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Life-Cycle of the Believer: a Crescendo of Praise

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PENINSULA BIBLE CHURCH CUPERTINO LIFE-CYCLE OF THE BELIEVER: Catalog No. 7153 A CRESCENDO OF PRAISE Psalms Dorman Followwill July 18th, 1999 Over the past year, my world has been turned upside- forward, the journey away from the “self” and toward our down. Having embarked on the path of being a vocational eternal God begins, and it is a journey we see traced in the pastor for the rest of my life, and after eight years of walking book of Psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures. Here we find Da- along that path, suddenly the plan changed drastically a year vid, a man after God’s own heart, working out his entire spiri- ago. It became clear to me that my God was calling me back tual life with his Lord, in all its agonies and ecstasies, on into the business world for a season. This past year has been a paper. Through it all he came to know himself very deeply. much different journey than any I have ever taken, and it has But more importantly, he came to know God. And even more forced me to think and pray about what God wants my life to importantly, he grew in praising God, the ultimate end of this look like now. So, since this has been so greatly on my heart life and the preoccupation of the next. and in my prayers over the past year, I want to take the next The path toward knowing God intimately and learning the two weeks to do a short series on the topic, finding God’s vision crucial importance of praising him lies through the Psalms. for your life. David grew mightily through writing seventy-five psalms, When your world gets turned upside-down and you be- half of the book of Psalms. Moses wrote two psalms himself. come lost in a wilderness not of your own choosing, it can Jonah prayed a prayer entirely borrowed from phrases in the rattle you to your bones. It can make you cry out for direc- Psalms while in the belly of the fish, at his crisis point. And tion, a way to get back to reality. When all of this change was Jesus Christ quoted from the Psalter more than from any oth- coming down in my life last summer, my family and I were er work of the Hebrew Scriptures, showing that the way of spending time up in the panhandle of Idaho, while I worked our Lord also lay through the Psalms. All these great heroes, with a friend on a short project at his church in Spokane, and the greatest of all, discovered the way of knowing God Washington. We had the privilege of living in a house on intimately, and praising him no matter what, through the Schweitzer Mountain, a ski resort. This place was quite wild: Psalms. Let us follow along their way. we saw bears on the mountain, and a bald eagle flying about fifteen feet over our heads. While we were there, my wife Overview of Psalms Blythe decided to teach our children about wilderness survi- val, using the book, Practical Outdoor Survival. That book de- What a joy it is to read and study the Psalms! One day a scribes exactly what happens to us when we get lost in the couple of years ago, I was preparing to teach a book study on wilderness. First, we panic. We realize our reality has funda- the Psalms. I sat down to read and take notes on the patterns mentally changed; we aren’t in Kansas anymore. Panic sets in, across the entire book of Psalms. It took about fifteen hours, and the first thing we do is react out of panic: we start scurry- but it was one of the great days of my life. I discovered that ing around, choosing the most likely direction and heading the book of Psalms is called Tehillim in Hebrew. Tehillim that way. But what usually happens is that the panicky per- means “Praises.” That is the title and the point of the book: son ends up walking in a big circle. And when he realizes he’s Praises. back where he started, the panic doubles. Psalms is a master work of diversity. It is composed of five The crucial thing to remember when you are lost in the separate books, each of which is punctuated at the end with a wilderness is to stop and not panic. The best first step is to doxology of praise or blessing (see Pss 41:13; 72:18-19; 89:52; find a compass. When you are in the wild, consult your com- 106:48 and 150:1-6). Because there are one hundred and fifty pass or find some natural way to locate true north. Once you psalms covering every imaginable human emotion and expe- find your compass and identify true north, you have a refer- rience, the book is difficult to classify. Some scholars over the ence point. From there, you can identify your relative posi- past century have decided to lump all the psalms into two tion, and plot your pathway home. categories: psalms of lament and psalms of thanksgiving. Others arrange the psalms in as many as ten different catego- The best thing about the past year is finding my true north ries, complete with sub-categories. There are Messianic once again, and seeing afresh this great compass called the psalms prefiguring Christ; the so-called imprecatory psalms Bible. Our God is our true north, the Ancient of Days, the One where the writer calls upon God’s judgment to fall on his ene- who is the same yesterday, today and forever. His word that mies; there are psalms entirely consisting of praise; others en- stands forever while the grasses fade is our compass. And in tirely consisting of lament; some are psalms of instruction that word is a book that traces the life cycle of every believer, which are not even prayers at all, and in many of them the what our lives should and ultimately will look like. It is the chief theme is the hesed, or the loyal love of God. If nothing book of Psalms, the book we will study together this morning. else, this book is a collage of diversity, where virtually any at- A believer’s life is a long journey from self-preoccupation tempt at classification seems to fall short. to God-preoccupation and praise. As babies and children all One of the more persuasive classifications I have encoun- the way through high school and college, we are consumed tered is the comparison between each of the five books of the with ourselves. For some of us, this self-preoccupation contin- Torah with the five books of the Psalms. Thus, Book One is ues much longer. But when the believer is indwelled by the analogous in topic and theme to Genesis (man and creation); Spirit of God when he or she becomes a Christian, a new Pres- Book Two to Exodus (deliverance and redemption); Book ence is asserted in the very center of our lives. From that point Three to Leviticus (worship and sanctuary); Book Four to Numbers (wilderness and wandering), and Book Five to Deu- Psalm 42: “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul teronomy (Scripture and praise). While this has some merit, pants for Thee, O God.” The problems have not disappeared, there is a more living, exciting way of classifying the Psalter. I with such questions as, “Why are you in despair, O my soul?” believe the book chronicles the spiritual life cycle of the be- still lingering in Psalms 42 and 43, and there is a deeper liever, from self-preoccupation to praise. searching going on. There is the realization of the deeper truth of resting in God himself discovered in Psalm 46: “cease Psalms: The Spiritual Life Cycle of the Believer striving, and know that I am God.” There is the remarkable observation of David in Psalm 51 that “the sacrifices of God I believe Psalms surveys the life cycle of the believer based are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou on observing the flow of the psalms from Psalm 1 through wilt not despise.” There is the growing confidence based on Psalm 150. Psalms begins with a definitional description of experience that if you “cast your burden upon the LORD…He the man or woman who knows God, in Psalm 1: who is a be- will sustain you,” in Psalm 55. There is the dawning of under- liever and who is not. Then it chronicles the coronation of the standing in Psalm 56 that “This I know, that God is for me.” believer into life as a king or queen before the Lord in the cor- But there is also the continuing suffering encapsulated in such onation psalm of ancient Judah, in Psalm 2. This starting lines as “O God, Thou hast rejected us. Thou hast broken us,” point in Psalm 2 is crucial: the believer is crowned a king or in Psalm 60, and “Reproach has broken my heart, and I am so queen immediately upon inviting the Holy Spirit to live in- sick” in Psalm 69. As with book one, there are only two side. The kingdom of heaven is a fine thing: everyone is psalms devoted exclusively to the praise of God, Psalms 48 crowned a king or queen from the outset. As C.S. Lewis used and 65. to say, every believer is a king or queen under wraps.
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