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131:1 O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
2 But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
3 O Israel, hope in the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore.
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Our text today is Psalm 131, so you can turn to that in your bibles or you can find it in the worship guide, Psalm 131, and, if you're new to redeemer, this summer we're taking some time to go through the Psalms, which are sometimes called the prayer book of the bible. So these are a 150 prayers, written down that have been part of the church's worship for 3000 years, nearly now. And some of these Psalms, they reflect emotions and experiences that we're going through and so they sort of speak words for us. And sometimes the Psalms, they train our hearts and so they introduce or lead us through an experience of prayer that may not be natural to us, but that we need. And for me at least, that's what this psalm is today.
Joseph Rhea:So I'm going to read the text, as you can find it in your worship guide. I'm going to make 2 small changes as I do though. See, in verse 1 and in verse 3, if you got a a Bible open, you probably see that the word Lord is in small caps there. What that means is that when David wrote the Psalm, he didn't write the word Lord. He wrote Yahweh, which was the covenant name of Israel's God.
Joseph Rhea:And the reason that's important is that this text, if it just has the generic word Lord in it, it can feel like it might be some kind of mindfulness exercise that just happens to be in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, but it's anything but that. This is a specific prayer to a specific God based on that God's specific character. And we're gonna talk through that more when we come to it, but, to reflect that reality, I'm gonna read his name where it comes up. So let me read Psalm a 131 for us. Oh Yahweh, my heart is not lifted up.
Joseph Rhea:My eyes are not raised too high. I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me, but I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me. Oh, Israel hope in Yahweh from this time forth and forevermore. Let's pray.
Joseph Rhea:Oh, Yahweh, we need your hope in our lives of distraction, desperation, despair. We can feel lost, But you find us. And when you find us, we don't just find you in the moment, we find a hope that carries us through into eternity. And so I pray today that through this prayer, you would help us grow in being able to calm and quiet our souls. That we could remember who you are and have our hope restored.
Joseph Rhea:We'll pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. So I want us to start with a moment from one of my all time favorite books. It's the return of the king, which is part of the Lord of the Rings series. Now if your eyes are glazing over already, stay with me.
Joseph Rhea:It's a short passage, and there's no weird names in it. I promise. To set it up, 2 characters have been journeying through this wasteland for days. They have very little food and water, and they're under constant danger. So they're kind of deep in their enemy's homeland, and there aren't just physical dangers that are kind of haunting them or they're having to watch out for.
Joseph Rhea:There's also this thick black smog that's being pumped out over the sky, and it's sort of obscuring the sun during the day and then the sky at night. So they're overshadowed, you know, literally and emotionally by fear. But one night, one of the characters, his name is Sam, sees something that changes his soul. And so let me read. It says there, Sam saw a bright star twinkle for a while.
Joseph Rhea:The beauty of it smote his heart as he looked up out of the forsaken land and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. Putting away all fear, he cast himself into a deep, untroubled sleep. See, Sam's life has been clouded over by the shadow that hides the sky and fills him with fear and dread.
Joseph Rhea:But there's a moment where the shadow breaks and Sam can see the stars through it. He could see the world that the shadow can't touch. And that moment of clarity restores him to hope. I share that because it seems like more and more people in our world today are noticing the fact that our world seems to live under some kind of weird shadow right now. That symptoms of anxiety and despair are skyrocketing, particularly among Gen z and those younger.
Joseph Rhea:More and more people are agreeing with statements like, I often feel like my life has no purpose, or I don't know what the future holds for people like me. Fears about politics or the economy or the climate seem to overshadow our souls and fill us with desperation and despair. And I'd love to blame it all on forces out there somewhere, but just from my own experience as often as not, it seems like I make my own shadow, that I pump out plenty of anxiety, selfish ambition, or just inner noise that can make my soul feel like a room filled with smoke. When I try to bring that into my prayer life, then I just sort of buzz around in this distracted, rambly interior monologue and leave feeling like I didn't meet God at all. It was all shadow.
Joseph Rhea:No sky. And when I live under that, the more I do, the more my life starts to feel that way as well. If that resonates with you at all, if this is a reality that you struggle with, then this prayer we're studying is for you. Because as we're gonna see, David comes into the prayer primed to pump out shadow with the best of us. But by the end, he's saying, oh, Israel, hope in Yahweh from this time forth and forevermore.
Joseph Rhea:He sees hope that light and high beauty that the shadow, even his own shadow can't touch. If I could put a name to this kind of prayer, I would call it quiet souled prayer, and it leads us from desperation and despair to hope. Quiet souled prayer has 3 steps, which can each be found in one verse of the song. As we examine the steps, I'd invite you to think about how this could fit into your prayer life where you could find time even if it's just, you know, 5 or 10 minutes to start to go through this like a training exercise to cut through your shadows and see the hope that we have in God. The first step of Quiet Soul Prayer is to restrain our ego.
Joseph Rhea:We restrain our ego. Look at verse 1 again. Oh, Yahweh. My heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high.
Joseph Rhea:I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. This might sound confusing. These phrases, a heart lifted up, eyes raised high, occupying myself with great and marvelous things, they can sound like acts of worship, but in the Hebrew, these are actually expressions of pride. See, a heart lifted up in this sense isn't a heart that's sort of held up to God in an act of worship. It's a one that's raised up on a pedestal.
Joseph Rhea:In one of the histories of ancient Israel that's called 2nd Chronicles, we read this. When King Uzziah was strong, he grew proud. It's literally his heart was lifted up to his destruction, for he was unfaithful to the Lord his God and entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense. So Uzziah took pride in his strength, and in his pride, he performed an act of worship that only a priest was allowed to do. So he sort of tried to redefine the terms of his relationship with God because his heart was lifted up.
Joseph Rhea:In the same way, raised eyes here as an expression not of lifting my eyes up to look for God, but of standing arrogantly in God's presence as if we're equals. It's like saying, hey, you might be the infinite, eternal, all powerful God of the universe, but I've got some ideas too and I think it's my turn to set the tone for us. Likewise, occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me sounds like a positive thing. It sounds like celebrating the fact that God is too great and too marvelous for me, which he is. And that is a good thing if that's what David was doing right now is worshiping that.
Joseph Rhea:But what he's talking about here is demanding to know more than we can know as human beings. It's coming to God with a list of questions that he had better answer now. See, our lives present us with many things that we just will never get answers for on this side of eternity. Why does God allow suffering and injustice? Why does it sometimes feel like he's absent?
Joseph Rhea:Why don't my friends and family members believe these things the same way I do despite the fact that I've prayed for them and I've talked to them about them? There's nothing wrong with having those questions and sometimes there's nothing wrong with bringing them to God. In our last 2 weeks, we looked at 2 Psalms that do exactly that. They bring God our questions and our sorrows and our pain. But there are times where that's not what we need.
Joseph Rhea:There are times where that's not the wise or the right thing to do. Where to stand before God demanding to set the agenda for our time is an act not of dependence, but of ego. And it's just gonna put more shadow in our sky. In this prayer, David is saying, I don't need to set the agenda right now. I don't need to seek answers.
Joseph Rhea:I need to remember that as one pastor has said, God is God and I'm not. Quiet soul prayer restrains my ego. It doesn't mean I don't have those desires or questions, but in that moment, I'm not giving them the microphone. I don't need more me. So in practice, this means making time for prayer where I'm not coming to talk, but to listen.
Joseph Rhea:I'm not coming to set an agenda, but to receive 1. I might have 42 things on my mind that I wanna talk about, but in this moment, I'm tuning those out so I might hear what's on God's mind instead. So the first step of quiet soul prayer is restraining my ego so I come to listen instead of talk. That takes us to the second step. We rest in God's presence.
Joseph Rhea:We rest in God's presence. Look at verse 2. But I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me. So David says I've calmed and quieted my soul, and he illustrates this with the image of a weaned child with its mother.
Joseph Rhea:Now I'm sure that like me, you use the word weaned in conversation, like, once a week. But in case you don't, weaned means no longer nursing. So in the ancient near east, the context in which this is written, people often nurse children on and off until they were 3 or 4 years old due to food scarcity. It was the way to keep your child, you know, alive through nutrition. And so the word weaned here, a weaned child, that word can also be used to talk about ripe fruit.
Joseph Rhea:And so it connotes a level of maturity. And so the idea is that a weaned child is a child who's mature enough to take their desires, to take their hunger, to take their appetites. And rather than just freak out and act on those, whatever they're feeling, to restrain those things, to kind of hold them down and wait. It's like a child old enough to sit still and quiet even when he's hungry. So quiet soul prayer puts those desires aside and chooses rest.
Joseph Rhea:My kids could all do that perfectly by age 4 for what it's worth. That is very false. So this isn't just a prayer to reflect a feeling of calm and quiet that we naturally have. This isn't the chilling at the beach in a hammock psalm. It's a reminder that there are times where we need to take the things that trouble our souls.
Joseph Rhea:Our worries about money, our concerns about family or friends or a boyfriend or girlfriend, our questions about the state of the world and say, not right now. We need rest more. But we don't just need to rest. David doesn't compare himself to a child sitting in a room alone. He says I've calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother.
Joseph Rhea:His rest comes from being in the presence of someone he trusts. The child is able to calm her desires because her mother is near and she trusts her. Quiet soul prayer is able to calm its desires and struggles because God is near and I trust him. This is where we begin to see that this isn't simply a meditation exercise that would fit just as well in any religious or secular framework. Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Christian woman whose family helped smuggle Jews out of Nazi occupied Holland during World War 2.
Joseph Rhea:They were caught for this and imprisoned in concentration camps, and Corrie was one of the few family members to survive the ordeal. She writes this. If you look at the world, you'll be distressed. If you look within, you'll be depressed. If you look at God, you'll be at rest.
Joseph Rhea:I don't know if she's doing this consciously, but her quote echoes one from Augustine of Hippo, the African theologian. He writes, you have made us for yourself, oh, God. And our hearts are restless until they rest in you. See, we were made for our souls to rest, to experience calm and peace in the presence of God. Dallas Willard writes this about this kind of prayer.
Joseph Rhea:He writes, in silence, you will find yourself and God will find you in new ways. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence, we come to attend. See, when my ego is unrestrained and my soul is like a toddler freaking out, I can't attend to God.
Joseph Rhea:He's still there just like the night sky is always there, but my shadow is blocking him out in that moment and I'm blind to him. But when I quiet my soul, I'm letting the sky clear so that I can see God. In Psalm 46, verse 10, God says, be still and know that I am God. When I rest my soul and remember that he's there, I become ready to see him and to hear him in ways that I just can't when I'm noisy inside. And so if you're starving for God's presence, try practicing calming and quieting your soul before God.
Joseph Rhea:Will you be able to do it perfectly? I hope so. I definitely can't. I have to do this over and over and over again when I attempt this kind of prayer. But the more that we practice, the better we get at it.
Joseph Rhea:And the reality of God, like Willard said, can stand in the midst of our lives more fully. So we restrain our egos, we rest in God's presence. When David does these things, he doesn't just get a moment of inner quiet or mindfulness, those are nice. In fact, there's actually demonstrable psychological benefit to them. They can help us cope with stress.
Joseph Rhea:But like we saw at the beginning of this time, this Psalm isn't about cope, it's about hope. Because the Psalm is so short, I'm gonna read the whole thing again so we can hear where these practices lead us in verse 3. Oh Yahweh, my heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high. I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me, but I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother.
Joseph Rhea:Like a weaned child is my soul within me. Oh, Israel, hope in Yahweh from this time forth and forevermore. The third step of quiet soul prayer is that we remember God's character. We remember God's character. David does this, and it makes him turn from the noise of his own ego to tell his brothers and sisters, oh, Israel hope in Yahweh now and forever.
Joseph Rhea:This is where God's name becomes vital. The name Yahweh comes from the Hebrew for I am. So in the book of Exodus, which is one of the histories of ancient Israel, is about, 4 or 500 years before this was written. God calls a man named Moses to be his agent for rescuing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. And Moses asks, when I go tell the Israelites that God is setting them free, who should I tell them you are?
Joseph Rhea:In other words, he's saying, which god exactly are you? And God says, I am who I am, which means I'm the one who truly is. I was here from eternity past before the world of space and time existed. I created all of it. I'm holding it together right now.
Joseph Rhea:I see you, Moses, here in this moment. I also see the planets revolving around the farthest stars in the farthest galaxies in the universe. Yahweh is the eternal, absolute, all powerful, omnipresent creator and ruler of everything. He's the I am. And he's not just that.
Joseph Rhea:See, Yahweh had personally bound himself to Israel's ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by making covenants with them. And then he went on to rescue the Israelites from slavery to the greatest political superpower in their region of the world at the time, and he made them into a nation who were free and, dedicated on their own. So Yahweh bound himself by grace to this lowly sinful people, and he promised that he would never forsake them. So that even when they blew it in terms of their covenant, which they blew it big, that he wouldn't abandon them even then, but he would come back to one day purify the whole earth, including them, recreate the entire world without sin or suffering, and establish an eternal kingdom on the recreated earth with one of David's descendants on his throne. And they would see him and know him face to face.
Joseph Rhea:That's what David remembers when he reflects on the character of Yahweh. He remembers a whole history of gracious commitment to God's people and a promised future that's as certain as God's own power and name. Remembering that character gives David hope. And if we are Yahweh's people like David was, this is our hope too. Whatever you're going through right now, whatever your circumstances look like, if you're part of God's people, your story has a happy ending.
Joseph Rhea:It doesn't mean you won't suffer here. In fact, it's almost guaranteed that we do. God doesn't promise us health or a good economy or a spouse on this side of eternity because this isn't where our hope is stored. But one day God is going to remake this world without sin or suffering or evil. And he's going to recreate you, too, in a body that can't hurt anymore and a soul that can't sin anymore.
Joseph Rhea:You're going to know him face to face like we are right now, and you're gonna belong to him, to the most glorious and beautiful being in the entire creation, like a husband and wife belong to one another. And you're gonna be family with everyone who shares that hope on this side of things across the world and throughout time. If you belong to Yahweh now, like David did, his hope is your hope. How do we know this? This is where we'll close.
Joseph Rhea:See, a 1000 years after this psalm was written, one of David's descendants, Jesus of Nazareth, was arguing with a group of Jewish leaders about Abraham. And in the argument, Jesus says, before Abraham was, I am not I was, which would have been weird enough because he was talking about 2000 years before he calls himself the Greek version of Yahweh, the covenant name of Israel's God. And those Jewish leaders immediately pick up rocks to stone him to death because they understood exactly what he was claiming in that moment. He was making the insane claim that he was the eternal infinite omnipresent all powerful God of the universe. Insane thing to claim except that he went on to be crucified and die.
Joseph Rhea:And then on the 3rd day after that, to rise again from the dead, not having sort of made it up out of the grave or come back to life like Rocky and, you know, at the end of a boxing match, but as a new creation who's completely free now of sin and suffering and death that death can't touch anymore. That power, that resurrection proved that he was who he said he was. He was Yahweh. God, the son made flesh and blood and his resurrection, his recreation in a body beyond the reach of suffering and death was the down payment or the proof of concept, if you will, of the resurrection of the entire world. To go back to our Lord of the Rings quote, the light and high beauty aren't just up there somewhere.
Joseph Rhea:They're coming down here. In another place, Jesus said, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find a rest for your souls. See, Christians know that we don't have hope because we're a good enough person to impress God or we because we pray any kind of prayer, let alone prayers like these perfectly. We have hope because Jesus made it possible for us to let go of our egos and trust in him.
Joseph Rhea:He lived a perfect human life, and he gives us that perfection credited to us as righteousness. He died as a sacrifice for our sins so that we could be forgiven for them. And he is now in the presence of God, the father in heaven, so that when we commit to him as our only hope and as our only king to set the agenda, not just about prayer life, but of my entire life. When we do that, we come into that presence too. By the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, we can rest our souls and experience hope now and forevermore.
Joseph Rhea:Let's pray. Jesus, we need the hope that we see in this passage. We need the shadows cut away, including our own shadows so we can see your character, so so we can see your power, so we can see your grace and have hope in you. I pray that you would help us learn to restrain our egos, to rest in your presence, and to remember your character that we might experience hope in a fresh way. We pray these things in Jesus' name.
Joseph Rhea:Amen.