God is Enough
Transcription
Amen, amen. Well, I am glad that the power is back on because I was sweating so hard up here. So thankful for AC, like probably number two all-time invention. I I think what you just heard, at least to me, is probably one of the most emotionally honest passages in all of the Bible. It's twenty-eight verses, and ASAF never once pretends that he's okay. Like he tells you how close he comes to.
To walking away, and then he tells you where he lands. And so this morning I kind of want to walk the road between these two. Most of you know this. We had a house fire in April. Kenna was out of town in Washington, DC, and so it's just me and our four kids, and I mean, personally, I felt like I was crushing it. Like I'm feeding Ruth with one hand, I'm changing laundry with the other hand, getting ready to take a selfie and send it to Kenna, dad of the year. And then the smoke.
And I hear cracking and popping, and I'm not really in too much of a rush, but I do go out our sliding glass door and walk around the corner, and I see that our playhouse and fence are a wall of fire. And it takes my brain a minute to process what I'm looking at. But but obviously it clicks, and I rush back inside and I see that my neighbor's already at my door, knock, knock, knocking. He's on the phone with 911, and so I rush up the stairs to go get my kids who are doing their rest time.
Say, stop what you're doing, you need to come with me right now. And so we go down the stairs, out our front door. None of my kids have their shoes on, and we walk to our neighbor's driveway. And while we're there, I'm just holding Ruth and nothing else, watching the side of my house go up in flames. There's nothing that I could do. I'll be honest with you, probably the most helpless ten minutes of my life.
Now here's why I tell you that, because there are fires that you can see from the street. The the smoke, the fire trucks, you've you've got all your neighbors out there talking while you're there, and then there's another type of fire. And it happens quietly. It's on the inside. Nobody can see it, where you can still serve and show up and be in this place while something underneath is slowly going up in flames.
And that second kind of fire is exactly what Psalm 73 is all about. Cause have you ever had a season where it feels like you're doing all of the right things spiritually? Again, you're you're praying, you're worshiping, you're you're trying to entrust yourself to God, and still life's falling apart. And somewhere along the way your soul starts to whisper, What's the point? What am I doing here?
And so for weeks we've been walking through these this series, like God is the attributes of God. And we've said that He's holy and good and sovereign. Last week Mark talked about his immutability. And every part of that is true. But here's the question that decides whether any of it holds when everything falls apart. Is he enough? Not as God real or as God powerful.
But when everything you were counting on is gone, is God Himself enough? It is the question that every single one of you will answer. And I'll be honest, typically it's not with your words. It's where you run when the bottom eventually falls out. And so I want to be so clear this morning before we get further into this. God is enough, is not the same thing as everything turns out fine. Enough is not the same thing as fixed.
It's even when the worst thing happens, God Himself is still solid ground underneath your feet. And so this is the claim that Psalm 73 is going to put to the test. It's the story of one man's journey from God is not enough to there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. And so right now, every single one of us is somewhere on that road. And where we're gonna hop in is gonna be verse two. Again, such an honest line.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. So not my feet stumbled and my steps slipped, it's almost in nearly. Which gives us an idea that there is a season where ASAP looks like he's very stable on the outside, while on the inside he's just holding on by a thread. I know that this is how some of you feel right now. Again, you can show up here and sing worship songs.
And be disappointed with God. You can sit where you're sitting right now and and again ask yourself, is any of us even worth it anymore? And the man who's writing this is not some immature rebel. This is ASAF. He's a worship leader. He lives close to the presence of God. And I think that that distinction really does matter because one of the enemy's favorite lies is if you were really mature, you wouldn't struggle like this.
And so where we come is i i and and and so Psalm seventy-three is going to destroy that lie. God puts this psalm in the Bible for struggling people, like you and me, so that you know that you're not alone, you're not crazy, and your struggle does not automatically mean your faith is fake. Because again, eventually all of us will end up in this wrestling match. Like eventually suffering will get intensely personal.
Eventually prayers go unanswered so long that it begins to hurt. Eventually you lose something you are sure that God would protect. And if we're not careful, disappointment slowly becomes disillusionment. And this is exactly what happens to Asaph in verse three. He says, For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. Envious.
Envy is is not just admiring what someone else has. Envy is resenting the story that God gave you while craving the story that God gave someone else. And it's spiritually deadly. Because its goal is to turn your eyes sideways until you lose sight of God altogether. And so when ASAF starts scanning sideways, what he sees.
destroys him. He sees that the wicked are wealthy and healthy and comfortable. They they mock God and yet they still seem blessed. Now here's the thing ASAF's envy has a very obvious target. It's the arrogant, like the people who ignore God and still seem to win in life. And so maybe for you this morning that's like, well I'm off the hook, because that's not me. I'm not sitting here wishing I could just live the life of the godless.
But the truth is envy doesn't need a villain. It is thriving just as well in the church as it is outside of the church. It sounds like a brother whose marriage just looks easier than yours. The family whose kids turned out the way that you've been begging God to have yours turn out.
The believer whose faith doesn't seem to require the daily struggle that yours requires every morning.
You can be here this morning again, sing these songs, sit in these chairs, and quietly resent the story of the person who's sitting right next to you. And I think that this envy is even more dangerous because it hides behind a spiritual face. It doesn't feel like sin, it feels like longing. But underneath all of this is the same thing that ASAF just confessed. You are
Resenting your story while craving someone else's. And so in his envy, he looks at himself in verse fourteen and says, All the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. You hearing his frustration? Like I tried to obey, and yet life still hurts. This is the crisis under Psalm seventy three. It's not atheism, it's disappointment with God.
And Tim Keller says this this feels like a spiritual vertigo. Your soul is losing its balance until your eyes start seeing something your theology just can't process. I love the way that he says this. The claims of truth are on audio. Experience is on video. So when suffering gets loud enough, experience starts screaming over your theology.
And here's the danger in that suffering is going to tempt you to reinterpret God through your pain instead of interpreting your pain through God. Again, suffering is going to tempt you to reinterpret the God of the universe through your pain instead of interpreting your pain through God.
And so when he does this, ASAF finally spirals into exhaustion. Look at the first half of verse 26. My flesh and my heart may fail. My flesh, this body weakens. Like everything feels heavy. My heart, I'm emotionally drained, I'm spiritually numb.
Fail, that the Hebrew word here means drained dry. Think a tank full of water with the plug pulled at the bottom. And here's what I want you to hear this morning. The Bible does not shame this struggle. Even Jesus, when he's in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. And yet he still doesn't sin. And so I think this teaches us the presence of
Of pain is not the same thing as the absence of faith. But even then, under all of this, the envy, the comparison, the exhaustion, the same lie that the wit the serpent whispered to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is the same he whispers to us. God is not enough. So you better go find out what is. Now, I want you to hold on to that tension because there is a turn coming. But right before this turn.
What we see is that Asaph tries to think his way to peace. Says, When I thought how to understand this, I it seemed to be a wearisome task. So he wrestles with this over and over, and all it does is wear him out. I think this is how so many of us can stay stuck. You're trying to solve a soul problem with your mind.
And then he enters the sanctuary. Until I went into the sanctuary of God, then I discerned their end. All of this psalm hangs on this verse. This is the pivot. Before verse seventeen, ASAP is drowning in his envy and resentment and self pity. And then he enters the sanctuary. And I want you to notice what hasn't changed. Like the wicked are still prospering.
His suffering hasn't disappeared. God hasn't answered all of his questions. And I think it l this matters because if you're like me, you can assume that peace will only come when your circumstances change. And yet we learn something deeper in this psalm. The first thing God changes is often not your circumstances, it's your vision. And so he enters the sanctuary, and it's not some quiet place of
Devotion, this is a worship leader. So this is worship and prayer, scripture, the gathered people of God, the manifest presence of God. Maybe you've heard this before. You you can study a storm and still drown in it. Well, what what does that look like? Before verse seventeen, Asaph is talking about God. After verse seventeen, he starts talking to God.
We've been in this series, so you have learned a lot of attributes of God, and you can know all of them to be true and still feel a thousand miles away from Him. There are some things that will only heal in the presence of God. This is why the Psalms are so different than just venting. Like lament doesn't just pour emotion out into the air, it takes all of that and points it at God.
And this is an act of faith in and of itself because it assumes that God exists, that God hears you, and ultimately that God cares. And so once he's in the presence of God, his vision, which is maybe another way of saying his loves, begin to change. He even starts to see himself more clearly. Verse 21: When my soul was embittered, I was like a beast towards you. The
Closer you get to God, the harder it is to pretend. Like the presence of God will expose what's really going on underneath all of your polished church language. And so suddenly he sees the real problem and recognizes that it's not just his suffering, it's just exposing what he loves most. He admits this in verse thirteen All in vain I have have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. Translation
Like, where's my payoff? I was pretty sure that obedience would lead to a certain kind of life. And yet suffering has a way of revealing whether God is your treasure or just your strategy. Corey Tinboom says this famously: You never know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have. This is Psalm.
Seventy-three, when everything gets stripped away, you finally figure out what you were standing on. So when my house is in flames and I run back inside, I promise you I wasn't going to save my TV. Although if you know me, you know that I do like my TV, or my furniture, or any of my stuff. The fire made it violently obvious in seconds what is precious to me and what is just stuff.
And here's the mercy in it. One of the most loving things God does is expose a false God before it can destroy you. And so now ASAP, he's seeing himself correctly. He he starts also seeing the arrogant correctly. Then I discerned their end. And so for the first time he's seeing past the moment and into eternity. And the prosperity looks a little different. Like their success, their applause, it's all temporary.
You hear that it's like a dream, and then you wake up. And I can just picture Asaph thinking, like, why was I envying people whose whole kingdom is evaporating? Look at verse 27 for behold, those who are far from you shall perish. You put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you. The people he had been envying had everything except God. And a life with everything except God is a life with nothing except.
That lasts.
Again, pain wants to pull your eyes down. Envy wants to pull it left and right, but worship lifts your eyes back up. And so it's right here in the sanctuary with his corrected vision that Asaph arrives at verse 25. I think that this is the verse that maybe all of the series has been building towards. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing.
On earth that I desire besides you. I hope you hear how radical that is. It it is this place where you realize when everything is stripped away, the only thing that my soul needs is God. And so at the start of this psalm, like I think many of us, ASAP is just being like, God, please just you seeing what's going on, just make my life better.
By the end of this psalm, he recognizes that God Himself is his life. God is the strength of his heart and his portion forever. This word portion could be the entire sermon series just in one word. We don't have time to go through all of this, but when the Israelites divided up the promised land, everyone gets a tribal piece of ground, all except for the Levites.
They inherit God Himself. He says, I am your portion and your inheritance. This is not some consolation prize. This is by far the better deal. Because when God is your portion, then when the land burns and the body fails, you still have the one thing that no one can take from you. Now, logically, if you're like me, you start thinking, like, well, how can he be so sure?
How can a man who just confessed, when I was embittered, I was like a beast towards you, turn right around in verse twenty-three and say, Nevertheless, I am continually with you. You hold my right hand. Jen alluded to it, but nevertheless is the most beautiful word in this psalm, at least to me. Because nevertheless means I was bitter nevertheless. I was foolish nevertheless.
I almost slipped. Nevertheless, you hold my right hand. I hope you're catching the order here because it's not I held on to God because I finally got so strong. He's saying, God held on to me when I was at my worst. That is grace. It's not God loving some cleaned up version of you, it's Him holding on to you in the middle of your mess.
So again, Asaph says, I was like a beast towards you, and God treats him like a son. I don't want you to rush past how scandalous that really is. A holy God doesn't just wave off sin, He doesn't lower the bar and just look the other way. So, how does a man who's at his worst get pulled in close and then held there without God ceasing to be God? That
Kind of nearness doesn't come cheap. It has to be paid for. And look where Asaph goes to find it. He enters the sanctuary. We've already established this is the place of God's presence, but it's also the place of sacrifice. There's an altar, blood, a priest. There is a way, but it's a very costly way to come near to a holy God. All of it is preaching the same sermon, generation after generation.
God makes a way to bring sinners home. And so hopefully you see that every drop of blood on this altar is pointing forward to a hill in Jerusalem, to a cross, to Jesus. Jesus is the true sanctuary. He's the place where sinners finally meet God. He is the sacrifice that opens the way. He's the priest that brings us.
Near. He is the reason, nevertheless, is even possible. And so on this cross, Jesus enters the deepest darkness of Psalm seventy-three. And he does not do this as a bystander, but as the one who's going to absorb it all. Catch the difference between these two. Asaf felt like God was distant. Jesus cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And he meant it because he's
Not performing, he's paying. Asaph watched the wicked prosper. Jesus watched the wicked spit on him, mock him, and gamble over his clothes while he bled. And it wasn't only Rome. It's his own people, like the same crowds who were cheering for him days before the all of the spiritual leaders who know the scripture inside and out. Jesus came to his own and
And they handed him over to die. And so you can imagine that for a moment it looked like the lie was true. It looked like God was not enough. It looked like evil had won. It looked like the Father had abandoned his faithful son. But then, three days later, the grave is empty.
And the resurrection is God's answer to every dark verse in Psalm 73. It is God standing over history and saying, The wicked do not get the final word. Suffering does not get the final word. The grave does not get the final word. I do. And so the cross is telling us that God is good. The resurrection tells us that God wins. And these things together.
It tells us that God Himself is enough.
But a hard truth for you this morning, Jesus did not die to give you a better life. He died to give you God. Not God plus the life I wanted, or God plus the life I've been demanding, or God where everything is finally fixed. God Himself. And because of Jesus, He is yours forever.
And so maybe you're sitting here this morning, and the honest truth is I've just never had a nevertheless in my life. And it's not because you haven't suffered. I know that you have suffered. It's because you've never come to the one who will hold you on the other side of it. And so every fire that comes your way, you have to hold alone.
And so hear me, the same door Asaph walked through is now open to you. You don't have to clean yourself up first. Again, ASAP came in like a beast and walked out with his right hand being held. The blood has already been spilled. The way is already open. Please, please don't fall into the trap that I need to clean myself up. I need to fix my life before I can come to him. Come to Jesus as you are.
So now for all of us, the question is no longer will God ever let go of me. The cross and the empty tomb have answered that. The question now is where are you pointed when everything hurts? Because this is exactly where Psalm 73 is going to land. If God Himself is enough, and if Jesus really has brought us close and near to God forever, then how do we actually
Live like that. Like not just here in Sunday morning, or not in theory, but on Tuesday, when the anxiety is back, when the diagnosis hasn't changed, your kids are still hurting. The prayer you've been praying for so long starts to wonder if anyone's even listening. How do we live then?
And he's about to tell us in this last verse, verse twenty eight, 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.
That's the whole Christian life in one sentence. Nearness, refuge, witness. So first you stay near. It's good to be near God. Sounds so simple, but it's not easy. Because when your soul is disappointed with God, your first flinch is to pull back. You stop praying, stop singing, you stop opening your Bible. That's not because you hate God.
Because you're hurt. And then slowly, quietly you begin to drift. And Psalm seventy three says, Don't don't drift. No, take all of that, take all of your envy, all of your resentment, all of your exhaustion, the question that you are too embarrassed to say out loud and bring it into the sanctuary. Because that place is not for people who have no doubts, but it is for the people whose feet have almost slipped.
It's a hard truth. It's hard truth for me this morning. Some of us do not need a new answer today. You need to get back near God. He has not moved, but our gaze has. Come near. Second, you make him your refuge. And again, a refuge is not a place where nothing hard ever happens. It's where you flee when hard things do happen.
And so it means the question is not simply do you believe God is enough? The question is where do you run when you don't believe it?
Because all of us have refuges. Like some of us run to control. Like if can just manage every detail, maybe I'll finally feel safe. Some of us, this one's me, run to distraction. If I can just stay busy enough, scroll enough, buy enough things, then I won't have to feel what's going on underneath. For some of us it's comparison, bitterness, self pity, literally anything to put you far away from the ache. And they may numb you for a moment.
This is true, but but not one of them can hold the weight of your soul. And so maybe if you're honest, you would say this morning, I have literally run to everything except for God. Sorry, guys, I just exited out of my own sermon.
And if that is you this morning, then Psalm 73 is also your invitation. I hope you you hear this because running to God for refuge is not one more thing you have to muster up enough strength to pull off. We get this backwards. We we treat taking refuge in God like an advanced move for the spiritually impressive. It's the exact opposite. Pastor John Piper says, hiding in God is
It's not a work you prove you do to prove you have it together. It is the white flag. It's admitting you are weak, you are cornered, you cannot save yourself, and he can. That is the only condition there is. Not God, look at me, look how faithful I'm trying to be. Just God, I am desperate, and you are all I have. And desperation, it does not demand.
And it does not deserve. It pleads for mercy and reaches out for grace, and the promise under this entire psalm is that the one who runs to God will never be turned away. No one who takes refuge in him is condemned. He is a shield to every soul who hides in him. He knows the ones who run to him, and then he holds them.
Make him your refuge. Lastly, we tell of his works. Psalm seventy three does not end with Asaph getting all of his questions answered. It ends with him becoming a witness. He doesn't get to come out of the sanctuary and be like, Well now life makes sense. I understand all who's got questions. Like that that's not what happens here. What he has is God held me when I almost slipped. God brought me near when I was bitter.
God became my refuge when everything else gave way. That is a testimony. And some of you have one exactly like it or are about to. It's not a polished kind. It's not the kind where you get to pretend like everything doesn't hurt. It's the honest kind. And so let me go first this morning.
At the beginning of this sermon I told you that there are two kinds of fire. Again, the kind that you can see from the street and one that burns quietly on the inside while you keep smiling and serving and showing up. I know that second fire. I've been preaching this whole sermon from within side of it. Most of you know about the house. And and if most of you know about the house, you also know that's not the only thing that our family is carrying.
When I ran out of that house I had Ruth in my arms. Ruth has a very rare genetic disorder, and the first two and a half years of her life have felt like a lifetime.
There have been surgeries. There have been nights that Ken and I have been on our knees praying, and all of the polished language is gone. This is not a testimony I would have chosen. If God gave me the pen, I promise you I would have written a different story for my little girl. That's just the truth. But I'm so glad that I don't have the pen. And here's what I can tell you.
Not from a safe distance, but again inside of the fire of my life that it is right now. He has not let go. My feet have slipped more times than I can count.
I have looked sideways and envied other families and their healthy children. I have laid awake at night wondering if God really cares. Is he really good and
Nevertheless, he has held my hand the entire way through. So I'm not standing up here because I have it figured out. I'm standing up here because when I ran out of things to hold on to, he held on to me. Now, this is not a unique story. Like I know many of you wish that your testimony was not marked by suffering.
But honestly, this is a way for God's glory to help struggling people breathe again. Because the church, it doesn't need more people performing like life never hurts. The church does need people who can say, I know what it is to be confused. My flesh and my heart have failed. But I also know this God is the strength of my heart.
And my portion for ever.
So how then shall we live? You stay near. You make him your refuge, you tell of his works, and when your feet start to slip, you don't run from him, you run to him. It's not because you've held on so well, but because he held on to you, nevertheless. Because one day your flesh and your heart it will fail.
One day every earthly portion will slip through your hands. But not him. Not your God. Not your refuge. Not your portion. He held ASAP. He is holding you right now. He is holding me right now. Because God is enough. Amen? All right, let's pray.
