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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Psalm chapter 19.
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech, and night
to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth
and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom
leaving his chamber, and like a strong
man, runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the ends of the heaven
and its circuit to the ends of them.
And there is nothing hidden from its heat.
The law of the Lord is perfect.
Reviving the soul.
The testimony of the Lord is sure.
Making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart.
The commandment of the Lord
is pure and enlightening the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever.
The rules of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold.
Even much finegold sweeter
also than honey.
And drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover by them is your servant warned.
In keeping them there is great reward.
Who can discern his errors?
Declare me innocent from hidden faults.
Keep back
your servant also from presumptuous sins.
Let them not have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless
and innocent of great transgression.
Let the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer.
Hi everybody,
good morning and welcome to Christ
Community Chapel.
My name is Joe. I'm
one of the pastors here.
Thanks for coming.
All right.
This is the second week of our visions
series.
We have a theme for this year in.
Our theme is More Life.
That's it.
Simply More Life.
And I got to tell you,
we feel pretty good about this theme
because we have taken it
right from John chapter ten, verse ten,
where Jesus gives us his mission
statement, his reason for coming.
Jesus says, I came.
I have come that they might have life
and have it more abundantly.
Jesus wants you to have more life,
a fuller life, an abundant life.
What we want as a church
is that by the time we get to December
of this year, to look back on 2026
and say it was the best year ever,
not because of things
that happened externally,
but because of something that happened
deep down inside of us.
The passage
we just had read to us is Psalm 19,
and it was written about a thousand years
before Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
And one of the reasons
that we wanted to look at Psalm 19 is
Jesus wasn't introducing something new
in John chapter ten.
Jesus wasn't saying before
God wanted you to have less life.
He wanted to limit you.
But now I've come
and I'm changing the program.
That's not what Jesus was saying.
God has always wanted you to flourish.
God has always wanted
you to have more life.
So if 2026 is going to be a time
where our lives are more full,
where we have abundant life,
how do we do it?
What do we need to do?
Well, the psalmist gives us
three things to do if you want
2026 have more life in 2026.
This is what he says to
do. Here are three things.
First, he says, look for amazing.
Look for amazing.
Second is read for life.
And the third is pray for hard,
look for amazing, read for life.
Pray for heart.
All right.
First look for amazing.
This is what he starts out saying.
The heavens declare the glory of God
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day.
Pours out
speech night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth
and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom,
leaving his chamber like a strong man
runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and it's circuit to the end of them.
And there is nothing hidden from its heat.
Our team does an
incredible job
decorating for Christmas every year.
And if you were here during advent
this past year, we're out in the atrium.
You saw a Christmas tree that was unlike
any Christmas tree I'd ever seen.
It was made entirely of presents.
It looked like this.
And, you know,
I like to hang out in the atrium.
And, when I was out there,
more than one of you came up to me
and said, hey, Pastor Joe,
did you wrap all these presents?
Right?
And of course, I didn't wrap any of them.
But if I had if I had not just
wrapped those boxes,
but I had placed gifts inside
of every one of those boxes,
and the gifts were wonderful gifts.
And I said to you, yeah, I know,
I wrap those.
I filled them with gifts
and they're all for you.
They're all for you.
What would that tell you about me?
Well, it would tell you that I had a lot
of resources and that I was generous.
Being rich and generous
should always go together.
It would tell you that I was imaginative
and creative and that I cared about you.
So the psalmist is saying that
all of creation is saying something,
telling us something about God.
And then the psalmist uses
the sun as an example,
that the rising in the setting of the sun,
he says, nothing can hide from his heat.
And, the Hvac unit,
that is over our offices,
went on the blink
about a week and a half ago,
and for four days
I was 54 degrees in my office.
Not not optimal, right.
But the Hvac units are ten years old.
They're kind of glitchy.
So what are you going to do?
But it made me think of the sun,
so I did a little research.
You know, the way you get heat is,
you have to convert matter into energy
and, like, if I light this match,
that's what's happening.
Is that matter?
Which is the match
stick is being converted into energy,
which is the flame which gives heat.
That's what happens with the sun.
But this is what
I found out about the sun.
The sun is converting
4 million tons of matter into energy
every second of every day.
And it will do that for the next
5 billion years.
That's God's Hvac unit.
All right, let me say that again.
I had to look it up several different
times to make sure I got this right.
The sun converts
4 million tons of matter into energy
every second of every day,
and it will do it for the next
4 billion years.
5 billion years.
What does that tell you about God?
What it tells you God is not small,
but God is saying, I am faithful,
I am consistent,
I am powerful, I am here, I am present,
I am caring, right?
Every morning
the sun will come up, every evening
the sun will set and it will do
that every day of your life.
And there is nothing that is hidden
from the sun,
right?
The reason I use the picture
of the Christmas tree is that the
the psalmist uses the sun,
but creation and creation,
there are a million different gifts
that God gives every single day,
from the explosion of flavor
that happens in your mouth
when you bite into your favorite food,
to the beauty
and majesty of a mountain range,
to the sound of a baby laughing.
Everything is a gift.
The psalmist says.
You want more life in 2026.
The first thing is look for amazing.
It's there all the time.
That perspective matters for everybody.
Perspective matters for you.
I always think of the
the story of the ten year old little girl
who fell out of a tree
and she broke her arm.
70 years later, the same girl
she is, a woman falls, breaks her hip
when she's 80 and she's heard saying,
first my arm, now my hip.
Everything always happens to me, right?
And we laugh about that.
But I wonder how many of us are
a little bit more like that woman
than we care to think that God is
giving us is filling our lives
with a million different gifts
that we take for granted,
and then things go wrong and we think,
why does this always happen to me,
perspective matters.
And one of the things the psalmist says is
you want to have more life,
look for amazing.
And every time you see something amazing,
ask yourself, what's this?
Tell me about God.
I looked out my backyard like Wednesday
and there were six deer in my backyard.
Six right now I just, I just smile
because I've been looking
for amazing all week
since I started studying this.
And I was just going, oh God,
well, what did I skip?
Now, some of you who are hunters
might have a different feel
about having six deer in your backyard.
I just found it, fascinating.
Right?
Look for amazing. That's the first thing.
The second thing is read for life.
Read for life.
You know, there's a limit to what
you can know about God from creation.
So that's
why the psalmist moves right to Scripture.
Yes, guys, what is this for?
Why do we even have the Bible?
If you read the Bible and somewhere
to ask you, why do you read the Bible?
What would you save
if you don't read the Bible,
someone would ask you,
why don't you read the Bible?
What would you say?
But the psalmist gives us
four things that the Bible does for
us, that Scripture does for us.
And he starts it in verse seven.
He says, the law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving
the soul, reviving the soul.
Life can be exhausting,
right?
From work to marriage to children
to family to relationship.
Sometimes you get
what happens when it's your body
isn't just the thing that's tired,
but your soul is weary.
What do you do if you're like me,
you might settle for distractions.
You might binge on Netflix, or you.
You begin to just flip
through social media, or
you go down a rabbit hole on the internet,
or you get to your hobby
and bury yourself in your hobby.
What happens
when you come out of the distraction?
Your soul is still weary.
Your soul will not be refreshed until
it gets the food for which it was created.
That's why the psalmist says,
this is like like honey, there's a reason
that that Jesus says in Matthew chapter
11, come to me,
all you who are weary and heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,
for I am gentle and
lowly, and you will find rest
for your souls.
That's the first thing.
The second thing the psalmist says
is this the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple,
where do you go for wisdom?
Where do you go?
Go for what is true.
To find out what is true.
Zach said last week
that the further we get from God,
it seems like the crazier
our culture gets.
I watched it,
a hearing earlier this week
where a senator was asking
a medical doctor this question
can a biological man get pregnant?
And the doctor
could not answer that question.
She said, that's a complicated question.
And that the senator is going.
It's not complicated.
Can a biological man get pregnant?
What happened?
How do we get there?
I looked up in ChatGPT.
How many genders are there?
Spits out.
There are 72 genders
other than male and female.
You untether
yourself from the wisdom of God.
There's no telling where you go.
And then you read.
In the beginning,
God made them male and female,
and it's like you sigh a sigh of relief
and feel like I'm.
I'm finally back.
I'm on solid ground.
The psalmist says, this is to make
you give wisdom to the simple.
You want to know what's true? Look here,
then he says, the precepts of the Lord
are right, rejoicing the heart.
If you came to church on Christmas
Eve, this year,
our text was in Luke chapter 15,
the parable of the Lost Sheep.
If you were at one of the services
where I spoke, you heard me talk about how
I would use that story to tell that story
to my children when they were little.
And now I tell it tell that story
to my grandchildren as they're little.
And whenever I do it, I personalize it.
I like I have a two year old
grandson named Malachi, and I would say,
I will grab him, pull him up
close and say, hey, Malachi,
there was a shepherd with a hundred sheep,
and one of them was named Malachi.
Sheep.
And then I talk about how Malachi sheep
wandered off.
And the shepherd look, for what I'm
trying to do is rejoice his little heart,
because there's a
neuroscientist named Kurt Thompson
who is fond of saying this.
Every single one of us,
we come out of the womb
looking for someone who is looking for us.
You came out of the womb
looking for someone, looking for you.
Where Jesus is telling us
in Luke chapter 15,
the God of the universe
is the one who is looking for you,
who searches for you,
who loves you, who rejoices over you,
and then finally, the psalmist
says, the fear of the Lord
or the commandment of the Lord
is pure, enlightening the eyes.
That means every once in a while
you're going to be reading the Bible.
You're going to see something
you've never seen before.
One of the great things about preaching
is that you get to spend so much time
on a passage that I will have at least one
moment,
and then I get to share it with you.
For this week, it was that that
information about the son,
that the son is converting
4 million tonnes of matter into energy
every second.
We'll do that
for the next 5 billion years.
Ever since I read that,
I go outside in the morning
just to see the sunrise, because it's
like God's saying, good morning, Joe.
And I get to say, good morning, Lord.
And every time the sun sets,
it's like God saying, good night, Joe.
And I get to say good night, Lord.
And that will happen every day of my life.
It will happen every day of yours.
Listen,
if you want more life in 2026,
if I could give you a pill
that would give you wisdom,
that would refresh
your soul, that would rejoice your heart,
that would give you an moment
with no side effects.
You would take that pill every single day.
And so the
psalmist says, you want more life in 2026.
Read this.
Read it for life.
Then the the final thing the psalmist
says, it's pray for heart.
Look for amazing, read for life.
Pray for heart.
Now I say pray for heart.
I don't mean pray for life
to get more difficult.
I'm not saying to pray
that life would give you more challenges.
I'm talking about the
what the psalmist asked
God to do towards the end of this psalm.
Sweet.
The psalmist says, verse 12 and 13,
who can discern his errors?
Declare me innocent from hidden faults.
Keep back
your servant also from presumptuous sins.
Let them not have dominion over me.
There are two things
that the psalmist is asking God to do
is to keep, to give him more life,
to keep him from moving away from life.
And what he says is, show me, stop me.
Those are the two things.
Show me, stop me.
When the psalmist says,
who can discern his errors?
There's some real insight there with the
psalmist is saying is, I have blind spots.
Show me my blind spots become
before they become
so serious
that they drain my my life away.
So I'm 66 years old now.
I'll be 67 in a couple of months.
I don't know if this is normal, but
I don't know when this started to happen.
But as I've gotten older,
I start to realize that
every time I get a new pain,
I wonder if how serious it is.
Like I get a headache
and I wonder what a tumor feels like,
I don't know, I don't know if it's normal,
but this is what I know.
I know that diseases don't happen
spontaneously.
I know that arteries clog over time
before you when you don't realize it.
I know that cancer cells grow over time,
and it happens before.
You know, now that I've made everyone
terribly self-conscious
and concerned
what's happening
deep down in your soul, do you know,
are there
are there spiritual habits that you have
that are doing damage,
that are killing you
softly, but you just don't know?
That's what the psalmist is saying.
The psalmist is saying, listen,
I know you want more life for me.
I want more life for me,
but I have blind spots.
Would you show me?
Show me if there is a
a small sin that I don't see,
if I'm becoming more comfortable
being critical of people
show me
if I am embellishing and exaggerating.
And it doesn't seem like a big deal,
but it will be.
Show me if I'm becoming more selfish
and more anxious and more fearful
and more prideful.
Show me what is happening
so I can keep it from becoming a disease
deep down in my soul.
Will you show me right?
Listen, I just want you to know,
in all the years that I have been
a pastor, I have seen this happen
more times than I want to count.
Where something starts,
like a small thing,
a little bit of a critical spirit.
A grudge that someone cannot,
will not forgive.
A little pride.
And then it starts to grow
until it absolutely wipes someone out.
So your spiritual health
is like your physical health.
It is connected to not just what you do,
but also what you don't do.
And that's why the second prayer
of the psalmist is stop me, stop me.
This is verse 13 when he says,
keep, keep back
your servant also from presumptuous sins.
A presumptuous
sin is a is something you know is a sin,
and you don't think it's that serious.
And there are people that will tell me
this and tell Zach this,
all of our pastors, they'll say, yeah,
I know God doesn't want me to do this,
but but I don't think it's that bad.
I'm just going to keep doing it.
And what the psalmist says is, stop me.
You know, there's an old saying
that you can choose your sin,
but you can't choose the consequences.
You don't know when you're about when
a sin is going to lead you over a cliff.
That's what the psalmist has said.
So what you're doing when you pray stop me
is saying, God, I give you permission
to do spiritual surgery in my life.
If there is something
I am doing that I know I'm doing,
I don't think it's a big thing.
You can.
You have my permission to do whatever
you need to do to intervene to stop it.
That may mean somebody
picking up your phone and seeing a window
open that you thought you had closed,
but that would eventually
lead you into an affair
that would destroy your life.
It may mean you starting to wanting
to share a piece of gossip to a friend
about a mutual friend,
and then that person gets distracted
and walks away, and you realize that
what you were about to do
if it got back to your other friend
would destroy your relationship for years.
Listen,
if you want more life in 2026,
this is how.
What do you want to do?
What do you want to see when you look back
and December
from on this year,
I'll tell you what Jesus wants to see.
You, want you to see more life, more
flourishing, more abundance,
and the way to do that look for amazing.
It's there every day, every day.
Look for amazing read for life.
Pray for hard.
Ask God, show me, stop me.
All week I've been writing my journal.
Those three things show me amazing.
And every day I see something,
I say let me read for life.
And every day
God gives me something in His Word.
And then I say, show me and stop me
because I want 2026 to be the best year
ever.
It's like Jesus,
give all of us more life, abundant life.
Would you pray with me,
father in heaven, to come to you?
And I'm so grateful for, Psalm 19.
I'm grateful that you have filled creation
with amazing.
I pray that you would help us, all of us,
to give us eyes to see it.
And then I pray that you would help us
to read for life to
to let you refresh us
and encourage us and strengthen us,
give us wisdom.
And then I pray for all of us
that you would show us our blind spots
and stop us from any sin
that would destroy our lives,
give us abundant life.
We pray
in Christ's name. Amen.