When the Curse Comes Close

1:52 we had a bad clog in our main drain. Now, if you've been at City's Church for a while, you might be thinking, man, another seagull flooding story. Seriously, just get rid of this house already.

2:14 I looked this up and we've now had enough water inside of our home that I think we officially qualify as an aquarium. Our main drain backed up, which is actually kind of normal for our street. A lot of our neighbors, we deal with tree roots in our drain lines that have to be cleared out once a year. Maybe some of you have this problem. We've done that for years now. We've owned our home for eight years. But this year was different. In the spring, we noticed that the line was backing up again, And so we had our guy come out again, and he cleared the drain, just like he had many times before. But then just three months later this time, the laundry room flooded again.

3:02 Really? Three months? It's frustrating. So we decide, okay, time to bring out a different guy. and this guy had a camera that he could run through the drain to show us if it had been cleared or not so this time after he's done we see that the drain is actually clear wonderful but then a couple hours later we run on we run the washer and within a few minutes there's water in the laundry room again so we bring the camera guy back out and he runs the camera through the drain shows us that it is clear but we see at that point that the floor drain in our laundry room is badly clogged so he goes to work on that one and as he's wrapping up we run the washer again to see and in that process we discern that the sink drain is also clogged and needs to be cleared So if you're counting, we had not one, not two, but three simultaneous clogs in our basement.

4:14 And as I studied Psalm 108 this week and did a couple of loads of laundry, all those clogs, they came back to my mind again because I think they're a picture of verse 12. Oh, grant us help against the foe, oh God, for vain is the salvation of man. The salvation of man, it's like a horrible triple clog flooding the house over and over and over again. Once you've cleared one drain, you just discover another clog. If we trust in man, if we trust in ourselves to deliver us, to heal us, to satisfy us, we're just asking for more dirty water.

5:06 but our hope, our hope this morning, it's not in man. It's not. No, our hope is in God and in his steadfast love, and that's what Psalm 108 is all about. It's a Psalm of David here in a series of Psalms here late in the book of Psalms by David, and David is feeling the pain of the curse. The world isn't how it should be, and the curse is coming close again for him, and so David's battling enemies at the gate and he's pleading again with God for relief for deliverance for victory like he's prayed so many more times we've seen this in the psalms over years now and as he pleads here in Psalm 108 he takes five big steps and those five steps are my sermon this morning when the curse comes close step one we groan we don't know what situation what particular situation caused david to write the psalm but we know that he was struggling to see where god was and what god was doing at this moment the psalm opens with this this loud praise and confidence we're gonna come back here in a minute he says i will sing and make melody with all my being Mm-hmm.

6:24 but the psalm doesn't end there, and it doesn't stay there. In fact, it kind of feels like there's two psalms here, and we'll talk about why in a minute. By the time we get to verses 10 and 11, he says, who will bring me to the fortified city? Who's going to lead me up against my enemy, Edom have you not rejected us oh God you do not go out oh God with our enemies he's saying God we're going out against our enemies and it feels like you've rejected us it feels like you've tossed us out to the wolves and then you just walked away where are you why aren't you helping us Let's do this. and before we go farther in the psalm we know this feeling right maybe it's a persistent conflict somewhere in your family or there's some frustrating dynamics at work that just linger months over months over months and make it so hard or it's a friend who keeps disappointing you even after lots of hard conversations There's more and more pain.

7:49 Or it's piles and piles of doctor's visits and the problem still won't go away. God, where are you? God, you promised a peace that surpasses all understanding. But I'm not feeling peace right now. God, you promised healing. And I'm not experiencing healing yet.

8:17 God, you promised victory over this sin, but I'm not winning yet. No, I'm feeling anxious, attacked, tired, and honestly defeated. This is our home for now because of sin. we all taste the bitterness of the curse all the time with all five senses. Some of you tasted it this morning just to get here, to get to church this morning. How much of life while we wait here on earth, how much of life feels a little like we're somewhere between clogs two and three. God, why is there so much water? You know what I have to do today. You know that I'm just trying to serve you and honor you and glorify you. Just clear the pipes already.

9:17 I thought you loved me. I thought you knew what I needed before I even asked. Why am I still dealing with conflict and temptation, with sickness and with weakness?

9:37 That's not the world that you promised me when I chose to follow you. David's groaning here and he's not wrong to groan. This world, it's not what it should be, not what it will be. It's the purpose of the curse. God wants us to feel how wicked and destructive sin is. Do you feel that right now?

10:03 Where are you feeling the crippling consequences of sin around you? where do you feel like God has rejected your prayers and that he's pulled back his support from you we should grow David's feelings here are legitimate and they're important and it's good for him it's good for us to express that groaning to God but those feelings they're not the complete picture David knows that and that leads us to the second step when we experience the curse along our way to glory, we groan, and we're not wrong to groan, but we don't only groan. No, we groan, and second, we praise. Even under the curse and all the consequences of the curse, we praise God.

11:04 You see this, David could praise God even while he felt abandoned by God. he could praise God because he knows reality is so much more than what he feels so much more than what he can see from his limited human perspective this is where the psalm begins verses one through four he sings my heart is steadfast oh God I will sing and make melody with all my being Awake, O harp and lyre, I will awake the dawn. I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples. I will sing praises to you among the nations. For your steadfast love is great above the heavens. Your faithfulness, it reaches to the clouds.

11:56 But Saul feels in the moment like God is not loving, that he's not faithful. But David knows better than that. He knows that God's steadfast love has not come to an end and that his mercy is still new again this morning. Even in disappointment, even in defeat, his God is not any less God in the valley. And so he says, your steadfast love is great above the heavens. your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. He's saying, I can only see so much down here on earth, God. I can't see everything. I can only see so much. And it looks pretty dark and pretty bleak where I am. But your steadfast love, it stands high above what I can see.

12:56 your faithfulness it reaches as far as i can imagine and then even farther still than that reality he knows reality is far bigger than my feelings it's galaxies bigger than my feelings i think that's why he's reaching for heavens and clouds i experienced this on a flight recently with our family it was overcast cloudy rainy that day. It was dark when we took off and as we started to climb. But pretty soon, what happened? You know this if you've flown before.

13:37 Pretty soon, we broke through the clouds. And you've seen this. As you looked out the window, I saw the sun bright and strong, shining in full strength. Blue sky as far as I could see. It was a whole different world up there. But it wasn't. It wasn't. No, it was the same world above the clouds as it was below the clouds. We just can't see above the clouds all the time. But if we could just climb high enough, it's all sun. it's all sun and that's how it is with God's love for you it may be pretty miserable for the moment down here down here beneath the clouds and what you can see it may be pretty miserable but just above all the clouds that you can see it's all sun his steadfast love it stands great above the heavens His faithfulness reaches to and through the clouds.

14:58 Don't measure his love or his faithfulness with your eyes, with your trials. I've got to tell you the truth is you can't see very much from where you're sitting. David praises what he knows about God, even when he can't see his faithful, loving hand. And in this particular case, this moment of groaning for David, David reached back for praise from another season of his life. He borrowed from two earlier Psalms. You see that Psalm 108 is a combination of a section from Psalm 57 and from Psalm 60. There's not actually anything new in this psalm. If you've been with us for a number of summers, you would have heard sermons on Psalm 57 and Psalm 60.

15:53 And everything in Psalm 108 is borrowed from one of those two psalms. Verses 1 through 5 are from Psalm 57. Where David praises God after God delivered David from the cave with Saul. This is Saul. This is 1 Samuel 24. If you remember, David's running from Saul. Saul's hunting him and trying to kill him. David hides with his men in this cave. And Saul actually goes into the cave where David is hiding. But it's so dark that he can't see him. It's so dark that David's able to sneak up close to Saul, cut off a corner of his robe. And so when Saul leaves the cave, David comes out and he shows him and says, look, I could have killed you. But I didn't. He's proving his loyalty to the king. God delivered David that day from great danger. He showed his steadfast love and his faithfulness to David.

16:50 And now with this new trouble here in Psalm 108, David reached back for the song that he wrote outside of the cave. I need that song again today. And then the second half of Psalm 108, verses 6 through 13, they're from Psalm 60, where David expresses some distress and battle against Edom. But this time, by the end of the psalm, with God's help, he leads God's people to victory over the enemy. They wipe out 12,000 soldiers in battle that day. With God's help, they did valiantly. They prevailed.

17:32 And so David reaches back for the old praise, for these memories of when God came through for him, when he demonstrated his love and faithfulness. And as David reaches back for old praise in these new trials, he teaches us to do that. City's Church, I want you to know these psalms well enough that you have them when you need them. and when God answers your prayers the psalm encourages us when God answers your prayers praise him write it down memorialize it in some way write a psalm we talked about that in psalm 98 praise him with a new psalm write a new psalm of praise to him for what he's done for you so that in the future when your prayers go unanswered for weeks or months or years and you're tempted to think that God has rejected you, you have a song to sing. He's given us so many songs to sing. So we groan feeling the awful weight of sin and all of its consequences and we praise God, remembering that God's love and his faithfulness are so much bigger than all that we feel and fear. David teaches us here third to ask. We ask God to end the curse and to make good on all of his promises to us. Notice here, David doesn't remember God's promise. We're going to get to it in a minute, but David doesn't remember God's promise and stop asking. He doesn't say God promised to conquer all of our enemies and so I don't need to pray because God said he was going to do it, therefore he's going to do it.

19:24 No, David remembered the promise. He hears the promise. He remembers the promise and it emboldens him to ask even harder. God, you promised to deliver us, so deliver us. Deliver us, God. We need your help. God means for now to make work, to make war on the curse through our asking. He means to make war on the curse through our asking. One day he's going to wipe out the curse, going to wipe out all of his enemies everywhere. But for now, he chooses to defeat the curse one prayer at a time. here's how David asks in Psalm 108, verses five and six, be exalted, O God, above the heavens.

20:31 Let your glory be over all the earth that your beloved ones may be delivered. Give salvation by your right hand and answer me. Deliver us, God. Give salvation by your right hand and answer me. do what I'm asking you to do do what you've promised to do that's the first prayer and I have prayers like this in our life prayers that just won't give why won't you answer me God I wonder what that prayer is for you right now one great reason I believe that God makes us wait in prayer is because he wants us to keep praying.

21:29 why would God make me wait so long for this answer? It's because he knows that some of us might stop praying if he gave us what we wanted. and it's far more important to him, and it should be far more important to us that we stay on our knees in faith, in dependence on him, than that we have some temporary relief or comfort in this life. God loves you too much to let you feel like you don't need him. deliver me it's not the only prayer though here in Psalm 108 it's not the highest prayer no the highest prayer comes in the verse before verse 5 be exalted oh God above the heavens let your glory be over all the earth praying saints like King David and like some of you that I know praying saints can keep praying these same difficult prayers. God, why have you rejected us? Why won't you go out with us? They can keep praying those same prayers over weeks or months or years because they want something more than they want relief or healing or deliverance. They want God to be glorified. That's what they want most. They want his truth and beauty and worth. They want it to be seen and enjoyed over all the earth. And they want God to do whatever he has to do to do that.

23:13 Do you pray like that? God, I'm asking for deliverance. I'm asking for your help in this battle. But what I want more, even more than that, what I want is for your glory to run. I want people to see you. I want your name to be exalted. Do whatever you have to do to exalt your name in my life. And scripture is clear that if we pray like that, if that's really what we want, it might mean that we have to suffer for a little while.

23:43 It might mean that we have to suffer in some way for the rest of our life. That's the apostle Paul's thorn, right? 2 Corinthians 12, Paul says that he prayed, Lord, take it away. Take it away. Please, take it away. and God doesn't take it away.

24:14 Not because he's rejected Paul or because he's abandoned his faithfulness. No, he leaves the thorn for now because God is more concerned with his glory running out into the world through us than he is with providing us some short-term comfort now. God is doing something wonderfully, eternally glorious through all of our trials. We just can't see it yet. But we can ask. And God wants us to keep asking. Just like David does here. When we feel the curse come close, we groan, we praise, we ask, and fourth, we trust. We hold on hard to what God has promised to do for those who love him.

25:14 Listen to David cling on to a promise here in verses 7 and 8. He says, God has promised in his holiness, and God never lies. God has promised in his holiness with exultation, I will divide up Shechem and portion out the valley of Sukkoth. Gilead is mine. Manasseh is mine. Ephraim is my helmet. Judah, my scepter. Shechem, Sukkoth, Gilead, Manasseh, Ephraim, Judah. These are all places within the promised land, the land that God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and to all of Israel after them. And by this point in Psalm 108, Israel's living in the land, the land that's been promised to them. But this land, it's still under nearly constant attack.

26:11 And so David's saying, God, you said Gilead, Manasseh, Ephraim, Judah, those are yours, and you promised them to us. so why does the land feel so fragile why do the enemies seem so powerful and yet even though the land feels fragile and the enemies seem powerful David still clings to the promise he says God you said it and I'm gonna trust you you said it so that no matter what I see and feel and experience, I'm going to trust that you're going to do everything you said. You do not lie. You promised in your holiness that you were going to conquer all of our foes. And God didn't promise only the 8,000 square miles of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, that's Israel. No, he promised to take every land captive for his glory.

27:23 That's what the next verse is about. Verse 7, God goes on, Moab is my wash basin. Upon Edom, I cast my shoe. Over Philistia, I shout in triumph. So now we're outside of Israel. These are Israel's surrounding enemies. And God says to David, Oh, they belong to me too.

27:49 And David believes him. Even when it feels like the Moabites and the Philistines have the upper hand and they're taking ground from Israel, David remembers what God said and he trusts the promise. He keeps looking to God for salvation. He looks to God for salvation and he refuses to look to man. You've heard this in verse 12. Oh, grant us help against the foe, for vain is the salvation of man. David knows this temptation all too well. He knows that when the curse is pressing in on him and the opposition is intense and it seems like God has rejected him and abandoned him, there's going to be this terrible pressure.

28:46 I'll say that really carefully. A terrible pressure to turn away from God and to trust in man. To trust in himself. In his armies. In other armies that might come and help Israel in the battle. If God's not going to help me then I'm just going to try something else. Have you felt that temptation? God's way isn't working for me yet. And so I'm going to try my way now.

29:23 We don't talk this way. We would never say to each other after a service, for instance, we never come up and say, yeah, actually, I'm trying out the salvation of man right now. We don't do that, right? We don't talk that way, but oh, we act like that sometimes. we might say that God is our Savior. But then how we live, it might point to a totally different Savior. what are the symptoms?

30:03 We skip time in the word with God because we're just too busy right now. We slip in and out of church because we have somewhere else to be. We work and work and stress and work and rarely pray. In fact, we might just go ask ChatGPT instead. It's faster. David knew that the salvation of man, what we can do for ourselves, the salvation of man saves nothing. It accomplishes nothing. It's vain.

30:55 Only God can save us. We do not trust in man, certainly not in ourselves. No, we trust in God. And when we trust in him, Psalm 108 tells us, we will do valiantly against our foes. We don't use that word valiantly. We don't use it often, at least I don't. But we really should.

31:21 When we feel the curse, we groan, we praise, we ask, we trust, and then finally, we tread. we tread oh we will tread down all the forces of evil and all the consequences of evil one day and even now we will tread this is verses 12 and 13 oh grant us help against the foe for vain is the salvation of man with God we shall do valiantly it is he who will tread down our foes. Vain is the salvation of man, friends, but sure is the salvation of God.

32:09 With God, we shall do valiantly. We shall prevail against all of our enemies. For David, in Psalm 108, those enemies that meant Moab and Edom and Philistia, if God is with us, we have nothing to fear and we cannot ultimately lose. We can't. No matter how bleak it gets down under the clouds here, we can take courage and know that we will outlast every enemy of God. Because God himself will tread down our foes. That's what he says. With God we shall do valiantly. It is he who will tread down our foes. And when this God treads, he treads with sovereign unrivaled power. We just heard that in verse nine. Moab is my wash basin. Upon Edom, I cast my shoe. Over Philistia, I shout in triumph.

33:04 Those enemies, David, those enemies that seem so massive and so powerful to you right now, they're a bucket for my feet. they're a plastic bin for my sandal we don't talk about Moab or Edom or Philistia anymore, right? They don't seem so big anymore. The Philistines, they vanished as a people 2,500 years ago. Think about that. Israel fought the Philistines for two or 300 years. For all that time, so think about basically the entire history of the United States. For all that time, these were the terrible giants bearing down on God's people.

34:03 God, where are you? When are you going to wipe them out? and then they're completely gone, tossed out like water in a bucket. And friends, that's true of every great fear you have today. War, disease, oil prices, artificial intelligence. God could say to us this morning, he could say, AI is my washbasin. Upon cancer, I cast my shoe.

34:57 Over Islam, I shout in triumph. The giants we most fear are as nothing to our God. They're water for him to wash his feet. And I don't know about you, but the giants I battle most, they're not the ones that are out there in the headlines. No, they're the ones that are in here. Pride, selfishness, impatience, anger, envy, self-pity. and God promises to me and to you, oh, I'm taking that land too.

36:01 He says, 2 Corinthians 3, verse 18, we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, the image of Christ, from one degree of glory to another. We shall do valiantly, friends, For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. In other words, pride is my wash basin. Envy and bitterness, I cast my shoe on them. Over lust, I shout in triumph. The salvation of man is vain. You can't beat that sin alone. But with God, you shall and you can, even now, do valiantly. David, he saw God tread down his foes by the tens of thousands, Moab, Edom, Philistia, but he didn't see God tread down all his foes, not yet.

37:12 And that brings us to the table. You see that King David, he knew that God would one day have his full and his final victory, but he also knew that God's people needed another king. They needed a divine king who would take on flesh, sympathizing with us in our groaning. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

37:43 A king who would praise the steadfast love and faithfulness of his father, even in his darkest hours. A king who would ask, would plead with the father that the bitter cup of the curse be removed from him. And yet also a king who would trust his father's word and will, saying, not my will, but yours be done. a king who would be betrayed condemned crucified bearing the awful curse for us in our place and then buried and yet through it all a king who would do valiantly on the cross this king King Jesus, he tread down his enemies in awesome victory. And then remember this king, like our king in Psalm 108, three days later, he was rescued from the cave. And having defeated his enemy through his death and his resurrection, he will return to wipe out all of his enemies, to wash his feet with all of his enemies. And on that day, he's going to come and bring us home where the curse will never come close again.

39:16 so as we celebrate that coming king at the lord's table now this meal it's a meal for the members of city's church it's a meal that we eat together every week to remember to remind ourselves and each other that god's steadfast love stands high above the heavens his faithfulness it reaches to the clouds but if you have believed in and follow Jesus, we invite you to eat with us. We'd love for you to eat with us this morning. If you have not yet believed in Jesus and repented of your sin, we'd ask you to let the bread and the cup pass. But let today be the day. Let this hour, right now, let it be the hour that you forsake the salvation of man. You cannot save yourselves. And that you embrace and enjoy.