Sermon by Pastor Brent Kompelien

December 11, 2022

INTRO

1. Let’s jump into our passage for this morning. We have been going through a series called “For To Us A Child Is Born” and we’ve been looking at the four names of the Messiah from Isaiah 9:6 and asking the question, “What kind of king do we need?” Today we are going to focus on the third name: Everlasting Father.

1. And this is what we are going to learn this morning: We need a King who compassionately welcomes us into the security of his love.

2. Open with me to Psalm 103. We are going to go back 3000 years to a song of David that expresses a radically different reality than the ancient culture of his day.

1. ILLUST — You see, in the ancient world, the gods and idols were angry and vindictive. They required that you come to them. They required that you bring your sacrifice, and there was always the fear that the gods might be angry with you. They would start by promising a lot and demanding little…you can have safety, prosperity, and success if you just put a little grain on the altar or pour a little wine out on the ground. But eventually, they ask for more and more, until they take over your life and destroy you.

1. APPLY — This isn’t any different from our modern idols. We are promised success and health and safety and self-worth and acceptance through social media, politics, self-help, career advancement, or a hundred other things. But these will demand more and more from you, eventually pulling you into a pattern of destruction.

3. But what David pictures here is a different kind of God. What he describes in this song is a God who reaches out to pluck you out of the darkness when you are helpless and weak, to forgive, to heal, to renew, and to shower you with his compassion and love. That’s the kind of King we need!

Let’s read our text. READ Psalm 103.

ORG SENT — What we are going to focus on is the theme of praising God and the centrality of his compassion and love in order to see how this ultimately points ahead to Jesus as the pinnacle fulfillment of this song.

MAIN 1 — Praising God (vv. 1-5). (SLIDE 6a)

1. These opening verses are all about praising God. And they actually give us a very simple and helpful clue to understand what “worship” actually is. In order to understand this, we need to learn a little about Hebrew poetry.

1. Poetry in Hebrew achieves its meaning through parallelism. Our English poetry achieves its meaning through rhyme and meter. Song lyrics are a good example:

1. ILLUST — Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king. Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinner reconciled!

2. But Hebrew songs put lines in parallel and either contrast them, intensify them, or invert them in order to create meaning. Take verse 1 of this Psalm as an example: (SLIDE 6b)

1. Praise the Lord

1. My soul

2. All my inmost being

2. Praise his holy name.

1. KEY: The emphasis here is on the center two lines: “my soul” and “all my inmost being” are put together in the middle in order to draw our attention to the fact that your heart is what matters most when worshipping God!

2. In verse 2, there is a different kind of parallelism: (SLIDE 7a)

1. Praise the Lord, my soul

2. Forget not all his benefits

3. KEY: “Praise” and “not forgetting” are set in parallel. David uses the second line to amplify the first line. So, praise is “not forgetting all God’s benefits.”

3. IMPORTANT — Here’s a helpful clue about what worship is: (SLIDE 7b)

1. From your inner being (v. 1)

2. Remembering God and his mighty works (v. 2)

2. Now, what is David praising God for? (SLIDE 8a)

1. Here is more parallelism!

1. Verse 3 (SLIDE 8b) — Forgives all your sins / Heals all your diseases

1. God deals with the sickness of BOTH your soul and your body. Through Jesus, he has paid for our sins and conquered death. We are reborn in our inner being today and we will receive resurrection bodies in the new heavens and new earth.

2. KEY: (SLIDE 8c) God is worthy of praise because he moves us from brokenness to wholeness.

2. Verse 4 (SLIDE 8d) — Redeems your life from the pit / Crowns you with love and compassion

1. God plucks you out of despair and showers you with his love and compassion. We don’t have to despair, we are not hopeless in our failure, we don’t have to worry about God rejecting us. In fact, he has not only plucked us out of the Kingdom of darkness through Christ, we are adopted into His family and we become royalty in his eyes, crowned as his beloved children.

2. KEY: (SLIDE 8e) God is worthy of praise because he moves us from despair to acceptance.

3. Verse 5 (SLIDE 8f) — Satisfies your desires with good things / So that your youth is renewed

1. God meets your deepest needs so that you find true joy and refreshment. The false promises of this world are exposed for what they are, and the longing and searching for truth and goodness can finally be found in Jesus!

2. KEY: (SLIDE 8g) God is worthy of praise because he moves us from emptiness to renewal.

2. APPLY — Friends, think about your own life. In what ways has God moved you from brokenness to wholeness, or from despair to acceptance, or from emptiness to renewal? You may be thinking of a specific event this last year, or you may be thinking about the moment years ago when you came to faith in Jesus Christ.

1. Well, when David thought about these things, it caused him to focus on God’s compassion and love. He felt drawn to praise God for how God had reached out to show him favor when he was undeserving. And so let’s focus on those two key words.

MAIN 2 — Compassion and Love (vv. 6-18). (SLIDE 9a)

1. These are the words that form the heart of David’s praise:

1. Compassion = (SLIDE 9b) to have mercy, understanding, desiring connection, see your hurts and being moved to help.

1. In other words, this is God moving toward us when we are in trouble, it is God reaching out to us when we are alienated, it is God finding us when we are lost.

1. ILLUST — Remember when we talked earlier about the kinds of gods that existed in the ancient world? False saviors and false promises of salvation will require you to measure up, they will demand you to earn your spot, they will destroy you by pulling you into a cycle of expectations you can’t live up to.

2. There is zero compassion in that. There is no mercy. There is no freedom or rest. There is only bondage and obligation. There is only fear that you will fail.

2. Don’t miss this: God’s attitude toward you is compassion. His heart breaks when he sees you dead in your sin, enslaved to idols, walking the path of destruction.

1. This is why Matthew 9:36 says that Jesus went through all the town and villages of Galilee and “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

2. You see, Jesus reveals the Father. He embodies the full manifestation of God in the flesh. And Jesus proved God’s compassion throughout his ministry:

1. When the leper came to him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean,” and Jesus reached out to touch the man, something no one else was willing to do, and he said, “I am willing, be clean!”

2. When a group of men brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus, Jesus saw their faith and he looked this hopeless man in the eyes, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.”

3. When he saw a widow mourning over her dead son, Luke 7:13 says, “the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry.” And Jesus again reached out and touched, and this widow’s son came back to life.

4. And when Jesus’ friend Lazarus died and his sister Mary was grieving, John 11 says, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled,” and the text simply says, “Jesus wept.”

3. APPLY — Friends, this is the King we need. Jesus cares about you, he is filled with compassion for you, and he desires to reach out to bring forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, and renewal to every part of who you are. This is where the second key word comes in:

2. Love = (SLIDE 9c) (hesed) lovingkindness, covenant love, enduring commitment to us as his children.

1. This is the natural result, or the gift of grace, that God gives when he is moved with compassion. When he moves toward us in compassion, he commits to love us, and he makes this evident through something very specific: the forgiveness of our sin.

2. More parallelism! Look at verse 8-12 again. READ vv. 8-12.

1. Verses 11 and 12 are the key parallelism: (SLIDE 10)

1. For as high as the heavens are above the earth

1. So great is his love for those who fear him;

2. As far as the east is from the west

1. So far has he removed our transgressions from us.

2. KEY: God’s great love is in parallel to the removal of sin. In other words, his greatest act of love for us is to take away our sin! And that’s exactly what he did through Jesus Christ in his perfect and final work to pay for sin on the cross!

3. How do we receive this love, how do we receive this forgiveness? There’s a new theme here in verse 11 that repeats in verses 13 and 17: “God’s love and his compassion are on those who fear him.”

1. What does it mean to “fear God?” (SLIDE 11a)

1. In our culture, fearing God sounds harsh and uninviting to our ears.

2. ILLUST — Jerry Bridges wrote a book entitled The Joy of Fearing the Lord, which itself is an intriguing title.

1. Bridges says that most important and central element of the fear of the Lord is a profound sense of awe.

2. That’s what the biblical word “fear” means: (SLIDE 11b) awe, reverence, or honor.

3. Now, what kind of awe are we talking about?

2. The answer comes through, you guessed it, parallelism!

1. Look at verse 13: (SLIDE 11c)

1. As a Father has compassion on his children

2. So the Lord has compassion on those who fear him

2. KEY: Do you see how “Father/Lord” and “children/those who fear him” are parallel? The metaphor here is the reverence of a child toward his or her father.

3. ILLUST — Scottish theologian Sinclair Ferguson calls this a “filial fear.” He says it is “that indefinable mixture of reverence, fear, pleasure, joy, and awe that fills out hearts when we realize who God is and what He has done for us.”

3. And friends, I’m convinced that the underlying character trait that forms the foundation of this fear of the Lord is humility.

1. The very next verses, 14-16, describe how we are dust. We are so fragile. In our culture, we tend toward grandiose pictures of ourselves, but we are a momentary blip on the scope of history.

2. But this doesn’t mean we aren’t important or special in God’s eyes. In fact, just the opposite. You are so worthwhile that Jesus died for you. That is the ultimate expression of compassion and love.

3. KEY: In light of this, the fear of the Lord is really about faith; it’s really about trust. We come to God in an act of repentance and surrender, coming under his fatherly authority, receiving his forgiveness, and resting in the security of his love. That is the fear of the Lord!

4. ILLUST — A few months ago, I shared an illustration at our Saturday men’s group about something I’m learning as a father with two young kids.

1. I’ve been thinking about how my kids respond or relate to me as a parent. My girls have made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes. I learned from a mentor of mine to be careful to understand the difference between being disappointed and telling my kids that they are a disappointment. One is an emotion, the other is an identity. One maintains the security of being a beloved child, the other is the threat of rejection and withholding of love.

2. You see, there’s a huge difference between my daughters thinking, “Oh no, I made a mistake…I can’t tell dad,” and “Oh no, I made a mistake…I have to go tell dad.”

1. These responses reveal something deeper about your relationship with your father.

2. The first response is what I’ll call a “fear of rejection” — As a parent, you can set a culture that poor choices will result in you withholding love or using your love and acceptance to manipulate behavior. This will causes a child to relationally pull away from their parent in a moment of crisis.

3. The second response is “fear as security” — This is when a child says, “I’m in a crisis, I made a mistake…Dad and mom will know what to do!” There is a sense of respect and reverence for the wisdom and authority of a parent. There are still consequences, there may be punishment, but the child feels SECURE in the compassion and love of their parents, and they feel drawn to come closer in relationship with them in a moment of crisis.

4. KEY — The only way that “fear as security” works is if the parent is extending compassion, willing and able to forgive, and if the child feels secure in your love.

1. Friends, this is what the Bible means by “the fear of the Lord.” God is the perfect Father because he is extending his compassion, he is willing and able to forgive in the ultimate sense because Jesus died for you, and he has committed to love you as his son or daughter. When you trust in Jesus Christ by faith as Savior and Lord, you are secure in the love of the Everlasting Father!

5. APPLY: (SLIDE 12, blank)

1. So, how do you approach God? Do you view him with a fear that you can’t go to him with your sin? Do you fear rejection, shame, or that you’re unworthy of his love?

2. Or do you have a fear of the Lord that actually draws you closer to him? Do you live in the humble security of the compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and love of God? Do you find rest and joy in the gift of his grace, that Jesus has defeated your sin, forgiven you, and calls you his beloved child?

3. When we think about Christmas, what kind of king do you need? We need a king who is the Everlasting Father. We need King Jesus who in his compassion reaches out to heal you, who alone has the power to forgive, and who is the only one who is worthy of our praise.

4. As the end of this Psalm says, let’s join with the angels and with all of God’s works everywhere in his dominion to say: Praise the Lord, O my soul!