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Sermon Notes: Psalm 125

Posted onAuthorKen Corder

An Unshakeable Mountain          Psalm 125

  1. My parents’ farm in Breckinridge County extended across the top of a flat ridge, down into the fertile bottomlands of one of those iconic Kentucky hollers, through which a large creek meandered. The farm then climbed up the hills that stood over the other side of the holler.  There were large sycamores, white oaks, hickories and red cedars that populated the fence rows and steep hillsides.  As a young man, the natural boundary that those hills and huge trees formed gave me a sense of security and permanence.  Our home was nestled in that beautiful, green valley.  The land gave us our livelihood.  Nearly all my neighbors were related if you went back four or five generations.  We shared the same history, heritage, religion, stories and general philosophy about life.  There was homogeneity and familiarity that was conducive to a reassuring sense of safety, regularity and habit.
  2. Best I can remember, just about everyone was a person of faith, even those who were not church-goers. We believed there was a creator God who had formed the world, made us a little lower than the angels, and who looked over us, and who desired us to be holy.  We believed that God gave us grace to carry out this task.  We were not perfect.  There were disagreements, divorces, and disturbances.  But there were also homecomings, harvests, and, of course, hunting season.  In all of this, for the vast majority of us, faith was the constant that held that enduring community together.  In that community lived the people, the church, the teachers, the old folks, even the rabble rousers, who formed me into the man that I am, such as I am, today.  That loving, tough, compassionate, sometime exasperating people of faith laid a foundation of faith that has allowed me to stand strong in some difficult challenges in life.
  3. Faith fashions people and communities into immoveable mountains
    1. Faith fashions men and women who will not be easily moved off kilter in life, come what may
    2. As the old spiritual goes: Jesus is my Savior, I shall not be moved; In His love and favor, I shall not be moved, Just like a tree that’s planted by the waters, Lord, I shall not be moved.
  4. What is this faith?
    1. A few weeks ago, we read in Ephesians that Paul calls it the shield that protects us from the Evil One’s flaming arrows. It’s the same faith, David had when he hurled those smooth, round stones and took down Goliath.
    2. And the Psalmist says, faith is a trust that just as the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Creator God surrounds his people
    3. This faith abides even when God seems distant and absent. Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
    4. This faith assures us that if we love God and neighbor, the Lord will not remove his loving protection and provision from his people. Romans 8:28 “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
    5. Faith is a decision, a decision to believe, to trust in a divine presence that breathes into us, even though, like the air we breathe, we cannot see it.
    6. Now, we either believe that the Creator God surrounds us, or we believe that the world is without order and purpose.  Those are our two choices.
  5. But let me tell you this, the community that is founded on faith becomes an unshakeable mountain, because it is founded on principles, customs and traditions that give the community its solid, enduring foundation. What we are seeing in our nation and communities today is a turning away from the faith that has sustained us.
    1. Communities unravel when they are not founded on faith. The unraveling of society and the nation soon follow when faith is abandoned.
    2. As the Psalmist says, the scepter of wickedness rests on the land that was once allotted to the righteousness. With the scepter of wickedness rests on the land, even good people are swallowed up and begin to engage in behaviors that are destructive to the self and to the community.
    3. Many of you remember a society and nation in which the vast majority of people were people of faith and held to this deep trust that a Creator God had fashioned them, desired them to be holy and provided grace to achieve this work. It wasn’t a perfect community, but it was a homogeneous, safe, predictable community
  6. Contemporary examples of the unraveling of our homes, community and nation abound:
    1. NXIVM sex trafficking scandals involving perverted Hollywood stars and rich elites
    2. The House of Horrors story where a mom and dad chained to furniture, starved and abused their 13 children for years.
    3. Recently, a Mom drives her entire family over a cliff
    4. Three people killed, including a woman from Louisville, in a mass shooting in Cincinnati this past week.
    5. Drug abuse, depression, anxiety, psychological disorders of all kinds, born of a community that no longer is founded on faith.
  7. When faith in a Creator God who loves, protects and sets boundaries for his people is abandoned, society becomes sick, perverted, violent. And the faithless cancer spreads into all aspects of society – schools, political institutions, families, churches.
  8. Faith is so important, because faith sets necessary boundaries. The faith perspective gives us a God who loves us so much that he protects us with prohibitions on our behavior and thoughts.  There are behaviors and ideas that a healthy community should not approve of or entertain.
    1. These boundaries are restrictive, but they produce pleasant ends.
    2. Psalm 16:6 “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.”
    3. These boundaries produce a faith community that is full of love, compassion and grace but one that is also is not afraid to condemn and prohibit destructive, sinful behaviors. But, because of political correctness and a weak desire to be admired rather than be holy, we as a church have tolerated and turned our heads in the midst of sinful behaviors.
  9. In Romans 1: 29-32, the Apostle Paul, goes into detail about the wickedness that can visit a community when it abandons faith:  His words are harsh, but they are necessary for us to hear: 29 [People who have abandoned faith] have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
  10. It’s an ugly, tragic community of individuals, homes and families that practice such a life, but that is what has replaced the community of faith in our time.
  11. So how do we refashion the community of faith? Can we refashion the community of faith?  Are things too far gone?
    1. The Psalmist in our Psalm today foresaw that people might very well turn from God, from trust in the Way of the Lord. So he offers these words as both preventative and curative medicine: Psalm 125:4-5: Lord, do good to those who are good, to those who are upright in heart. 5 But those who turn to crooked ways the Lord will banish with the evildoers. Peace be on Israel.
    2. Check the condition of your heart. Is it upright, is it pure?  Do you operate form a pure heart?  In the heart is where courage generates (courage having the same etymological root as coronary).  In the heart is passion, a desire to do right and good.  In the heart is the will to be strong, an unshaeable mountain in the face of life’s challenges.
    3. C.S. Lewis wrote in the Abolition of Man that in modern times we have become men without chests. People are either operating out of their cold, calculating, abstract minds, worried about spreadsheets, net assets, control and dominion, or they are working from below the belt, driven by uncontrolled sexual drive, which without the calibration of a pure heart, can easily become perverted and destructive.  Lewis said when a society no longer is founded in the heart but rather in the instrumental reasoning of the mind or the unchecked sexual pursuits below the belt, we are  doomed for the kind of behaviors that Paul decried and that the Psalmist warned.
    4. So, I would ask you, from what spiritual zone are you operating? The cold, abstract mind?  The uncontrolled desires from below the belt?  Or from a pure heart? Only when the heart is pure and right – a heart that desires to do good and upright – can our intellectual and sexual lives land in the sweet boundaries that produce healthy communities of faith.
    5. The destructive powers of the world want to keep us in our heads or in our pants, because those are weak zones that are so easy to manipulate with ideology and images.  But if we operate from a pure, upright heart we are an unshakeable mountain, and we will build a warm-hearted community of faith that is unshakeable.
    6. Romans 10:9 calls us to believe in our hearts, because if our heart believes, then we can harness the power of our minds and our sensual drives for the good of the faith community.
    7. Proverbs 4:23 – “Above all else, guard your heart.”

 


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