Psalm 93: The King Above the Floods

 Okay. Friends, if you would find your seats and grab a Bible and open with me to Psalm 93.

Somebody was describing the, the liturgy of our church. Every, every, every church has a liturgy. Of course, every church has a liturgy. As somebody was describing our liturgy, and they were. Talking to me about, you know, um, halftime and I was like, halftime and like Yeah. You know, the time when we all like talk to each other and we go and get coffee and we sneak Yes.

The passing of the piece. That's right. But as an a lover of SEC, uh, football of course. And as the football season begins to ramp back up. Yes. Call it what you will. Do you know that traditionally in the history of the church, this time of passing of the peace was a time when people would literally say to each other, the peace of Christ be with you, and the response would be.

And also with you, some of you know that, and it was a time where when we were an agrarian society and we would gather for church, they would hear the church bells. So people would drop their plows and they would run to church. They would come to church sometimes, you know, sweaty. They would come into church and if there was someone with whom they needed to reconcile before they came to communion, they would do that.

During the passing of the peace, they would extend peace and forgiveness to each other, and so. Um, let's not let that old ancient meaning, uh, go by the wayside. If there's somebody in this church with whom you need to reconcile, what a great opportunity it would be to do it during halftime.

If you're willing and able, would you stand with me as you read from Psalm 93? Remember, the Psalms were put together in ways that help you understand the spiritual dynamic of our lives. And as we come to Psalm 93, we have entered, as we've learned these last several weeks into book four, which takes us out of the depths of despair.

The saddest Psalm, again, was in Psalm 88, and now they're painting a picture for us to talk about how God explodes upon the world through his character and his power, and is able to subdue every foe In Psalm 93, we have a beautiful picture of that. The Lord reigns. He is robed in majesty. The Lord is robed.

He has put on strength as his belt. Yes, the world is established. It shall never be moved. Your throne is established from old. You are from everlasting. The floods have lifted up. Oh Lord. The floods have lifted up their voice. The floods lift up their roaring mightier than the thunders of many waters mightier than the waves of the sea.

The Lord on high is mighty. Your decrees are very trustworthy, holiness, befits your house, oh Lord, forevermore. The grass withers and the flowers fade. But God's word stands forever, and this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated, please.

I read this week a article by Victoria Clayton in The Atlantic who was talking about the way that we have changed our view towards summer camps in many quarters, and a lot of us are thinking, of course, about summer camps in light of the tragedy at Camp Mystic. And, um, other camps along the Guadalupe in central Texas.

But this article in The Atlantic explains that many kids are too anxious to go to summer camp alone, and many parents are too stressed out to send them. What if they went together? And so the rise of family camps in the last couple of decades, some of you have experienced that because you yourselves have been to these family camps.

Clayton explains that the. Family camps across America is not just a quirky new trend, but it's a signpost that family camp is trying to fit an age of anxious parents and anxious kids who respectively will, may feel, as she says, wary about letting go or nervous about attending camps on their own. And that picture rings true for some of us, doesn't it?

Some of us who have perhaps anxious children or you yourselves feel anxious yourself. And it's not just a uniquely American problem overseas in Britain. Uh, they tried to take South by Southwest, which I know some of you have been to in Austin. They tried to take south by Southwest, uh, over to London and in London in its shortage district.

South by Southwest set up shop to have a European debut of South by Southwest. But this article in the Brightly Newsletter of the Economist spoke about how South by Southwest in London was commandeered. All these creatives and all these artists and all these musicians came together. But the prevailing topic at South by Southwest was not the music and was not the art.

It was the fear of what artificial general intelligence might do. And so this article in The Economist was talking about and this great debut of South by Southwest in Europe. AI anxiety prevailed in this world of anxious parents in America. In this world of AI anxiety for our European brothers and sisters, we live in a world where it just seems like cascading flood after flood, after flood.

Weigh us down. And I was thinking about this recently because my wife Lauren bought a, a weighted vest. Any of you ever had one of these weighted vests? You know, you wear these weighted vests to help your bone density, you know, over time. And you go on walks with these weighted vests and it's about 15 pounds.

And I put this weighted vest on and I thought, ah, this is no, no problem. But then I, I thought, what if you took those little weights that are go in those weighted vests, and what if you added one a day?

And over time what felt pretty easy to wear begins to really weigh you down so that you can't really even move very fast or very far anymore. And as your pastor may I say, for some of you, that's what it's been like as you have taken in your social media habits. And you have listened to the headlines and you have become obsessed even with headlines that do not affect your local area, but that you begin to own problems that you can't fix or even really speak to right now.

But wait, after, wait, after, wait. These things have begun to weigh you down and I'm. Uh, incredibly aware of this. It seems more and more, uh, in this season of my life, I, uh, my soul feels weighted down as a husband, as a father, as a pastor, and I feel like I'm kind of wearing this spiritual weighted vest. I, I struggle sometimes feeling numb, like I'm just going through the motion.

You know what? I really wanna study the text and pastor you, but I have a long to-do list and that to-do list. When it gets interrupted, I can feel myself rising up in frustration just seems like it just gets added to day by day by day. And so the temptation that we have to numb ourself is so very real.

And there are a thousand different ways to numb ourselves. Sometimes we feel on the one hand that we're callous. We wanna avoid the news altogether, and sometimes we feel. Very defensive that we wanna pull our kids back into us, into the nest and protect them from the wider world. Both of those can be ways of numbing ourself, and maybe you can relate, you know, what more can we say about the health issues, even in our church, about the church transitions that are happening even in our midst about the ways, the questions that we're asking.

Job transitions, thinking about moving. Listen, all of these are little weights. Weight by weight, by weight, by weight. Are you, do you feel it? And so these five verses for us are just the elixir of our souls. They are a medicine for us because what they say to us is The Lord reigns above the turmoil in power and holiness so we can rest secure.

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. The Lord reigns above the turmoil and he doesn't just reign above it. He reigns in power and in holiness. So that we can rest secure. So verse one of Psalm 93 starts out with this declarative shout, this anchor statement. He says, the Lord reigns. He is robed in majesty, Yahweh, maek.

In Hebrew, it is a declaration. It is a primal boast by the psalmist. In the ancient world, when men would go off to war, they would stand in a line and they would boast. Do you see this? Especially with the Israelite Philistine battle that David, uh, where David stepped in to kill Goliath. Goliath was their boster.

He was the one calling out their God, and yet David was the one who said. To Goliath, as you see Emblazed in the wood. He who rescued me from the lion and the bear will certainly rescue me from you. O Philistine. It was a primal boast and it was doing what Paul says in Galatians six 14. I will boast in nothing else other than the cross of Christ.

And so as Christians, we boast, we are boasting people, but it's not in our own works. It's in the work of Jesus. And here the psalmist gives us medicine for our souls. He boasts for us to teach us how we are to boast. The Lord rains

and it's louder than all the flood waters.

He is robed in majesty twice. It says in Hebrew that he is robed, and if you read it this. Entire Psalm almost reads with a kind of rhetorical pattern and flow that you can almost feel the floodwaters come over you. He is robed in majesty. The Lord is robed. He has robed himself with strength as with belt.

You know, we see this fulfilled in the course in Jesus, who in Revelation 19, Jesus is clothed in a robe. But that robe is that robe is what it is dripped. In blood and it's the conquering king, treading all of his adversaries. And he has his name written, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords. It's as though he has Psalm 93 on his mind.

I reign. I am robed in Majesty Reformed Theological Seminary. John, uh, professor John Frame once said that God's lordship is the central. Fact of scripture and to confess the Lord reigns is to say that he has an absolute control and authority and presence in every sphere of life. And that means that God's reign is the bedrock beneath our anxious world.

Do you know that the Lord reigns or is that something you're still working on? 'cause one day you will know it. But what a privilege it is to be able to boast in that. Now for balm to your anxious soul. RC sprawl once said, if there was one single molecule in the universe running around loose, totally free of God's sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.

But the comfort of Psalm 93. Is that when the flood waters roar? Not one molecule, not one wave, not one anxious thought escapes the rain of Christ. The great theologian Stephen Colbert said in a moment of pastoral, surprising pastoral warmth, when he was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper, he said that faith teaches me that death is not defeat.

That's the great gift of Christ, that death, even death. It is not defeat some of you're caring for aging parents and as you care for those aging parents, you write to say in these really difficult years that even death is not defeat. Amen. You are a strange people o Christian to believe that even death is not to be feared.

Like I spoke of last week in the martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley, when they were burned on Broad Street and Oxford. Even death is not to be feared, and that should make us incredibly humble because we have an eternity fixed in the heavens because of the finished work of Jesus who reigns above all of the floods.

Do you believe this? Victoria Clayton, in our article in the Atlantic said, uh, rights of a woman who says, I was exhausted after trying to get my son all the school services he needs during the school year. And I hoped that nestled in a summer camp together in a national forest, we could forget all of that and try to be happy campers together.

What if the Lord said, Hey, I'm gonna give you something better than summer camp. I'm gonna call it a Sabbath, and it's gonna happen not one week a year. It's gonna happen 52 times a year on Sunday morning, and it's a time when you bring all of your anxious luggage. And you bring your chunk and you bring all of your things and you bring them to worship, and you say, Lord, here I am.

Here's my heart. Take and seal it for your courts above, and you walk into this room and you grab the handle of the front doors of this place, which are shaped like a artistic heart because John Calvin's seal was a heart and a hand as though you say, Lord, even entering into your presence, I offer you my heart.

Do with it what you will because he is a good father who has never let anything in your life happen without purpose, even though you may not understand it on this side.

He loves you. The Lord reigns over the turmoil in power and holiness so you can rest. He is robed in Majesty.

Point two, the Lord is mightier than the roaring flood. Point one is that he's robed in majesty. He reigns in majesty. Verses two to four teach us that the Lord is mightier than the roaring floods. He doesn't deny the chaos. The floods have lifted up. Oh Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice three times.

He uses this language of being lifted up. Na,

in Hebrew. The floods have lifted up. The floods have lifted up. The floods have lifted up. Do you hear it? You can almost hear it rhetorically as you read the psalm In Hebrew, it's the best we can do in English. They have lifted up. You can hear the cascading waves come upon us. They have lifted up their roar.

The Bible is fiercely honest about the existence of the waters. It does not try to say, just ignore it. It does not say be overwhelmed by it. It says address it and use the gospel to help pierce it. So that you can see through those flood waters of the one who reigns above the floods. One of my favorite parts of the book of Mark is when Jesus in, in verses chapters three, four, and five, when, when.

When Mark is explaining, you know, the authority and the power of Jesus, you know, and it says that basically he has power over each of these realms. He has power over, uh, health. He has power over nature. He has power over the universe. And in Mark four, you heard, Jan and James read it earlier, he talks about how when the disciples panicked as the waves roared, and Jesus rose, and all he said was peace.

SH

and the waves were still just as God spoke the world into existence by the power of his word. So Jesus stills the chaos of the natural order by his word.

It's a picture of Psalm 73. Mightier than the thunders of many waters mightier than the waves of the sea. The Lord on high is mighty, and Mark illustrates that for us. Don't underestimate the roar of the floods or the weight of pound by pound by pound being added to you all. The more reason for you to be able to see Jesus who rains over all of those floods.

One of my old students in the northeast when I was a campus minister was a girl named Jen when she was a sophomore. She had always done well in school and she, uh, broke under the pressure of trying to perform. Her parents back home in Arizona were going through a divorce, and she felt torn between staying at school.

The school, her family had worked so hard to try to prepare her for. And going home to support her younger siblings and her professors understood that they were just relentless with deadlines and deadlines, and she was working a part-time job to help keep up with needs. And she described it, uh, like this, she said, everywhere I turned, it felt like I was drowning.

I would lie in bed at night, and I would just feel the panic. My chest was tight, my thoughts wouldn't stop. It was like an electric blanket that just kept heating up. Oh, the gins in the room. The floods have lifted up Their voice. The floods have lifted up their voice. The floods lift up their roaring, but mightier than the thunders of any waters.

The Lord on high is mighty. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Friends, the gospel is not just a set of truths to be believed in. It's a worldview through which you should see everything in life. And when you understand that Jesus has conquered sin and death for us, that he has offered us salvation freely by his grace, you are beginning to understand how you get through the mental meltdown of our larger society.

It's not that every verse in the Bible has a simple antidote to your anxiety, but it is giving you a foundation and a framework through which to see that death, even death itself will not have the final word because Jesus has conquered death on the cross and he has declared his victory in the resurrection.

So that you owe moms as you make those sandwiches for your children every day and you send them off to school or you homeschool and you feel the weight fathers as you go to work and you feel the pressure and feel the weight to perform to provide for your family, the Lord has lifted up the waters little.

You say the Lord reigns and he has given you something better than a summer camp. He has given you something called the church. And he asks us to come and bring our luggage week after week after week to leave it before the table and to take the Lord's table with joy and celebration because the Lord reigns in majesty.

Secondly, the Lord is mightier than the roaring floods. And third, the Lord's word and house are trustworthy forevermore. The Psalm concludes in verse five, and he says, your decrees are very trustworthy. And holiness befits your house. Oh Lord, forevermore. This word decrees or testimony is talking about the covenants that God has made throughout scripture and in an old, um, doctrinal statement that was written in the mid 17th century between 1643 and 1647, it's called the Westminster Larger Catechism.

There's a question that asks, what are the degrees of God and for children? The answer is in the shorter catechism. The decrees of God are his eternal purpose according to the council of his will, whereby for his own glory, he, for ordains whatsoever comes to pass. And as they're about to take this doctrinal statement and submit it, they decided to split it in two, and they decided to make a children's catechism.

The shorter catechism in an adult catechism. And the adult catechism asks the same question, what are the decrees of God? But it answers it this way. The decrees of God are the wise, free and holy acts of the council of his will, whereby from all eternity he has for his own glory unchangeable, for ordained, whenever comes to pass in time.

And I love this, especially concerning angels in men. In other words, God reigns supreme, the Lord reigns. Over the turmoil and power and holiness so that we can rest secure. And then he says, holiness befits your house. Why does he say that? It's a veiled reference, of course, to the temple. And Kosh being holy means to be set apart, being completely other.

When people came to worship Israel's God, they came into his temple, which was marked uniquely indifferent from all the other pagan gods around the world because this God created the world, not with primordial matter, but he created it out of nothing by the power of his word. And when you worship this God, it's unique.

There's different cultural. At the time in the Old Testament, there were different civil laws to mark these people out from the rest of the world. Those laws having been passed. The moral law, of course, still standing, the ceremonial law fulfilled in Jesus, but we still are a holy people set out and marked, and I wonder if people would see your family or see you, and they would see any difference in the way that you continue to submit the anxieties of your heart back to Jesus when it says that holiness befits.

His house. It was talking about the temple, literally in the temple, which now of course is given way to Jesus, who himself is the true temple. In John one 14, it says, the word became flesh and it dwelt among us. And Jesus said in John two that he will destroy the temple and in three days he will raise it up.

And John explains that Jesus was speaking to the temple of his body. And the house of God is no longer a physical place, although we wanna build beautiful things and we want to come to worship in a very particular way because of the weightiness of Jesus's presence in our midst by his spirit. But you are the temple O Trinity, oh guests.

You are the temple and you are extending his imago day, his image across the world as you go, and you lead your lives with integrity at work Monday through Friday. As you homeschool or you send your kids to public school, you send your kids to private school, whatever it is that you do over the rhythms of your week, you are extending God's image in the spheres of influence that you have.

And this becomes for us immensely practical because in a world where everything feels untrustworthy, God's word is trustworthy. Your decrees, it says. Are very trustworthy, covenant certainty and holiness. Befits your house. Oh, Yahweh. Oh Lord. Forever and always. And so my friends, would you join me this morning as you come to the table and would you take off those weighted vests and would you lay them at the foot of the cross?

And as you take communion this morning, for all of you who believe in Jesus as you come to the table this morning, would you say, yes, indeed, the Lord reigns. Amen. Let's pray.

Father, the floods have lifted up their voice. The floods have lifted up their voice. They have lifted up their roaring. We feel it.

And yet we proclaim that you reign. You are robed in Majesty, holiness, befits your house. And would you help us to come to your table this morning with joy that you welcome us with arms that are covered no longer with wrath, but they are covered in the gracious embrace of a father. Who sings over us as his children because Jesus, you did the work we could not do, and you died to death.

We deserved to die. Would you help me? Would you help my family? Would you help each of us in this moment to lay down the weights that so bear us down and would you help us to come with joy to your table and celebrate your goodness? We pray all these things in Christ's name. Amen. 

Sermon transcript is computer generated.