovers. He died to capture your heart in wondrous love and assure you that what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what has not even

entered into the heart of man to imagine, that what God has prepared for those who love him is yours. That's what he died for. If you were whisked away to heaven for 30 seconds, two things would be true. Number one, you would fall down on your knees before the Lord with tears streaming down your face, begging not to come back here, and two, if you did come back, you would be completely unable to express what you saw and experienced.

Jesus died to capture our hearts, to make us people who say, "Whom have I in heaven but you? And on earth, there's nothing I desire besides you." And all of this glorious nevertheless is because of Jesus. It's all because of the gospel. Because Jesus left the comfort and the glory and the beauty and the adoration of heaven, because he came and was born a little baby, because he became human and entered into all the brokenness of this world, because

he lived an impeccably sinless life and suffered his whole life, and especially at the end, began to take into his own body all our sins and all the wrath of God and all the curse of God, and then three days later, defeated, destroyed Satan and death and hell, because he was ascended to heaven and conquered all our enemies, because he is seated at the right hand right now, sovereignly ruling, compassionately interceding, and planning to come back to get us, we are assured

of everlasting and ever-increasing happiness. Again, Christopher Ash says this about Jesus. "We watch a man dragged back from the brink of an abyss," that's Asaph, "because another man who plunged into that abyss for him." Jesus lived, Jesus died, and Jesus rose for your nevertheless. So as we close,

again, Jason said this this morning, everybody suffers. Everybody in this room has something you wish was different. Again, vastly different degrees. But whatever is most perplexing, whatever is most difficult and painful, whatever feels the most tempting to you, in the midst of that, whatever it is, maybe it's something in your family, relationships, work or ministry, your health, your spiritual questions. In the midst of that, I want us to close by thinking about

considering our loving Savior, Jesus Christ. Think of him who by his gracious coming has dragged you and me back from the abyss of sin and death and hell by plunging into that abyss for us. Think about Jesus, who is himself the ultimate answer to every distressing mystery and is himself the final reversal of every agonizing temptation into joy. And as you think about Jesus, can you say with Asaph, whatever your life is like right now,

"But for me, it's good to be near God. I've made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works." But for me, even in the midst of confusion and pain and temptation, it is good to be near God through the sacrificial death and indestructible life of Christ. I have made the Lord God my refuge that I may tell of all your works. Let's say that together. It's verse 28.

"But for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works." Let's say it one more time. "But for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works." If you're able to say that and mean it, then Jesus has accomplished all that he came to do for you when he died for you. He is glorified tonight, even in your faltering love and trembling

trust. And if you can say those words, and if you can say, "Whom have I in heaven but you, and there's nothing on earth I desire besides you," in the deepest and most ultimate sense, you are free. Jesus would say to you, "Your faith has saved you. You can go in peace." If you aren't able to say that tonight, maybe you just say, "I don't have that faith yet," or "Things are just burying me," then what I would encourage you to do is read this psalm, Psalm 73, every day this

week, and pray, even plead with God, to open your eyes and show you the reality and the power of the great nevertheless. Let's pray.

Lord, for us, it is good to be near you. It is good to be your beloved children in Christ, and we say together, you can have the whole world, but give me Jesus. We pray it in his precious name. Amen.