A New Name

You can watch my video sermon for May 10 at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsPvME4wZ4Y  or you can read this edited text below:

------------

Psalm 139, Part Three

A New Name

During the past two weeks as we looked at Psalm 139, we reminded ourselves God never, ever leaves us. We saw that God searches and probes us, and that He also searches FOR us. We looked at why some try to hide from God, and why some run from Him. We also saw how God personally directed our conception, and that we are each one in one hundred million possibilities.

Today we look at the next part of this psalm and I begin reading at last week’s verses for context. Here are verses 14 through 18:

Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.

Some of you keep a personal daily diary or journal. In it you record the things that happened that day and often what you thought of those events. The psalmist tells us God has His own diary – so to speak – His own diary of you and me. In it He has recorded everything in our life, from the moment of our conception, to this very moment as you read this.

Have you been baptized into Christ?  Are you following Him in daily obedience? Is your name written down in His book of eternal life? God tells us through the prophet Isaiah: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you. “Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands." (Isaiah 49:15-16)

Is your name inscribed on the palms of the Lord Jesus’ hands? Have you ever said to Him, “Oh, my God! Come by Your Holy Spirit into my heart and change me! Make me pleasing to You, obedient to your every commandment, and increasingly fruitful for your kingdom as I live my life from day to day”? Have you ever said something like that?

As I prepared for this message I thought of the old church hymn by Charles Miles. Many of you might remember it. Here are some of the lyrics:

I was once a sinner, but I came, pardon to receive from my Lord. This was freely given, and I found that He always kept His word. There's a new name written down in glory, And it's mine, oh yes, it's mine! And the white-robed angels sing the story, "A sinner has come home."

In the Book 'tis written, "Saved by grace." Oh the joy that came to my soul! Now I am forgiven, and I know by His blood I am made whole. There's a new name written down in glory, and it's mine, oh yes, it's mine! And the white-robed angels sing the story, "A sinner has come home."

Can anyone hope to fully understand what God did for you and me on that old rugged and splintered cross where God’s dearest and best – for a world of lost sinners was brutally slain?

No wonder David says of God’s intimate knowledge and love for him, “Such knowledge is too high. I cannot hope to understand it all.”

During the time of Jesus, shepherds did not drive their sheep from behind. They walked in front of them, leading them. The sheep – who trusted their shepherd – followed wherever the shepherd led them. The shepherd knew the terrain the sheep would walk over because he had already been there.

That is a picture of our Great Shepherd. And since God CREATED what we call ‘time’, He is not subject to time. He exists in what we would call the eternal ‘present.’ Tomorrow is just as clear to Him as is yesterday and as is today. God knows our tomorrow because He is already there in tomorrow.

So as Jesus leads His sheep, He knows the terrain – the rocks, the valleys, the streams, the dry ground where you and I will travel because He has already passed through there, ahead of us. We are simply following our trusted Shepherd to lead the way along and THROUGH the terrain. That’s why David wrote: The Lord is my shepherd . . . He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.

Why will we not fear? Because our shepherd leads us. “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.” (Psalm 46:1-3)

No wonder David continues in this 139th psalm: “How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me!

Is God precious to us? Perhaps He is not as precious as He ought to be because we become so busy with life that we don’t have time to think about God except perhaps a quick moment of prayer over our food or a quick hello in the morning and a quick good-night as we pull the covers over ourselves. If you are like me, you know how easy it is to forget God, and what He has done for us – especially at the cross.

That’s why I have a crucifix in my study where I spend my mornings with the Scriptures and prayer. The crucifix reminds me, as often as I meditate on it, of the bloody wounds I caused Him. In my mind’s eye I look at the stripes sliced into His back, each one fashioned from my whoredoms, my blasphemies, my pervasive rebellion against Him. And I wonder in amazement how can it be that He should die in such a way for someone such as I?

“Oh my God, thank you for saving my soul. Thank you, Lord, for making me whole. Thank you, Lord, for giving to me your great salvation so rich and free – free to me. But terribly costly for you.

Yes, Oh, Lord, how precious thoughts of you ought to be to me.

Moving back now to the psalm, David writes what is troubling for many Christians to understand. Jesus Himself told us to love our enemies and to pray for them, yet David writes, beginning in verse 19:

“O that You would slay the wicked, O God; Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed. For they speak against You wickedly, And Your enemies take Your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? 22 I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies.”

Before we become too critical of David, remember also what we read in the New Testament, the cry of the martyrs for God’s vengeance on the wicked: (Revelation 6:9-10) When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”

And we need to juxtapose David’s imprecation in this psalm with what he also wrote in Psalm 37:7-10 (New Life Version):

“Rest in the Lord and be willing to wait for Him. Do not trouble yourself when all goes well with the one who carries out his sinful plans. stop being angry. Turn away from fighting. Do not trouble yourself. It leads only to wrong-doing. For those who do wrong will be cut off. But those who wait for the Lord will be given the earth. A little while, and the sinful man will be no more. You will look for his place, and he will not be there.”

I do not doubt David was justifiably angry when he wrote those words we just looked at. But do YOU not hate the evil that you see all around us? Do YOU not hate the barbaric murders, the ruthless rapes, the sordid perversions of marriage and the marriage bed?

Do you not hate those who will kill every day this week 2,500 babies in their mother’s womb in American abortion clinics? Do you not shudder to know American abortionists will kill more than 17,000 babies in the next seven days in their clinics? Seventy-five thousand this month. Nearly 850,000 by this time next year. More than 60 million since abortion became legal in all 50 states in 1973.

Do you not hate that wickedness?

Now, while we know Jesus tells us to hate the sin but love the sinner, the more I read and listen and watch Christians responding to the evil in our world, I wonder if have lost our balance. I wonder if we love the sinner to the point that we now tolerate the sins for the sake of what we call loving the sinner.

In my recent book on supernatural warfare I referred to pastor I’d read about who was asked to preside over the funeral of a young man who’d died of AIDS. When the pastor arrived at the funeral home, he noticed the attendees were all men. He suspected many, if not all of them, were homosexual.

When he finished his eulogy, the men asked if he would read various Bible verses they remembered from their childhood. Afterward, they thanked him and said it was the first time they’d heard Bible verses without a sermon of condemnation along with the verses.

I understood the story’s point about the pastor’s kindness to read the men’s favorite passages. But it appeared from the story that that’s all the pastor did. And that is the deadly problem in a growing number of churches today.

Clergy and laity quote the happy verses and ignore the judgment verses. In so doing, they give people living in sin a false and ultimately damning sense of security by telling them what they wantto hear and not what they need to hear.

To do such a thing is not an expression of Christ's love, who calls all men and women to repentance, to turn from their sins and live holy lives. What clergy and laity do when they do what this pastor did is nothing less than help the sinner go happily on his or her way to an eternal and fiery hell.

That is NOT hating the sin and loving the sinner. That is ignoring the sin and helping the sinner into hell. It’s called cheap grace.

At the end of the 19th century, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army warned of cheap grace this way: “The chief dangers which will confront the coming [20th] century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.

Don’t you want to please God? Of course, you do. If you didn’t, you would never have read this far. God loves you and me with a love incomprehensible. But God is also a God of Justice. And He demands we obey His commandments.

God has written down every day of our lives, to the moment we step into eternity. Is your name written down in His book of life? It can be. Please make it so by repenting of your sins and seeking the Holy Spirit to help you obey Jesus all the rest of your days on earth.

Next week we will conclude this series with a closer look at those closing verses of this psalm: O, search me, O God. Know my heart. Show me if there is any wicked way in me. And lead me in the everlasting way.