04 Meeting God in the Psalms

Speaker 2: This is the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta. Today, David John Marotta will be speaking on Meeting God in the Psalms, how to apply and teach the Psalms. You can find lecture notes for this talk at wednesdayintheword.com slash meeting God dash Psalms. That's Meeting God-Psalms. So glad to have you along. Speaker: The topic for today is Meeting God in the Psalms. I have a handout I'll pass around. And this class fits into other classes in a little bit of a strange way. David Turner did Living the Psalms, which was a lot about application. We're actually going to talk some more about application today, but we're going to talk about application from a different perspective than what David Turner talked about it. So fortunately, I picked this one aside for myself because I wanted to fill in the gaps of whatever our guest speakers had before us. And there's been some overlap, and there's been but I think the overlap has been good. You've seen a lot of stuff from different perspectives from different instructors. And so in this week, what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to talk about how you how you determine doctrine and application and what of the many true things in the psalm is worthy of putting into your talk whether the many worthy sermon topics you need to pick a sermon topic and gear your talk around that. So next week, Ed Scully is going to come and he's going to talk about how to present your material. Today we're going to talk about a little bit about how to organize your material and how to pick what your main points are. Because after you're done studying a psalm for six months, there's lots of main points. Now, let me give you one confession about something that I have learned from many years of teaching. I used to teach computer science, I taught the Bible, and I've been bad, and then I've been better. I won't say good. And you need a forum to be bad, and you need practice to be bad. So if the first ten times you teach, you don't think you did all that well, that's okay. First of all, God uses some of your worst teaching powerfully for his purposes. And so you don't have to be great. You just have to be teaching God's word. God's word has its own power to it. So we're going to try to talk next week about how we can make, this week and next week, about how we can make sure we're doing our parts in being faithful to give God's word its proper place and its proper format. But even if you don't, even if you don't do it all that well, it's still going to be okay. Because God is a faithful God. So let me tell you a confession, first of all, and that is that I've come to the realization that teaching doesn't work. That's a very hard thing to come to. If teaching worked, no one would smoke and we'd all be thin. So the bottom, that's the bottom line. Everybody knows that smoking isn't good for you, and a ton of people smoke. So even with the media blitz that we've had on all the different aspects of smoking, it doesn't work. Now, uh I will tell you that personally, I hate smoking. My grandmother lost her sight from macular degeneration. That's 10 times more likely if you smoke. So nine out of ten are the chances that my grandmother lost her sight from smoking. And she lost her sight at a young enough age so that she could not see for, I don't know, 20 years at least of her life. My mom died in 2002 from lung cancer. She used to smoke, and that's um that was a terrible experience. I miss my mom. Christina and I miss my mom every day. Um, and she doesn't get to see her grandchildren, and her grandchildren are without a grandmother. And not only was my mom just a really neat person, um, but she was also part of the glue of our family that held our family together. And so her loss is noticed in a you know in a factor and fold many, many more times. Um my mom got uh diagnosed in the summer of 2001, and by she died in April of 2002, April 1st, and toward the end, you know, it sounded like she was drowning, and all the kinds of things that happened. If you've ever had someone who's had lung cancer and died that way, it's just difficult to watch. It's painful and and and uncomfortable. And I take comfort in the fact my mom was a believer and I know that she's with the Lord and she was very strong, and she said, Don't worry about me, you know, God will take care of me. You know, I know I know He I'm in His hands. And so you have that comfort. And then my grandmother, who also smoked, lived to 99.5, but she never made it to 100. And she always had those kinds of lung problems and things like that. So there's a sense in which you can tell someone that smoking causes all kinds of disease, and then you can tell them your personal story, and that has more impact. So there's a sense in which just straight teaching the facts doesn't really always work. Somehow you'll probably remember my stories about the personal loss in my life because of smoking better than you'll remember all those little warnings they put on the cigarette packets. And so that's part of uh, you know, and every young woman I see who smokes, I just want to go up to them and shake them and say, you know, what are you doing with your life? This is not a good idea. This is this is a dangerous thing. Let me tell you my story. And I just sort of want to share that with them, and I refrain because it's sort of obnoxious to do that to every smoker you see, and I know they they they they would not appreciate it. But um but the the point of this is um partly to understand that the teaching process is not just communicating head to head. It's communicating heart to heart, it's trying to get at the root of the matter, and it's trying to find what what are the things that will help people change their lives. So let me give you one more uh example, and that is we were looking through an evaluating Sunday school curriculum. I was part of the children's ministry for many years, and we were looking through an evaluating uh Sunday school curriculum, and we were always trying to figure out was this curriculum working? At every age group, we had to pick curriculum, we had to pick curriculum for the fall and the spring, and sometimes we picked different curriculums for different ones, trying to find out is it age appropriate, things like that. And we were evaluating this one curriculum, and we were looking through, and the curriculum was just absolutely great reform theology, deep principles, would have been a great curriculum for adults, I think, and we were using it in the sixth grade, and the sixth grade was was old enough to understand it, but it was too abstract and it wasn't concrete enough. And so we started just asking the question because the curriculum was great, the teachers were great, the presentation was good, there wasn't any problem with that. I sat in on the classes and I learned things. So it wasn't, and I was engaged, and it wasn't, that wasn't the problem, and I knew everything was going well, but lives were not being changed in the sixth grade. So the real the real evaluation of a curriculum is are sixth graders praying on their own in their private life throughout the week? Are they studying the scriptures on their own in their private life throughout the week? Are they bringing to mind things and living in relationship to their parents in a different way? Are they thinking about their own self-image while they're in middle school in a different way? Are they more confident in who they are in Christ? These are the real ways in which you evaluate whether or not teaching is effective, is is it changing lives? And so the challenge is, you know, and I I don't want to I don't want to sort of um I don't want to scare you in one sense, but the challenge is to try to reach people's lives. And sometimes it's not the scholarly study of the Greek in the Psalms and understanding all that that really in the Hebrew that would really be scholars if you can get Greek. Well, yeah, I suppose you could. Um so that's that's not the goal. That's not the challenge. The challenge is can you communicate with people? Can you reach their hearts? And so sometimes it's not the best scholarly teacher that does that. I mean, one of the things I've been excited by by the past two guest speakers is every week I'm more excited about studying the Psalms. And that's what a good teacher does. A teacher makes you excited about the subject matter. So that's the very first sort of principle of what you're trying to do is you're trying to take your passion and excitement for something and help convey a sense of that to the to the people that you're teaching. So it's heart to heart, it's head-to-head. The first rule is to excite the student about the subject matter, and that you measure the effectiveness of your teaching by that, by changed lives, by people actually taking some of this to heart. So, whatever your psalm is about, you'd ask yourself, well, if I were to try to communicate this to someone and they really got what this psalm was about, how would it change their lives? And then you can start thinking through, okay, how would it change their lives if they were single? How would it change their lives if they were a married woman? How would it change their lives if they were a young man? How would it change their lives if they were a very young child? And you start thinking through different areas, and quite often you'll get your application. So it could be a very different teaching for a group of married women than it would be for a group of kids or for a group of young men who aren't married. And so you may find different applications for it in different regards that way. So part of thinking it through is going that extra step after you've done your work on your psalm and you've applied it to your life, then thinking through how does this apply into everyone else's life. Now, when you're um when you're trying to understand a psalm and how to teach a psalm or any any Bible study or any Bible passage, there are certain things that you bring to the text that you're um and uh those are called presuppositions. And so as you bring presuppositions to the text, that changes the way that you understand the text. And let me just sort of uh let me sort of take you through what's called the the the process of building a godly worldview. Let's see if we can. Speaker 2: You're gonna hand that out, right? Speaker: Uh this is on the internet. I wasn't gonna hand it out. I didn't make copies of this. Jeff got it. We'll get it again. If I jiggle it, it's gonna pop out. Okay. Um this is sort of the the process of interpretation and and deriving doctrine. So down here somewhere, you come to the text with certain presuppositions. And your presuppositions are things like, I believe that God is good, I believe there's only one God, I believe that Jesus is his son, that Jesus was the Messiah, and you come to the text with a lot of different presuppositions. Sometimes you come to them with just life presuppositions. So when the Bible says Moses got angry and his face turned red, you know that from personal experience, you know what it means for Moses, you know what it means for someone to get angry and for their face to turn red, and you know what that looks like, sort of. And so you come to it with certain just life presuppositions about the way in which the world works. And then you understand the Bible and you start understanding the text. Now, it is a wrong when you're in when you're in application, it is wrong to take exactly what the text says and then apply it to your life. That shortchanges the process, and that's not the right way. So you've probably seen that list you know, is there a promise to keep? Is there a uh uh a command to obey? You know, and the command to obey may have been for a very specific historical situation, you know, and it may not apply to you. So if the command is, you know, don't leave any of the Hittites alive, that's a very specific command. If you try to take that command over here and apply it in your life, and if you meet any Hittites, you'll kill them. That's not that's not an application. Now that's obviously a very silly application, but sometimes there are commands which sound like they're general that we want to take and apply directly. And even if it's a general command, that's not the right way to go about it. You need to make sure it's a general command first. So you start with your interpretation, you study the Bible, you gather more information, and then you ask yourself, what does that teach about God? Krissan's gonna make handouts of this, so you can, she's gonna bring it back. What does that teach about God? And then you princip you you go through the process of making principles out of it. So we learn from this that we should treat even our enemies with respect, or that vengeance is God's, or something along those lines, or that we should not take matters into our own hands, but rather we should be trusting God. There are certain principles that you all draw out of the text. And with the principles, then you try to integrate those with everything else that you already know about God. So there's a great example, this is, by the way, from my wife, and there's a great example Krissan uses about teaching our children, and children are trying to do this process all of the time. They're trying to interpret their interactions with their parents, to figure out what their parents' principles are, to integrate that in with all their other principles of the parents, in order that they might live harmoniously with their parents and not make their parents angry. And we're doing the same thing with God. So, for example, if Krissan says to Brendan when he was very young, don't touch the TV and don't hit your sister, those are principles, and then he's trying to integrate them together. And he's trying to figure out why does she tell me not to touch the TV? You know, can I touch it if I don't turn it on? What if I happen to just brush against it? You know, kids are always asking where are the boundaries, where are the limits, and what's going on with that. So now imagine Brennan is trying to follow these principles, and the television is about to fall on his sister. Now, there's lots of different ways in which he could try to apply what he's learned in the reasoning. And so one thing he could do was he could stop the TV from falling on his sister, but he's touching the TV now. That would break one of the commandments. Or he could shove his sister out of the way, but that would break one of the commandments as well. Or he could just let the TV fall on his sister and say, Well, you told me not to. Obviously, if he's correctly integrated everything together, he might put his hand out to stop the TV and push his sister. He might break both commandments and yet have fulfilled what his mother wanted him to do. Do you see that? Okay. So the problem with just taking the commandments and trying to directly apply them is the same thing is true about God. You see this in a great passage where David eats the showbread. You familiar with that passage? David's men are starving, he goes in, only the priests are supposed to eat the showbread, and David eats the showbread and gives it to his men. Jesus uses this passage when they tell him not to heal on the Sabbath. Or maybe it's when his disciples are picking grain on the Sabbath. It's picking grain on the Sabbath. His disciples are going through and they're picking grain out of the fields on the Sabbath, and they're eating them. And Jesus says, Didn't you learn anything from when David ate the showbread? So what he's saying is that the commandments are not just the commandments. The commandments reflect the character of God. It's the character of God which is sacred. Commandments in individual situations are a reflection of the character of God. Now that's a very hard principle, and you can take that completely out of context and you can do awful things with it. But it's more biblical. So it's the challenge that we have, and what we're trying to do is we're trying to build the mind of God. Now, obviously, if you see the commandment, thou shalt not murder, you know, that's just a reflection of God's character in a particular time, but murder today is okay, especially because they really tick me off. You know, and that's a good justification. Obviously, you can take that to justify almost anything, but what you really are challenged to do is to build the mind of God and build the character of God. And if you build the mind and character of God, a model of how you think that works, and if you've if you've understood that correctly, then you'll be able to apply God's worldview, if you will, in situations that He's not explicitly told us about in the Scriptures. And you see there's some very good people today who are trying to do that, very good Christian thinkers who are trying to build a Christian worldview on things that the Bible doesn't speak to directly, and they're, you know, they're they're all over, you know, if you think about medical ethics today, or you think about all the different kinds of things that are going on, there are some very good Christians who are trying to build the worldview that God would have in situations that the Bible doesn't explicitly speak to. But if you've correctly understood the worldview of God, then there are principles. So you interpret the Bible, you make principles out of it, you integrate all of those principles together into a theology or a doctrine, and then you take that doctrine and you try to start applying it into your situations and your life. So wisdom is called a skill in living. The Hebrew word for wisdom is a skill in living, and being skillful in living is being able to take God's principles and the situations that you see and discern in the world and apply God's principles into that situation. And so as you do that, you're trying to figure out which principles are relevant to this decision, which ones should I be looking at, and then applying those decisions down here. Now, there are some principles which are taught in Scripture, and you can take that principle and apply it directly over here. So there are some universal principles that are that are taught in Scripture, and you can just take it and you can apply it right back here. So, because they've already, they're teaching you the principle here, but it's really an eternal principle, and it's really a general principle, and it's applicable all over the place. So for some passages, this process is very, very simple. And for other passages, this process requires more work. And almost every statement in Scripture, if you will, has behind it a list of assumptions that aren't even stated. And those assumptions are principles as well. So when it talks about God, it's often talking about the fact, it talks about God, but it's implying that God exists, it implies that he's the only God, it implies that he's a good God, it implies that he's a sovereign God, and so sometimes just by talking about God, there's a list of implications, things that are assumed. And since they're assumed, they're also things that you can derive doctrine from. So anything that the original authors are assuming about God as they write, we can assume about God as being true as well. So there's a lot of different ways to build doctrine. Sometimes you can build doctrine out of very, very small nuances. So, for example, there's uh a place uh in the New Testament where Jesus' whole point turns on is it plural or not? I don't know what you're talking about. I I'm sorry, I don't remember, but it turns on a very, very small nuance of of what the grammar was. And and the author would not have done that except from some presuppositions that they had, and and and Jesus uses that. So this process of deriving doctrine, um let me just give you another example. Take, for example, that people say that um the Bible teaches polygamy. There's a lot of examples of polygamy. A lot of the heroes of our faith um had multiple wives, and how could that be okay? The interesting thing, though, is if you look at all the contexts of polygamy, the first one appears in Genesis. Is it nine or six? Must be six. Yeah. Speaker 2: That's how we learned as kids. Speaker: Here it is. It's uh Genesis four. If you look in Genesis four, verse 19, this is the first example of polygamy in the in the uh in the history of mankind. 419, and Lamach took to himself two wives. The name of one was Ada, and the name of the other Zillah. And Atta gave birth to Jabel, he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock, and his brother's name was Jubal, and he was the father of all those who play the libel, the lyre and pipe. As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal Cain, the forger of implements of bronze and iron, and the sister of Tubal Clink was Nama. And Lamech said to his wives, Ada and Zillah, listen to my voice, you wives of Lamech, give heed to my speech, for I have killed a man for wounding me, and a boy for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold. So here you have the first example of polygamy, and would you say he's a sympathetic character? No. So he kills a young boy just for just for striking him once. So he's clearly not a good character. And if you look at the Old Testament, every example of polygamy has with it death that comes from it. So that's not explicitly stated in a lot of the different texts, although it is explicitly stated in things like the king shouldn't, even the king shouldn't multiply wives. And I don't know about you, but multiplication starts at two. So there's a lot of examples in the Old Testament where it doesn't have to say something explicitly, it can say it implicitly. You see, David fell from uh from his desire for extra women. Solomon, his heart was turned from his foreign wives, uh, and the kingdom is split. And over and over again, all of the patriarchs, um, when they have two wives, it just spells trouble for them. It's not a good thing. So you can derive doctrine sometimes just from the things which are implied as you see that sin leads to death. Okay. Now, presuppositions make a difference because they help shape the way in which we view a passage. And let me just give you a really quick example of how it might shape our understanding. Um just take the sovereignty of God and human responsibility as a small piece. Um, if you believe that God is not sovereign over our human choices, but instead he's just a very good manipulator, and he's very good at organizing events to get us to do what he wants us to do, that's a very different view than saying that God is in charge of even our choices, sovereign over them, and can change our very choices. And you'll see everything that stems from that in terms of your theology. It's everything along the lines of can a believer lose their salvation? That is, having chosen Christ, can I unchose Christ? Or is God going to make sure that's not going to happen? You'll also see it in the terms of, well, if everything is up to our choice, if God is not sovereign over our very natures and able to change them, then it's my choice whether or not I end up being sanctified and I can frustrate God's purposes. So rather than seeing our good works as a result of God at work in our life changing our natures, it's very easy to see our good works as something which is a prerequisite for the good things that happen in our lives. So reformed theology matters how you take various passages. Now, I will confess, there are places in the New Testament, I think it's very excuse me, it very clearly teaches reformed theology, and then there are some passages that it doesn't seem to fit as well. And those are problem passages for reform theology, and on their face value, it doesn't look like it's teaching the same reform theology, which is very clear in other passages. Now, if I were an Armenian or Arminian up here and I believed that we can frustrate God and we do have complete free will, and God is not sovereign over our free will, I would say, you know, there are some passages that clearly teach that we have free will and we can frustrate God, and then there are some problem passages that seem to teach reform theology. Do you see the difference it's going to make in the way in which you approach the scriptures? And your presuppositions, after you've gone through this process of driving doctrine and you've received some doctrine that now you believe is true, that doctrine is going to affect then how you understand various passages. And so there is this hermeneutical circle, if you will, that starts with your presuppositions and ends up generating more presuppositions. And it's very important what presuppositions you start with, because that's going to help determine. If you start with the right presuppositions, it will determine that you land in the right spot. Now, how do you break that hermeneutical circle, if you will? Well, one thing is you're constantly challenging your presuppositions. So you hit texts that seem to imply that this does not fit with your presuppositions the way they used to be, and you're constantly letting the scriptures renew your heart and your mind and figure out whether or not you still hold those or how do they integrate? And it really happens in this integration point here. As principles are coming out of a text, they should be challenging your theology. And they should be challenging what you believe because, let's be honest, all of us like to justify our pet sins, and we like to keep them around, and so when you have something that keeps challenging those sins, it's very easy to try to s to bend what we think the scriptures are meaning into something that's a little bit more palatable for our lives. And so it's very easy to justify yourself by saying, well, that's not really what it's saying, or that's not really that important. And yet that's the that's the that's the important thing about Bible study is letting ourselves sit under the Bible and let the Bible judge us, not us judging the Bible. So in this process of a hermeneutical circle, there will be times at which the scriptures are challenging your presuppositions and challenging you to change your theology. I used to think this, now I think this. And it's okay to change our theology, and it's okay to change it back. We're trying to figure out what the mind of God is, and doctrine doesn't save, Jesus saves. So you don't have to have perfect doctrine in order to be a Christian. You don't even have to have perfect doctrine in order to be a good Bible teacher. You do have to let the Bible wash over your theology and renew it on a regular basis to try to figure out what um what that means. Now, let me just give you a couple of things. Trinity is a reformed uh church and very much seeped in reform theology. I've known many really good Bible scholars, Bruce Waltke among them, who have grown more and more and more reformed as he studies the scriptures. And you can tell that from the places he works and the various seminaries he's been at, and then he ends up in the most conservative, you know, of reform circles because he just let the scriptures wash over him, and over and over again in the scriptures saw that reformed theology was true. So I think the more you study the scriptures, it ends up the more you end up drifting toward reform theology. I'm just gonna say that because I think it's true, and it's true of the Bible scholars that I know. But then when you're first starting out as a teacher, sometimes you just don't even know what reformed theology is or what it means or what or what's going on there. So um I've skimmed this book, my wife has read it. That shows you a difference between us. She's um she's uh quite often um uh uh an example to my shame. This is What is Reformed Theology by R. C. Sprohl. R.C. Sproul's a great writer. He's really a way of popularizing um some very deep concepts. This is not watered down, I don't think, uh in the slightest. This is deep theology, but it's written in a way that you can actually understand. And so, and I think presents it pretty well. So, this is a great book. It's also on the website, we just put it up. I'm just gonna pass it around and you can take a look at some of the chapters and and stuff. And yeah, I always know how good a book is by how much yellow is in it after my wife has read it. This was like it's like highlighted. You could you could only she could have she could have like taken a black magic marker and just crossed out the ones that weren't important, it would have been quicker. Um I recommend this book if you're if you're not sure what reform theology is and you want to make sure that you understand reform theology, what it does is it gives you a different set of principles you can integrate with and a different starting point for your psalm, you can just try it on. And sometimes it's really good just to try on different ideas onto a psalm, because what you're trying to figure out is which set of presuppositions makes the best sense out of this psalm. And then which um presuppositions seem to flow out of this psalm. And so if the if the river is flowing one way and then you have your psalm and then it's flowing the same way, that gives you a feel that the psalm is flowing that way as well. The psalm is in that stream. Now, I will read a lot of commentaries from authors whose presuppositions I do not agree with. And the reason is because if you read a lot of different commentaries, first of all, you're bound to get people who have different presuppositions. And the second thing is, sometimes some of the best scholars are not particularly conservative, they're not particularly reformed, they don't believe in the inerrancy of scripture, but they're very good at what they do in terms of background material and word studies and things like that. So one of the people who is probably one of the best scholars on the Psalms is Derek Kidner. Derek Kidner has uh these are two books on the Psalms. These are on the no, these are not on the website. Um I should put them up. Um Derek Kidner is, I think, what we would call a typical liberal scholar, meaning that I don't think he necessarily believes in a lot of the conservative doctrine conservative doctrine or background or things like that. Um I believe he's probably a believer from reading his stuff, but he doesn't believe in the inerrancy of scripture and uh and a host of other things. Um but he is incredibly good. He's considered the classic. If you're if you're in a secular university and you're not a Christian and you're doing biblical studies, again, I've never quite understood why people do that. Why would you not be a Christian and be doing biblical studies? But if you were, you'd read Kidner on a lot of a lot of the stuff on the Psalms because he goes through. And what you have to do is you have to pick and choose. Well, he throw this one out because it's clearly his liberal bias, and then these are gems. These are things that you ought to be looking at. And I find these very helpful for looking at because it gives me two or three points. Usually there are two or three points I could not have figured out on my own. And yet he's got the background to be able to tell me what's going on and what the Hebrew means in areas I don't. I take those, I integrate them in with more conservative theology and understanding, and it's very powerful that way. So I'll go ahead and pass these around just to take a look at them. They're good. Um I'm always looking for new commentaries. I just bought these because they look good and they look thick. I like thick books. Um these this is called Exploring the Psalms by uh John Phillips. And if you look at some of the Psalms in here, he just kind of dives straight in. I love the way he's outlined them. I like the way he's kind of unfolded the meaning. Um, and so there's a lot of sort of good stuff in these. Speaker 2: And I'll watch you think it's um, we can zero out irrelevant pages on your psalms in the right. Speaker: Because in in both of these, in Kidner, one psalm is is two pages, but it's two pages of great material. And if you read them, then you'll get the two or three insights into the Hebrew, the languages, or the background. In this one, it's you know, five or six pages. It's got a nice outline, a way of organizing it, kind of gives you some ideas for how you might want to get started. And if you're like me, you'll read these and then you'll think, well, what am I supposed to do? They've done all the work for me. You know, but that's not true. As you get deeper and deeper into the psalm, trying to figure out how you're going to go through it, you'll find out this isn't enough material. This isn't enough to unfold it the way you want to unfold it and to understand it the way you want to understand it. So this was the point of these are really good background material, but his presuppositions are completely different, and you have to look at his presuppositions then as you as you go through it. Okay. Let me tell you something. So now let's talk about, you've gone through the process, you studied your psalm, you've done all that, and you're trying to figure out of the many true things that are in the psalm, which one are you going to teach? So I heard uh Greg Thompson say, while a passage can be about many things, sermons are usually about one thing primarily. So you're trying to figure out of the many things the psalm is teaching, what's the one thing that you think is going to be the best? And when you're picking um when you're picking what principles you're going to pull out of the text, we're on the handout down at four poor substitutes. These are four mistakes that people make for trying to figure out what the psalm is about. The first one is we substitute interpretation for application. So, and I I will tell you, this is probably the thing I'm the most guilty of when I'm working on the Psalms. I'm always looking at one more word study and one more background and trying to figure out what the Psalm means, and I'm not spending enough time figuring out how this truth will land home in people's lives. So generally, when I'm when I'm trying to do Bible study, I'm doing this first column up to some general principles, and then the application of those principles is sort of left as an exercise to the reader. So as an example of that, they uh they had a room and they wanted to know how different people reacted, and they put a uh a trash can on the right side of a desk with some papers in it, and a bucket of water on the left side, on the left side of the desk, and they lit the match and they threw it in, and then they called the first person in and they took the bucket of water and they dumped it into the trash can and put the fire out. And then they sent him back out, and then they they wanted to see how different. So they took the trash can filled with papers and they put it over on this side, right next to the bucket of water. And the person came in and they took the burning trash can and they moved it over here, reducing it to a problem that had already been solved, and then left. So that's the problem, is we don't I don't always take people through the entire application of putting it out. I just give them some general principles and hope that they'll figure out how to apply it in their lives. And that's the problem. You get some teachers which are very good, you know that the principles are coming out of Scripture, but they never land home in people's lives. And then you get some teachers which are landing home in people's lives all the time, but you're not sure where the principles are coming from. And it's our job to build the entire bridge from biblical principles to application in people's lives. And if you if you just go halfway, you leave that burning trash can there. You leave something that's not quite completely full. So substituting interpretation for application is just unfolding the meaning of the text and then leaving people there. That doesn't change lives. So one of the books I put down here under resources is by Howard Hendricks. It's Teaching to Change Lives, and he goes through a series of um of several different principles on how to teach to change people's lives. And it's it's a good book, it's on the internet site as well. Um but the basic, if you had to pick one that summarized all seven, it's being excited about applying the subject matter in your own life will get conveyed to the students. So if you're taking the whole process from understanding what the Psalm says and landing home in your life, then you're going to be able to build that bridge for other people and see other ways that it can be applied in life. Okay, so the first poor substitute, substitute interpretation for application. The next is we substitute superficial obedience for substantive life change. If you give people a way of applying your psalm and they can do it and check it off their list, you really have not done them a service. So if it's something simple that they can do and they can check it off their list, that's not a good thing. In fact, if it's something hard and they can do it, that's not a good thing either. So if you if you give them some task to do rather than some life change of their heart, that's not a really appropriate application. Now, a change of their heart may result in things that they do. You may see it in outward actions, but you're really trying to get at real life change. So another way of looking at it is God doesn't set the bar down here where we can make it on a regular basis. He sets the bar up here, and we're going to fail and fall in trying to get there on that. We substitute rationalization for repentance, um, and that is we don't really let the scriptures apply to our lives in a way that convicts us. So. And let me tell you, being a teacher is really hard. There's a great, my favorite passage from my wife's teaching on Romans is the passage that says, um, it's easy to be a teacher of the law, but they're not justified. It's the doers of the law who are justified. And I I keep thinking about and I keep thinking about, yes, and there comes to a point in every teacher's life when it comes time to stand up in front of a group and tell them what they should do, and they haven't done it themselves because we're fallen and broken people, and that's okay. In fact, if you stand up in front of a group and you're teaching them how to be perfect and you've done it, you're probably not the right person to be standing there because you probably really haven't understood how high God has set the bar. And so you have to let the scriptures wash over you. You have to let the whole process of the scriptures, including repentance, where you get convicted of your sin and you turn back to God and you say, God, I don't want to be like that. I want to be a changed person, and you receive his forgiveness and his grace, and that that's the kind of people you want teaching, is broken people who've been through the process of finding their way back to God in the midst of their sin. So as you're going through your psalm, it's easy to be convicted and say, gosh, you know, why should I ever be teaching the psalm? That's okay, that's a normal process. And God picked Moses because he stuttered, and he picked me to teach. And those two are just the same kind of thing. The last one is particularly important. It's particularly one that I think is is uh around in our in our circles, uh, Christian circles today. We substitute an emotional experience for a volitional decision. If the result of the psalm is simply to say, to to whip ourselves into an awe of God and a love of God and an emotional experience that way, um, I think we do a disservice because the scriptures have teeth, and you don't have to be in an emotional experience in order to be a follower of God. So we're not trying to produce mountaintop highs that fade quickly. You know, Paul writes about Moses' face shining, and then he used a veil to cover the fact it fades. Um we don't want to produce that because it doesn't last. What really lasts are changes of the heart. And believe it or not, the heart in Scripture is used as a metaphor, not for our emotions. In Scripture, they had a different word, a different organ, in fact. When they wanted to talk about someone's emotions, they used the term kidneys. The heart was more the seat of your choices and what I think uh Jonathan Edwards would have called your affections, what you put your life to, what your what your the goal of your life is. And so it's it's a cross. It's not quite the mind, because it's not just intellectual, it's more like the will, if you would. So it's it's the mind's desire, if you will, is is what the heart. And I think we're trying to reach that part of people, the part that really changes their attitudes, the part that gives them convictions. And that doesn't just come from our emotions, and in fact, our emotions aren't the best way. These uh these four principles come from I think they come from Howard Hendrick's Living by the Book. And they're really, I think, good because they're trying to find the balance between um between teaching that changes people's lives and teaching that doesn't. Teaching that makes a difference. And teaching that will fade. Let me just tell you there's one kind of sermon that I'd like you to avoid, if at all possible, and that is the be perfect sermons. I have heard many sermons for whom you could summarize them, be perfect. And that's the sort of sum focus of the call is we should be like this. And it spells out, and sometimes it even gets the very high bar of what we should be like, but it doesn't give us any methodology for getting there, what to do when we fail, the post-mortem or the uh of how we fail or why we fail or what happens when we fail, or the how sin leads to death, or it's just a be perfect sermon. And it focuses, the problem with that is that it focuses on us and our strengths. And yet that seems to be probably the majority, I would say, of sermons in America is be good. Maybe it's be perfect in conservative circles, it's only be good in some of the liberal churches, or try harder in some of the really liberal churches. Um that's just not helpful because when you dig deep down inside yourself to try harder, all you find is yourself. And that's probably the worst thing you could possibly do in order to try to be good. So I'm just sort of saying, if you get halfway through and you're looking at your application and it really could be summed up, be perfect, take another look, because there's something else there that's more worthy of being taught than that. And that's one of the things we always try to evaluate the children's uh teach the children's um uh curriculum on, uh, is if it was a be perfect, that was bad. And most children's curriculum is the be perfect uh variety. And the reason why I think is if you have a children's curriculum that's be perfect or be good, more often than not, with children's curriculum, if you have this be good curriculum, you can sell it to every church because there isn't a church in America that doesn't think you ought to be good. So it doesn't get into any of the doctrinal issues about reform theology and about God and about his nature and about and if you look through our curriculum, I hope you will find that we don't have any be good curriculum. We have the promises of God, that's a whole series. We have the attributes of God, that's a whole series. And then every story, the focus is not on, oh, look what the characters did, it's oh look what this teaches us about God. And so to build a theology, you really have to be focused on God. And that's why this whole sort of lecture is entitled Meeting God in the Psalms. What we don't want to do, that's the purpose of the Psalms, is to bring us in an encounter with God Himself, and that's a challenge that we should be looking at. Let me just uh go through a couple of different passages. Um let's go to Psalm 15. And I want to sort of take you through how this might apply. Uh Psalm 15, uh my Bible says, Description of a citizen of Zion, a Psalm of David. A Lord, who may abide in thy tent, who may dwell on my holy hill, who may walk with integrity and works righteousness, and speaks truth in his heart. He does not slander with his tongue, nor does evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend, in whose eyes a reprobate is despised, but who honors those who fear the Lord. He swears to his own hurt and does not change, he does not put out money at interest, nor does he take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things will never be shaken. What do you think the main point of this teaching might be? You're allowed to throw at anything, even if you think it's wrong. How are some ways you could take this psalm? Just list as many as you can. Here's how you get to heaven. Here's how you get to heaven. Right. If you want to be a citizen of Zion, here's what you gotta be. Great. Speaker 1: Or how do you get to heaven? Speaker: How do you get to heaven? That's right. How do you get to heaven? Here's the list. Check them off and you make it in. Good. How else could you take it? Speaker 1: What does it look like to be a child of God? Speaker: What does it look like to be a child of God? Very good. How can you tell someone who's a believer? Good. What else? Speaker 1: What you can do to please God. Speaker: What you can do to please God. Wonderful. What else? Speaker 1: How to not be shaken. Speaker: How to not be shaken, sure. Here are some ways that you are different from God. Here are some ways you are different from God. I love it. I love it. That's great. Here are some ways you are different from God. Good. Speaker 2: How to be proud of yourself. Speaker: How to be proud of yourself, yeah. Speaker 2: The impossible dream. Speaker: The impossible dream. Very good. Good. How else? Speaker 1: Big steps. Step by step. Yeah, good. Speaker 2: I think it teaches that we shouldn't be rich. Look at that. You want to put your money out at entrance? Speaker: Okay. Speaker 2: So I'll turn it on right now. Speaker: What else? Speaker 2: We're running out of time, but we have six minutes. Speaker: I know we do. Sorry. Challenger can't be met. Challenger can't be met. Okay. So you can see from this psalm that the first blush, at least, of the way you look at it, is it's a be perfect psalm. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker: And this and this is this is this is at least the first time I looked at this psalm, mine was, well, you know, what is a citizen? Now, you could turn it around, you know, I think as as as Jeff tried to, and you could say, this is the promise of what we will be like. That's a good way. If you have a be perfect psalm, at least try that one on. That this is a promise. Citizens of Zion will be like this. And it's true. God has promised He will make us creatures, exactly like this, creatures of glory and not of shame. And that's a better way of building a theology out of this psalm. There's one other piece, and I just, every now and then a psalm sort of clicks for me, and I think, hmm, that's interesting. I'm not sure if that's true or not. I love this Psalm, by the way. This is a really great psalm. If you all notice, it says, O Lord, who may abide in thy tent and who may dwell on thy holy hill. I was confused by what the New American Standard added, a description of a citizen of Zion. That's not in the text, that's not in the Hebrew. This is not, I don't think this is a citizen of Zion. I think this is who may abide in thy tent and who may dwell on thy holy hill, and I don't think it's talking about every citizen of Zion. I think it may be talking about priests and judges. And if you take this as these are the characteristics you should look for in the leaders of your people, those who must judge, then it makes a lot more sense out of the second line in verse 5. He does not take a bribe against the innocent. The only person who can take a bribe against the innocent is the judge, someone who's been set over Israel. Now all of a sudden, uh this psalm begins to have a different meaning. This is not everything you need to get into heaven. These are the characteristics we should be looking for for leaders, or judges, or rulers, or something along, or ministers, or something along those lines, is that they should they should be um they should be like this. They should be people who honor the Lord and who live along these. Now, now all of a sudden it's not as impossible as these are the characteristics you're looking for. This is how you judge various people, and you try to take people who best fit these characteristics. And that you know, it makes it more obvious when you see the list of you know of people you should be looking for for elders, and the elders all look at those lists and say, yeah, and why am I here? You know, because we're all fallen and broken people too. So can you see how one little assumption on how you take a psalm might very well change it to a very different meaning and all of a sudden have a very different, a very different approach. And on the first blush, it might be it be perfect, on the second blush, now it may be talking about leaders of some sort, maybe judges, maybe rulers in Israel, and how that can completely change what's going on in Assalam. So as you're going through various things, you can try on sort of various assumptions about Assam and be wondering, you know, a little bit which one fits the best. In this one, I think leaders fits, but I'm not quite sure what kind of leaders. It's an it's sort of an interesting question to me, is you know, what kind of and I don't quite understand, because I I guess the phrase, abide in thy tent and dwell on thy holy hill, that's where the tabernacle was, the temple, that's where the leaders were, the rulers, and I'm not quite sure exactly what that means. But can you see just sort of how you can you can take it from be perfect to this is a promise of what will be like to maybe it's got another application as well. Okay. Yeah. Speaker 1: Um, you know, the psalms are divided, Psalm 14, 15, 16. Yeah. Are they ever together? Speaker: Yes. Speaker 1: Because the next Psalm, keep me safe, O God, for whom I in you I take refuge, if Psalm 15, if none of those conditions are true for me, then I will be shaken, according to Psalm 15. Yeah, there's 16. Could I go on and pray, keep me safe? Speaker: Yeah. There are at least a couple of psalms where it's clear they were joined together, because they're acrostic psalms. First line begins A, second line, and it goes through half the alphabet in the first Psalm and half in the second Psalm. So it's clear they were joined at one time. And the the book divisions and all that, and the psalm divisions quite often were added at a later date anyway. And then I found a couple of psalms where I thought two psalms belonged together because they were both talking about the coming king. And they were at least messianic in their nature and may even have been together originally. Speaker 1: Where would you discover something like that? In a commentary? Speaker: Yeah, some of the commentaries have it. For example, we know 90 is by Moses. 91 is in the same voice. And I think 90 and 91 probably go together. At least they're both by Moses, I think. But only 90 says it's by Moses. But if it says 90 is by Moses, and then it flows into 91, I don't think they would have repeated it necessarily. So you do see sometimes they're they're they're put together that way. Um I think it's 72. 71, 72, and 73 are all together, and they're joined by some common language. So, yeah, sometimes you'll get a psalm that's in context with other psalms that way. Um, just back on the handout, the main teaching points, this is for how you pull principles out. These are some positive principles of what to look for. Principles should correlate with a general teaching of Scripture. Principles should speak to the needs, interests, questions, and problems of real life today. And principles should indicate a course of action. That is, the principles that you pick should have teeth. If people believe them, they should actually live their lives differently. So if it's just an abstract principle and it doesn't affect your life, then you're not teaching to change lives. We're trying to teach to change lives that way. Okay. I put down here sermon themes because in addition to having the be perfect that you don't want to do, I just wanted to sort of give you some ideas of sermons you might want to do. Um, and these are the five points of Calvinism in what is reformed theology, which I think are is God-focused, and so that's why I put them in here. So these are taken from the What is Reformed Theology book. Humanity's radical corruption is a good theme. So, and by and by radical, um, he sort of spells out in that book what he means by that. That is, that we have sin in all areas of our life. You could even go through a pathology of how sin leads to death. Um, and I will tell you why that actually changes people's lives. I used to love eating chocolate chip, raw chocolate chip cookie dough. And then I um I learned what that did in my arteries, and I can't enjoy it anymore. I just I just can't enjoy it. You know, after you've gotten your cholesterol test a couple of times and you've realized, you know, how much weight you gain from it, it's just very difficult. So um so the point is that sometimes if you go through the pathology of how sin leads to death, it makes it less attractive because you have eyes to see it from God's perspective and you know how it grieves your life. So sometimes you don't even know the death, you don't even relate the death in your life to the sins that are causing it. So when we were, when Brendan was really young, he used to get night terrors. And then, when we couldn't figure out why he was getting night terrors, and then we learned that if you don't give a if you don't put a kid to bed early enough in the evening, if you keep him up too late, in the middle of the night their sleep cycle is disrupted, and they'll have these sort of night terrors, they'll wake up screaming. Well, it turns out it was our fault he was getting night terrors, but we never connected the death from the sin of not putting him to bed. I'm using that metaphorically. It's, you know, that and then if you see what's going on, if you see the death that's coming from what's going on in your choices, then it just makes those choices less attractive because you know the death that's going to happen later on. So the pathology of sin is a good one. Uh, God's sovereign choice is a good one. Christ's purposeful atonement, the Spirit's effective call, and God's preservation of the saints. Those are all themes in the Psalms. And in fact, that's where Martin Luther got most of his Reformed theology. Before he studied Romans, he studied the Psalms, and he got almost everything from Reformed theology. You find it in his sermons on the Psalms. And then he decided to study it in a little more systematic detail, and he went to Romans. So where you start determines where you're going to end. If you start in the right place, you'll end in the right place. And that circle, you're constantly trying to reform your theology and have your theology be more godly, more biblical. That's a process, and you're trying to pull out the points that are going to be the most about God and land home in people's lives and build that bridge between God and his word and people's lives and where they live. Does that make sense? Okay. It's a challenge that probably three months from now, when you're pulling principles out, you'll kind of want to come back to this a little bit and say, okay, now that I've gotten through my psalm, I begin to understand it. Now how do I how do I build this into a talk? How do I build this into a theology? Next week, Ed Scully is going to talk to us about once you've got what you want to say, then how do you present it? So I'm sure he'll go through how to make teaching vivid, the different styles to help connect with people and things like that. That should be very different from anything that's gone on and really good and really helpful. Because that's part of the process. I'm always on the one end and I'm not always thinking about how to present it a little bit clearer. Let me close this in prayer. God, thank you so much that your word does change our lives. We pray that we would have that you'd soften our hard hearts to help us to repent when we should, to realize our sin when we should, to uh to turn to you for your forgiveness and your hope. Give us spiritual eyes to see your truths at work in our life and how you would want us to live. Just thank you so much for the band of brothers here, brothers and sisters here who are dedicated to studying and and teaching and sharing your word. In Jesus' name. Amen.