Sermon Notes

June 23, 2024

Seeing Through the Fog

Psalms 146:1-10

Ever since I was a child, one of my favorite summertime activities has been snorkeling. I still love to go under the sea and explore everything that God has made. Many times the sea didn’t like me back, but that’s another story for another time. I think my love of snorkeling came when I was younger, and my Grandfather would throw coins into the pool, and I would eagerly dive down and pick them up. I’m one of those people who cannot see at all under water, so I had to use goggles when I dove down. However there was one thing that really bothered me and slowed me down from completing my mission of diving for coins, and that was the fog. For the life of me I couldn’t keep my goggles from fogging up. I tried every method that was suggested but nothing would work. Then I was told the greatest piece of snorkeling advice I’ve ever received. “Stop trying to breathe through your nose and that will take care of the problem”. Well, I was young, and it never occurred to me that this was causing the fog. Once I addressed it, I didn’t have to worry about it anymore and was able to carry out my mission of diving for coins. The reason I wanted to share that with you this morning is because that can happen in our lives as well. We have so many things going on around us that it fogs up our lives and we can’t carry out our mission. This is when the truth of God’s word can come in and help us clear out the fog to carry out our God-given mission and it might help us make sense of our vision that has been a little blurry as well. So if you have been struggling to carry out the vision that God has given our church, which is to “Connect people to Christ and His followers”, maybe your goggles are a little foggy and my prayer today is that through the 146th Psalm, God will use His truths to clear out that fog and clear up our vision so we can carry out our mission (The Great Commandment & The Great Commission) as a follower of Jesus.

The Mindset of the Follower - Psalms 146:1-2

Praise the Lord! Let all that I am praise the Lord. I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God with my dying breath.

The Psalmist starts out this Psalm by sharing with us the mindset that is needed if we are going to clear up our vision and carry out our mission. It's a mind focused on Worship. The first thing we hear from the Psalmist is a command for all who hear this song to praise the Lord!! It’s a call to worship and worshiping is never a problem for us as humans. As a matter of fact all throughout the Bible we can see that we were created to worship, so we all do it naturally. The issue that can cause us problems is the object of our worship. This causes all sorts of issues and idolatry in the lives of those who are lost, and this can even be a problem for those who are followers of Jesus as well. When our mindset is not on the Lord, we are just worshiping the creation instead of the creator. That kind of mindset causes fog in our vision because we don’t have our priorities straight. That hampers our efforts to carry out our God-given mission because the object of our worship can impact our motivation to carry it out. When we lose our focus and motivation we seem to live in a fog in our lives. How does this happen to a follower of Jesus? Well, we tend to take the blessings that God has given us in this life and elevate them above God and those blessings are what we start to worship. Whether it is family, work or pleasure. We can find ourselves elevating them above God and they become our little “g” gods. That’s why the Psalmist is emphatic when he declares Praise the Lord!! He wants to make sure that we have the object of our worship correct and that the object of worship must be the Lord. The Psalmist knows that he can’t just tell everyone else to do it because he is prone to wander as well. Therefore he continues the Psalm by making it personal, not just by calling upon the reader to Worship the Lord! but saying I must give my all to the Lord in praise for as long as I live. Do you realize that is what we do as followers of Jesus? When we make Jesus the Lord of our lives, we make Him Lord forever. However we tend to put limits on His Lordship in our lives. Making Jesus only Lord of some, is making Him Lord of NONE. It’s all or nothing, it’s Jesus who must be your object of worship till you take your last breath this side of eternity. I would love to stay and speak of the things that the followers of Christ tend to worship and what we struggle with in that regard. God has not given me that liberty this morning, so I’ll just wrap this up and say ― you need to make sure you are 100% sold out to Jesus, 100% of the time. That truly clears any fog that is surrounding your ability and zeal to carry out the vision God has for FBC Bloomfield. The object of our worship has a dramatic effect on our effectiveness as followers of Christ ― it starts out with this Psalm.

Worship can be and should be expressed in many ways in our lives. Notice that the Psalmist mentions only one way here ― worship and praise through singing. Singing is a dynamic expression of joy in our lives that comes when the object of our worship is Jesus and the mindset that we have is focused upon Him. There are at least 50 commands to sing praises to God in Scripture. Maybe you say, “I can’t sing” or “I just don’t feel comfortable”. Well, that is not an excuse. It means that the focus of your worship is upon yourselves and not upon God. However I said I wouldn’t go any further into that so I digress and will just say, refusal to sing praise to God is disobedience. If we can’t get our personal worship lives in order, we are never going to be able to carry out the vision God has given to us. We must repent of the faults in our worship lives, clear out the things that cloud our worship (whatever they may be) and get on fire for God again. That all starts when we begin to worship. God created us to worship Him (Isaiah 43:21). Once we are inwardly focused to make sure our object of worship is Christ alone it’s then and only then that we can focus outwardly to help others connect to Christ and His followers.

The Confidence of the Follower - Psalms 146:3-4

Don’t put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there. When they breathe their last, they return to the earth, and all their plans die with them.

Worship is pointless unless you back it up. When we give God the praise, He is due, our actions must follow through with the sentiment our worship presents. When they don’t, we are not worshiping but doing something else entirely. That’s why the Psalmist continues the Psalm by speaking about the confidence problem. You see, when we praise God for who He is, but we put our trust in another, that’s not true worship. That's just lip service and hypocrisy and that type of worship will never clear out the fog in our lives so that we can carry out the vision and mission God has given us. From time-to-time others will come into our lives that we will be tempted to put our hope in ― politicians, employers, family, etc. That can be a problem. I’m not saying God can’t use those people to carry out His plan, but if our confidence is in them, they will just let us down. For a Christian many times these other people are not the ones we find ourselves trusting in more than we should. It’s ourselves that we have a disobedient amount of faith in. This is a pride issue and a worship issue when it comes to putting too much trust in our own abilities. Again, we must look at where our confidence lies. When it’s not in Christ alone we need to make an adjustment to clear out the fog and get ready to carry out our mission.

The God who we Follow - Psalms 146:5-10

But joyful are those who have the God of Israel as their helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God. He made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. He keeps every promise forever. He gives justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry. The Lord frees the prisoners. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts those who are weighed down. The Lord loves the godly. 9 The Lord protects the foreigners among us. He cares for the orphans and widows, but he frustrates the plans of the wicked. The Lord will reign forever. He will be your God, O Jerusalem, throughout the generations. Praise the Lord!

The final piece of this Psalm, I believe, is given for a twofold reason. The first reason given is for those who are struggling in the object of their worship and confidence. For them, this is a reminder of who God is and why He is worthy of all their worship and the entirety of their faith. Those who have been able to clear away the fog and get their worship lives in order, this is a reminder of exactly who we are trying to connect with ― Jesus. I’m going to focus on the latter as we finish out this Psalm.

Those who need Joy

Leonard Ravenhill often said that entertainment was a poor substitute for joy, but we still seek it, because everyone wants joy in their lives. When our source of joy is anything outside of God Himself, it will leave us unfilled. The source of true joy is God alone and we can experience that through a relationship with Jesus Christ alone. Once we make Jesus the Lord of our lives, the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in us and then joy is produced as one of the fruits of the spirit. Those who are seeking joy in all the wrong places are the ones we need to connect to Jesus. Jesus is the only source of everlasting joy ― tell someone about Him.

Those who need the God of Jacob

I read about a Pastor who used the phrase “The God of Jacob” in a unique way. He said when people would ask him if Jesus could help them, his answer would often be, “Well, He is the God of Jacob.” What he meant by that was if God could do what He did for Jacob, then certainly God can do it for you. If God could bless Jacob after he wrestled with God, then He can do it for you as well. If God used Jacob and his children to make an eternal impact for the Kingdom of God, then He can do it for you as well. If God rescued Jacob when he had nothing, he can do it for you as well. If God restored to Jacob what he thought was forever lost, God can do it for you as well. There are many out there who fall into one, if not all those examples from the life of Jacob. and those are the ones we need to connect with Jesus. Connect those who have struggled and wrestled with God. Connect with those who are looking for purpose in life. Connect those who have nothing and those who feel like they have lost everything. Connecting people with Jesus will give to them restoration that they never thought possible.

Those looking for Hope

Everyone seeks someone or something they can trust and that they can rely upon in their lives to not let them down. There is only one who can fulfill that need ― that is Jesus. There is a world out there who has lost their faith in humanity because they have been let down time and time again, but they have never met Jesus. Our focus needs to be on connecting those people with the love of Jesus that is only found through His Gospel. He is the only one who is mighty enough to keep all His promises. His promises never fail nor will they ever. He keeps His promises forever.

Those in need of Justice

There are many, especially in America, that have been let down by the justice system. They have not had justice shown to them because the justice system is broken, and it’s broken because it is run by broken people. These are the people who fall through the cracks. They are the ones who the world oppresses. They feel like there is no one that cares, but they don’t know Jesus. These are the ones who need to be connected to Jesus by telling them about His perfect justice. His justice is always perfect and is always right on time. We can know with 100% certainty that it is coming with this justice, and it won’t be long now. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord. That is a theme we find all through the Psalms and a wonderful reminder to us who might have forgotten that God is the mighty God of justice.

Those who need Freedom

We have had a desire for freedom since we were little, wandering away from our parents, thinking we could do it all on our own. That desire kept growing inside of us till we got our driver’s license and got to experience the freedom of the open road. Then came our 18th birthday and we thought we had the freedom of being an adult, but it wasn’t long until we learned we really didn’t have the true freedom we so longed for in our hearts from a young age. When Jesus sets us free, we are free indeed. We cannot experience true freedom unless it is through a relationship with Jesus Christ. It is through Jesus we have freedom from sin, freedom from the consequences of sin and death. Freedom from shame, freedom from wrath, freedom from fear, freedom to approach the very throne of God with absolute confidence as His children. The list goes on and on, but the fact remains that we cannot experience true freedom unless we relate to Jesus. It is true that America is the land of the free, but that is only to a point, America and those who are Americans cannot bypass the cross to experience true freedom.

Those who are blind

2 Corinthians 4:4 tells us that Satan blinds people to the truth. Who needs to be connected to the light that is only found in Jesus? Everyone.

Those who are down

60% of people in America say they are down and discouraged right now. 100% of everyone you have ever met has been at some point in their lives and needs encouragement. This world is chaotic, and the ruler of this world just wants to see you stay under his shadow of discouragement as long as possible. Jesus is the one who lifts us up and shines light into that darkness. Sometimes it is immediately, sometimes it’s through a process, but He is always the one lifts those who are down.

Those who think they are OK

There are many people out there who think they are fine with God because of their good behavior and their good habits, but the Bible tells us that we have all sinned and the wages of those sins are death. There is no one who can work their way into heaven for it’s by the grace of Jesus Christ alone, through faith in Him alone, that they can be saved. They need to know that individuals need to be connected to Jesus as well.

Those who don’t fit in

There is a notion that you must be a certain way to come to Jesus or to even come to church. but that’s not true. Jesus will take care of all of that after they are saved. We just must connect them with the One who loves them enough to die for them. This world is full of oddballs. In fact I’d say compared to Jesus we are all oddballs in some way and that’s ok. Jesus loves us all but loves us enough to not leave us there. He wants us to come to Him for forgiveness. There is no other way and no prerequisite other than making Him the Lord of your life, and then watching the Fruits of the Spirit start to grow.

The Psalmist ends the Psalm the same way he started it, “Praise the Lord!” It’s not a suggestion. It’s required of all who have made Him Lord of their lives. I hope that this Psalm has cleared the fog from your goggles this morning, made you understand the vision God has given to FBC Bloomfield, and understand how you can carry out the mission God has given you.

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Sermon Notes

Seeing Through the Fog

Psalms 146:1-10

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