Olly Olly Oxen Free // Summer Mixtape: A Playlist of the Psalms// Read

The Early Church regularly used the Book of Psalms as an unending source of insight for the Christian life—to inspire faith, to praise God, and to encourage one another. This summer, we’re going to do the same thing at Cornerstone. We’re making a playlist of some of the Psalms greatest hits, compiling a mixtape that we believe will help inspire you and motivate you during the dog days of summer.

Where do you run when you need safety? Who do you go when you need refuge? When the hard times come, we all go to somewhere or to something. But what if we started going to Someone? How would our life change—especially the challenging moments—if God truly became our source of refuge? 

Well, it's an absolute joy and privilege for me to get to speak to you this morning. I'm excited about it. I've been excited about it. And I want to tell you, though, that it's not for any
the reason that's giving pastor Jacob a vacation from preaching. He's preaching now this morning in the Allegheny forest at a campground over there to a family camp. And they're having a super time. The kids love it. Jessica sent me pictures of the little rustic, no finished inside cabinet cabin that they're staying in that has a lot of loft, the sleep the kids are sleeping in. And Griffin is having a time. All the kids are having a great time. And in a great moment, the director of the camp, somebody that I knew when I was young growing up on the campgrounds that I grew up on in the summertime, she was a friend. They're a few years older than me. She's the director of this camp. And she sent me a message, and she said, I want to tell you, everybody loves your family and loves pastor Jacob. But here's the cool thing she told me. She said the old folks at the campgrounds are having a great time remembering, and I had completely forgotten this, that his Father Charlie was there and preached the camp in the early 1980s within a club sidles song evangelists. So that was great fun. It was an excellent memory to come up with. But that's what's going on there. So if your mind drifts officer off from here, pray for them. He'll be preaching there through Friday.
Does anyone feel like the world you're in today is more rigid than the one you were in before this? Does anybody feel that way? Yeah, a lot of us do. Well, no wonder because it's an epochal time it is different. And this summer, we're studying other songs, ones that maybe you don't read quite that often. We're exploring those. And this week. It's Psalm 57. Now, the whole book of Psalms is kind of a travel diary of people who were learning to relate to God. God was speaking to them, and they were talking back to him. And it's about their life and their experience with him. And the Apostle Paul told us in First Corinthians chapter 10 he says these things, these stories were written down to be an example to you and me. So this morning, we're going to look at King David in Psalm 57. And we're going to find him to be an example to us in the time that we live in because he was also living in a very typical time, in his life of the Kingdom of Israel, which is where he lived. They had become they were the people of God that he was raising that his son Jesus would come from. And they were the people that had been ruled not by the king but for all of their existence, and they had been ruled as a theocracy. God was their ruler, and they were. Judges directed them. But the time came when they didn't want to do that anymore. After many years, they did not want to do that. They wanted to be a kingdom on their own. They wanted to have their king as the other nations did. And so God says, I'm going to let your habit, but you're not going to like it. Because when they got their first king, now, they could be conscripted for war, they had to pay taxes, all different kinds of things, things in their kingdom, changed a whole lot. King Saul was the very first king, and for a while, he did well, but he did it and didn't keep that up. It didn't stay that way. And he became very self-centered and complex and did his own thing, disobeying God. And when that happened, God let King Saul know, you're going to be out. I'm going to anoint a new king who's going to replace you, and you'll be gone. So he sent Samuel out into the country. And Samuel, the Prophet, went to the place that God directed him to. And there he found David, who they had to search for him because he was the youngest one in the family. He was not considered to be a great kid or anything like that. And so he sent them out to find him. Brant brought David in, and he chose David above all of his brothers, who were talented, gifted, good-looking, all of those kinds of things. He chose David, and he believed that God was telling him to anoint the king. And so he did. And at that moment, David's life changed forever. It was going to be more than a decade. It's going to be a lot of years before that came to pass, but he was anointed at that moment. And at that moment, everything changed for him. Not only was the kingdom already different, but life changed for him. Have you ever gotten a job promotion that made people hate you? Have you ever had some of you have had that happen? Have you ever uh
One opposition, you became a cheerleader may be, and everyone else wanted it. And suddenly, you were at the top because of gossip and stuff. A lot of us have had that kind of thing happen to us. That's what happened to David. People hated him instantly. They didn't want him to be king, especially his brothers. But the one who hated him most was King Saul. Even though King Saul's son, Jonathan, was David's best friend. They were excellent friends, and David had done nothing wrong. God had picked him. But King Saul hated him and wanted to kill him and remove the possibility that he would be king. And so he began chasing him to kill him. First, it was tipped that they were smaller, but now he got an army together, and he's chasing him. And where we find David in Psalm 57 is when he's hiding in a cave, he had run away from King Saul. He was trying to save his life. So I'm going to read it to you this morning. And you can follow along on the screen. It's Psalm 57. And I'm reading from the New Living Translation. Have mercy on me. Oh, God has understanding. I look to You for protection. I will hide beneath the shadow of your wings until the danger passes by. I cry out to God most high to God who will fulfill His purpose for me. He will send help from heaven to rescue me, disgracing those who hound me. My God will send forth his unfailing love and faithfulness. I am surrounded by fierce lions who greedily devour human prey, who's Keith Pierce, like spears and arrows. He's not just talking about real lions. He's talking about people whose tongues cut like swords, teeth pierced like spears and hands, and whose tongues cut like swords be exalted. Oh god, among the highest heavens, may your glory shine over all the earth. Wasn't that a sharp turn? I mean, he goes from talking about these people, and suddenly he's talking about God. He talks about the people again. My enemies have set a trap for me. I am weary from distress. They have dug a bottomless pit in my path, but they have fallen into it. My heart is confident in you. Oh, god, my heart is satisfied. No wonder I can sing your praises. Wake up, my soul. Wake up. Oh, liar and harp. I will wake the dawn with my song in the early birds. Wait, The dawn with your song this morning? Probably not.
I will thank you, Lord, among all the people. I will sing your praises among the nations, for your unfailing love is as high as the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds; be exalted. Oh God, above the highest heavens, may your glory shine over all the earth. Okay, that was David. Let me ask you one more time.
Does anyone here feel like the world you live in? Is it more challenging than it was ever before? In your memory? Does anybody feel that way?
Yes, some of us do. And you know what, you're not alone. And you're also not wrong. It is more challenging than it's been. There were there have been many tough times before. But this is tougher, in a way different way. Why the World War? We call them World Wars, but they didn't affect the whole world. A lot of the world was involved. But many places had no conception back in. In the country, they had no concept there was a war going on. And many countries, even if they knew it, it was not affecting them at all. But the pandemic, the global pandemic, was international. It affected everybody because of the worldwide travel that happened. And because of, you know, the biological things around us, the virus spread like wildfire at Mach speed, and it missed nowhere, and it changed everything. I have friends around the world from traveling a lot. The things that have happened to them, in many cases, are worse than what's happened to us as far as a physical things. It affected everyone. Sociological sociologists, at first thought you'll have to excuse me a little bit. I've had a couple of lousy mg days, and I'm tripping on my words a lot this morning. So just forgive me. I'll eventually get it out. Sociologists at first thought the pandemic was simply a storm. They just thought it was a storm. And we did too. We thought it would be over pretty quickly. And then it went from being a storm to well, maybe this is a blizzard. It's pretty intense. And then, after we thought it was a blizzard for a while, it changed to something else. It changed our minds. We were aware. This is not a blizzard. This is a storm, and we're going to have to wait it out for a few months. And then it was longer than months. And now the people who know the scientists and the sociologists who study history and who study
the way things affect our societies and culture. Now they say that it's an ice age of sorts, sorts, it is ethical, and it is going to affect us for the next 100 years for sure. And we will wrestle the rest of our lives. Everybody in this room will wrestle for the rest of our lives, and the youngest child down the hallway will wrestle for the rest of their lives with
The things that COVID the pandemic has caused and the things that accompanied it. And we will see that COVID itself was the very smallest part of this; it's the things that happened because of it. I recently listened to Andy Crouch, who is a cultural student and scholar. And he shared what a few of the changes are that affect us and will affect us. And then, because I believe this is so significant, and I feel like we need to understand these things, if we're going to make a powerful impact on our world as it currently is, I need to know these things. And so I've read a lot in addition to it, I want to mention three changes that have happened. I'm going to say the first two, I hope, really quickly. I have to tell you, and I'm kind of
this just so important to me. I could talk for hours on just this. I can't afford to, but I want to tell you two, I hope, quickly. And then the third one I want to dwell on it because it's the most significant for us, first of all, is the economic changes that have occurred as a result of the pandemic. And also, combined with the war in Ukraine, you know that everything has changed financially pretty quickly, right? Has anybody noticed the gas costs more than it used to?
If anybody noticed your grocery bill, you just can't stretch the money. It's very different, isn't it? It's different. And it's confusing, and it's scary. There are shortages in staff and resources, and prices are off the charts. The great resignation they're calling in is where people were not content to go back to life as it was before. So they quit their jobs, many of them with nothing else to go to. Inflation has hit us hard. But then we printed trillions of dollars, whether we had anything to back them or not, we printed trillions of dollars. And it did avoid a deep depression. We don't know how much it will affect us in the future. But the economic forecast is not immediately as bad as they were. Fearing that it would be more severe than that is the way that things have affected the development of our kids.
As you know, it was nobody's fault, and you may have agreed or disagreed with the choices that were made. That's not what we're talking about, agreement or disagreement here. But you know, that, that our schools pretty much around the world had to be shut down for the most of two years. If they, if they did have school, they had it through zoom and, and parents are somebody, we're supposed to help them out a lot. But there's so much learning that needs to occur. In a group context, history tells us sociologists tell us science shows us that there's a window of opportunity at different points of our development as humans, which is very effective to us. The first window of opportunity to talk about today is between eight and ten years old. That is when we have the chance neurologically, as our minds are developed to develop organic fluency in reading, we can learn to read, and if you remember when, when you were young, or maybe your kids, you may place a period where it was like, they couldn't read very well. And then, all of a sudden, one day, they were reading so well. And you're like what happened, and it's their brains kicked into gear, as they were with their peers, as they were with their teachers as they were in the settings and reading different things. All of a sudden, it made sense to them. Brain and their connections help them out so much.
Eight to 10-year-olds that miss that window of time will probably very few of them will ever get the organic fluency, and reading doesn't mean they won't be able to read doesn't mean they can't read. But organic fluency means that you do it so quickly, and you love it. And you know, it's just it comes naturally to you. They can read, they will read, but it'll be a little bit different. And then the other window of opportunity that I think is even more troubling is 13 to 15-year-olds during that period. In middle school and junior high ages, that's when you learn a whole lot about group activities. You know how to work in a group that is not your own family, and your peers are critical to you at this point. That's why you know, a lot of these kids were kind of going crazy when you know they had to be at home and they couldn't be out. This is a period when you learn to take a joke at yourself. Someone's making a joke at your expense. And it's not your family, and you know to take it without falling apart. It's when and isn't Middle School, a genius place for that to happen. That's the way it works. And you learn how to discuss with somebody that you disagree with without it rupturing the relationship. You know how to discuss in groups, complex topics. There are all different kinds of things that you learn during that period. And our kids missed it. The 13 to 15-year-olds in that period missed that group connection—teachers who are teaching today. Many of them will tell you if they're teaching ninth graders, they'll say wow.
We're just having the most challenging time. We can't get things to be where they were, and it's more like teaching fifth or sixth graders because it's their social development. They just haven't been able to do that. And, you know, we don't know how they'll make that up, but some, some way they will grow. But there are 100 years for the next generation that will still be feeling the effects of what happened here. And they will make do the best they can. And as we typically do, we will blame it on other things they'll say, we'll say they're just bad kids, or bad parenting, or that kind of stuff will say that, but the truth will be that they missed out on some stuff that they didn't know how to catch up on. If you don't believe me, just think about this. Don't. Don't mentally fight with me. Let your mind think about it. Okay. We have all kinds of questions. Now we say, where did all these angry kids come from, all these angry young men that are shooting up schools and doing all this stuff? Where did all they come from? Check them out. They came from 911. They came from the generation that has known nothing but terrorism. We didn't know that. We didn't know that. We knew that there were other ways that you work out your anger. We have a whole generation that saw terrorists take over the world and get their way and do things. And they have their rage, their issues. They have things that have gone wrong since then, and it's built up in them. And we see that happening everywhere. I'm not excusing anything. I'm saying that when you see things that are different, there's always an explanation. There's always a why, but behind the question, as hard as those things are. And they are. The thing that affects us most is the general breakdown of trust in institutions and between people. And this affects every single age; trust is already eroding. But boy, when COVID showed up, and all the things that happened to surround that, the COVID period, accelerated everything so fast. And we as a world and we as a nation are not the same people we were when it started in May 2020. We sat in our homes, in our relative isolation, and we watched a man be brutally killed on national TV. George Floyd was killed gruesomely, and we saw it. Okay, some of you are already wanting to shut me down. Because you have your opinion on how that started. I'm not objecting to your opinion at all. I'm just saying, if you have a brain, you recognize that a man was brutally killed, whether he deserved it or not.
He didn't deserve it. He did deserve it. You can line up on your sides about that. But that's not even the issue right now. Here's the issue. We never had, as a nation, except in movies, watched someone be killed in front of our eyes. Unless it were a carefully edited war thing that came from Vietnam or something like that, I wouldn't ever see it. We'd never seen it before. And now we watched it. And if you have a brain, you have to admit it was brutal. It was gruesome. It was not the way that you would want anybody you love today. And here's the thing, our nation has changed so much. Suppose I would have talked about something like that in 2019. Without this going on, I would not have had to say all that stuff surrounding it because I've been the pastor here. I was a pastor here, for I've been on staff pastoring in some way for more than 40 years. And you would have enough trust in me and enough trust in our world that I can say it without recognizing that I'm going to lose some people. When I say it, do you understand what I'm saying? We are so political. We are so divided.
You can't say squat without people turning on you. That's just where it is today. For most people, we got so politicized and so divided that there were terrible fights among families and friends over that first incident. Everything today is politicized and divisive. The shock and rage then began to divide us quickly, and trust collapsed more and more. We are not just against the court system and law enforcement and races, but we are divided over what we think about it. Who can we trust for truth? Who can we trust to protect us? Who could we trust for lack of bias, the collapse of trust set off echoes around beyond the US? More and more has happened? The cancel culture has developed. If I disagree with you, you're out.
We don't. We're not even friends anymore. If we can't agree, that's the way most people think about it. If you are a thinking person, you have asked yourself, is there any longer any ground that we can meet on? Is there any place that we can be, and we can try
For us that things will be fair, and things will be good. We'll be dealing with these kinds of questions for the rest of our life. We truly will. As Christians, as Jesus followers, our job description for life is to love God and love our neighbors. But how can you love God? And how can you love your neighbors if you don't trust anybody? If you don't trust God, how can you do it? In the pandemic, other people became the enemy. We weaponized humanity and fought with each other. We blame the Asians for COVID. Is that not ridiculous? A crazy, crazy thing. But we had pockets of hatred sprang up against Asians, Asians, who were American, just the same way we were, many of them born right here and no nothing else.
They didn't do anything,
but are ridiculous sinfulness. And our isolation causes us to hate people. We hated other people we didn't know. And we assume things about them because of their color. We assumed terrible things about them. Because whether they were masks or didn't wear a mask, whether they were socially distanced, or whether they didn't, based on what we thought, some brands of Christianity became some of the ugliest fighters. This was a statement on Twitter. Tell me your church stand on mass vaccinations and gun control. And I will know everything I need to know about you. Really? What a warped and crazy person you are. To think that sums up a person. Seriously, faith in politicians and our political system, which was already loaded up to its lowest point, conspiracy theories everywhere. Why do conspiracy theories flourish? Because when you don't know the answers, if your God is a certainty, if you have to feel like you know everything, you'll make up something, and you'll believe it is true, you'll accept what someone else has come up with, and we come up with stories that fit our need for the truth. And we declare their truth.
America, in all of its history, all of its records, for more than 200 years, has been the crown jewel in the world of everyday people for its value of people and our system of democracy. But in these few years, we have become the focus of distrust, disbelief, and ridicule around the world, as we tore up our country because of the flaws that we criticize and reject, which is, you know, you have a reason to do that I have a reason to attack our nation, there are things wrong with it. But in our criticism, we have forgotten, and we've lost gratitude for the things that we have or that are truly wonderful and that the rest of the world wished they could have. I've been around the world, I've been to lots of places. And I've never been to any place where every person I met didn't want to spend time here and would love to have what we have.
And we forgot it. Pastors, doctors, educational people, and any kind of leader everywhere became tainted because of a few bad seeds.
People have devoted their whole lives to Me to movements and things like that of Christians who have lost their focus on Jesus, and they go down hunting, trying to find a flaw, trying to find something to criticize about somebody. I didn't intend to get into something on Twitter, which I will say is the lowest form of life on our planet. I think it's the worst social media out there because people can say devastating things in such a few words. But had this person posted something that, with a broad brush,
tainted the reputation of virtually every pastor that had a church of over 200, And it was accusing everyone, every one of abuse. We're all manipulators, and we're all abusive. And I answered back, and I said I understand your tweet intended to protect people and to blow a whistle on things, but if you can't name the people, if you can't say where it is, it's like shouting fire in a crowded Mall. You hurt innocent people. I have been a pastor for more than 40 years. And I know that many awesome good loving people lay down their lives. I jumped on there. And he roundly attacked me, made fun of me, sent me stuff for days, and he said you destroyed your credibility by admitting to the fact that you've been a pastor.
That's the state of our world, friends. That's the state of our world. Every leader, every person
Pastor, every school superintendent had to make decisions for the whole that they believe we're best. And whenever you're a leader, you know that if you lead in your own home, when you make a decision that you believe is best, you're not popular with everybody. You can have half your family mad at you when you're doing the best that you can. And that has happened across the board. Listen to me. People left churches, the place where they had been saved, the place that had rescued their marriage, the place that had saved their children, the place that had turned them from addiction. They left churches and left the people who had been their family.
Because the church required that you wear a mask for the courtesy and protection of other people, it happened all over the place. Do you know what's even worse? People turned on their own families. You can't believe the counseling appointments I've had about this. After Christmas and Thanksgiving when people got to be together again.
I had meetings with many people who said it was the most hellish experience we ever had. We were looking forward to being together for the first time in a while. We got together, and all we did was fight. We fought over people we will never know and never see because their ideas are different than ours. So how did this help us? It didn't. We isolated ourselves from others, and we dug into social media and devices, and our highest level of trust went to people we'll never meet, we'll never know, and we had no way to check their credibility or their integrity. We don't even know anything about them. Except that they said something we agreed with. We no longer have a Dan Rather Walter Cronkite that we all listen to for the news. And I'm not saying that was best or anything. I'm like that. But I'm saying we used to have a general source of news. And now we are so surrounded. And our social media is so great. Our technology is so great that the news you listen to is designed to enforce what you already believe. It's not intended to give you new information, and it's designed to give you and bolster what you already think journalism shapes us. Even if journalism is so weak, it's nothing really but a 22-year-old guy with a microphone in his hand that knows how to make a video. And he'll say something and posted on YouTube, and you agree with it, you find it, and your quote is true. We quote these experts, and we lose relationships with the only people that will sit at our bedside when we are dying over stupid stuff over stupid things.
We try to talk to people, and they have their experts, too. And our experience of things is so different that the conversation degenerates immediately. It's like we're speaking foreign languages. The social algorithms feed our smartphones, our Facebook feeds, and our Twitter feeds. They provide us because they read us. They know us. Did you know that your smartphone pays more attention to you than your spouse does?
That's true. You can tell your spouse
400 times what you'd like for Christmas. And if Christmas is more than a day away, they're not going to remember.
But if you look it up on your iPhone, in a minute, you're going to get ads on it for from Facebook,
you're going to get contact, you're going to have all kinds of contacts, and you're like, oh, they know me. They know me. Isn't that amazing? It's almost godlike. They know what I want. Wow.
Here's the bottom line. We have become so isolated and so separate that we trust ourselves more than we trust anyone. I have an opinion. And I'm good at it, too, because I spent 32 minutes this afternoon on YouTube. And I know all I need to know.
So when we act, we don't realize that we are trusting our traumas and our fears. We are letting our fears direct us. What happens when I become my locus of trust? What happens when I only trust myself and people like me? We become a whole bunch of little gang tribes.
We only trust each other. We only trust brothers and sisters in Christ as long as they agree with us. We went forever without social interaction in a real way. The longer we don't see people, the less certain we are. We became a bar relationship with them.
I can
tell you as a pastor, you know, going almost three years total without seeing many people that, you know, I still haven't seen yet. Maybe they watch on Zoom Zoom or something, and it's awkward to run into them. Because I don't know, have they quit cornerstone? Do they go someplace else to church? Do they come here? I don't know. And my head can play games with me, and I can think they're mad, they don't like us there, whatever. And don't kid yourself; you feel the same way. You know that. You don't know where people are, and you don't know how good the relationship is anymore. And you begin to write imaginary stories that make a distance even more.
And we have lost our trust in God because we don't trust our systems anymore. The people we look to.
We don't trust them. And we don't understand, and we don't know why God doesn't. He doesn't seem to be controlling things. He doesn't seem to be in charge. And he doesn't even seem to care about the things that we care about. And so we got out of the habit of actively, with our whole hearts, turning to God. What have we done? We have run from the enemy, not knowing that, in actuality, we are running to the real enemy.
We are the most connected but the loneliest people in history. I could go on and on. But we need to get to the solution side of these things. So none of you go out and hang yourself after service.
That back to David, back to David. He was in a world that felt to him just like what I just described to you. Just like it No, no faith in the systems, no faith in the king, no faith in people, he didn't know who was his enemy, and who he who wasn't all of that kind of thing. And so we see him hiding in a cave, isolated as we are. But sometimes, when he was in that cave, David got a hold of himself. And he decided to do something different. Instead of going over and over the issues, instead of doubling down on his position and his isolation plan, instead of running to his wisdom as he was tempted to do as you and I always are, he took a break, and he reconsidered his situation. Let's see what happened. Now, I'm not going to have time to read these verses, but I'm going to urge you this afternoon read them again. Reread him, read them in the coming day or two, reread them, and see if you don't see this is what you need to do. First of all, David returned to God as his source. You know, that phrase of actually the title of our sermon, if you saw it online, the title of the sermon that Pastor Jacob gave me to preach today. He told me to preach Psalm 57, use this title, and go, go from there, do whatever you want to, and I'm like Olly Olly oxen free. What in the world? Well, you're talking about
it because I didn't recognize that phrase. It sounded familiar to me. But when I was a kid, we would say, Ollie, Ollie, all's in free. And that's how we would play tag and, you know, Hide and Seek and that kind of stuff. And it meant you're safe. Now, you can come in if you want. You can come in now. Well, when I looked it up to find out what that meant. That is the way that it's recorded in history, as being said, but when you dig around, you find that it was in England years ago. And that was when they, you know, use words like ye, and it was all ye all ye all in free. But children get gibberish in how they twist things and make them sound different. It came out as Olly Olly oxen-free. And that became a thing as it was recorded historically. But David, in the cave, heard God call to him. David calls in free random me, random me. I am your Father. I've got you. And so he did. He returned to God as his source. And you can see it as you look down there for protection, for purpose, for perspective, all of that. Now, see, when you're in a cave, you don't have meaning, protection, and perspective. But you don't know it. Because inside the cave, what you see is all that you have gathered there with you. That's all that you see. You don't see anything else. You don't know. You don't see it. And I will tell you that those of us who are Americans, those of us who are Christ's followers, those of us who have the humility to admit we've gotten caught up in our day and age.
We don't know what we're missing. Because we've gathered our resources around us, and we're stuck in a cave. You and I need to return to God as our source, not the news, not our political party. Not any of that. We need to return to God as our source for our protection, our purpose, and our perspective. Dave
It shows as if he did that to rebuild his trust around you. And I have to choose to do that as well. Now, here's a hard thing to hear. Nobody wants to hear it. But did you know that the only way to learn trust and to rebuild trust is to have trust be broken?
That's it. That's it. The only way to have it happen is for trust to be broken. And that's hard news. But it's also good news because all of us have had our trust broken. Let me tell you about my dog Barkley.
He was a normal, pretty healthy, mentally healthy little dog before COVID. And during COVID, he got mentally ill.
He and I developed a codependent relationship. Because he was used to me before that wanting to work and being gone and stuff. But at home, when I was there for this time, and I was there almost all the time, Barclay got used to me being there. And he was like a little Ward on my leg. He would follow me all over the place; he would go wherever I was. He would just be there. And, you know, it was it was great. Okay, so when COVID was over, I could go out, and I could go back to work, and I could do different things. We had a problem on both sides, and I felt guilty for leaving him. You know, he's a little dog. That's ridiculous. I know. But I felt guilty for leaving him. And he hated it that I left. And I had no idea that Berkeley had such excellent skills of manipulation. I had no idea the intelligent little dog would go. When I would pull out of the driveway in my van, before I left, I would put my hands on either side of his little face. And I would say barky, and I love you, I'll be back. And I would leave, and he would run to the front window. And he would stand in front of it like this.
Just looking at me, just looking like, you know, life was over for him. And when I came back, he would be a literal, nervous wreck. He would be shaking all over the place. It would take him a while to get himself calm down. You'd be shaking all over the place. He'd be all over me, you know, I would find that he would have an accident in the house, and different kinds of things would happen. That's how it was. But you know what has happened now? Now that COVID is over, in a way, that has to keep me at home. I go out, and I go to the doctor, I go to the church offices, I come to church this morning, I do all these things. And I put my hands on the side of his face. And I say Bucky, and I'll be back. And he just looks at me. And he runs in and jumps in my recliner and goes to sleep. And it's all cool. And when I come back, there are no messes. There's nothing wrong. He's just normal. He's glad to see me. But it's kind of like, Hey, glad you're back. That kind of thing. That kind of it's different, why he has learned to trust me. He has learned I'm going to keep my word. And I'm coming back. It's the same way with babies, right? So the only way a baby can learn how to trust is to have mom hand them off to somebody else, and it breaks her heart and breaks his at the same time. But then he begins to learn. She's coming back. She's coming back, and the people who are going to take care of me are going to be good to me. That is how trust happens. Now let me talk to you about trusting God.
The people that you admire the most are the people you look at, and you say they are so solid, they are so rocking on. They're just so awesome. I sure wish God loved and protected me the way he loves. It protects them. I sure wish God would have saved me from getting my heart broken and getting my heart disappointed in the way he protected them. That's the stuff that is so ridiculous. We tell ourselves. It's not true. The people that you admire the most, the people that you trust the most, have been disappointed and heartbroken as much as you have. They have had their days just like you have, where they stood at the window of their life. And they watched God. It seemed like drive away in a band. And they had no idea if he was ever coming back or if things would ever be okay.
Everybody you admire who is living an amazing life for Jesus Christ has had that experience. And they've had it over and over again. But they chose not to say God hates me. They chose not to say I don't even think I believe in God anymore. Suppose he could do that to me. Listen, you live in a broken world. Jesus told us in this world, and we will have trials and tribulations. But don't be afraid. I am with you, always overcome the world.
The people that you can put your faith in have been where you are. And they intentionally chose
is to trust, they chose to strip to trust.
The bad news is that it never stops happening. People will hurt you. People will break your heart. And sometimes, it's a sin, and you need to learn to forgive. And God will help you with that. Sometimes it's things that they can't help. People will let you down and disappoint you. It'll be they were supposed to come to your graduation party, and they got a flat tire, and they didn't get there too late. And you're disappointed, yet you have a right to be disappointed, but you don't have a right to get better. You don't have a right to add this to your column about why the world hates me. You don't get to do that. If you're going to live a wholly healthy life, you don't get to do that.
You can't turn everything that happens in our sad and broken world into a reason for resentment and feel that you live in an untrustworthy universe. Look at David, all the way through the psalm. He's like praising God. And then he turns around, he says, I know they're going to bite me, you know, they're going to get me. Why? Because that's the way life is, right? You get through one thing, and something else happens again. And this is just one of his times in the cave. If you look at all of his writings, through the Psalms and the stories that were told about him, you know that he got in caves. Some things happened to him again, and he talks many times about his incidents and his hard times.
But he never turned them into a reason to hide out and quit trusting God, and it would have only made him bitter and hard. God's plan and purpose for him would never have been fulfilled had he stayed in that cave. The rest of your life, the rest of my life, we need to choose to be like David, choose that God will be our protection, that God will be our perspective, that God will be the one that we depend on. Don't go to the cave of your choosing. And you know what it is. It could be a political viewpoint. It could be an addiction. It could be shopping. It could be any number of things that could be relationships, don't go to those caves. They will always let you down, and you will not be protected. Your prayers and your perspective will be skewed. You will just not be in a good place. David said I choose. He used the word I choose to live in the shadow of your wings. It's a picture of a big eagle. You are sheltering the Eagles. And you know what's cool about that picture? Eagles can fly. Eagles can fly. They can go anywhere. You can be in the mountains, you can be in the valleys, you can be in the plains, you can go anywhere, and an eagle can fly and protect the eagle. It's wherever they are. That is your Father. He's not stuck in a cave. He'll go wherever you are. You don't have to hide.
How do you rebuild this trust? You rebuild it by intentional choice. I laughed so many times this week over pastor Jacob last week. And if you're, I've met several new people here today. Please don't
check out on us until you hear him preach because God will use him to help you. But he said last week he was talking about how he went. If he tried to do a cartwheel, it would look like he was having a medical emergency. I've laughed about that so hard as he compared it to his daughter, Evie, who is great at cartwheels and looks like a pro. And he said, what's the difference? It's intentional practice. It's intentional doing it. And that's the way it is in our relationship of trust with God. We have to rebuild our broken trust by intention. You have to reconnect with God and turn to him regularly, daily, moment by moment, taking a Sabbath, you know, he says in the morning, I'll wake up, and I'm going to do this. You need to decide a time and a way in your own life that every day you will turn to God. Now I'm not telling you that you have to read a chapter every day. I'm not telling you that you have to pray in a certain way. I'm not telling you any of that. But you know, don't lie to yourself, you know, on a day when you have turned to God or not. That's what he wants from you. It's a relationship. You wouldn't go a full day without speaking to your wife. Why would you go a full day without talking to your Father? You can't do that. You need to connect with God every single day. And then you need to have a Sabbath. You need to have God say that. God said that. You need to have a Sabbath, a time during the week where the basic purpose of that day is to focus on your relationship with God and reconnect with him. Okay, so, you know, it doesn't have to be Sunday, but Sunday is a perfect day for it. If you can't do it on Sunday, we have friends who can't come on Sunday, and so if they come on Saturday night, you can choose to do that. But you have to, and you have to do that.
And you say I don't have time to make a regular commitment to that. I don't have time to do that. Isn't this distracting? Hasn't this been ugly up here this whole time? You say what in the world? Why couldn't they clean that off? What's your purpose? Look at this thing right here. This is your life, right? Isn't your life ugly and messy and got too much in. There's only one little tiny place over here where you could put anything. But actually, you can't. Because this plug takes up so much space, there's no plug to get one in here. The only way I will plug in something I'm not already using is to remove something that's already plugged in. Look at your life. If you are too full
to connect with God regularly, you are too full, and you are becoming less human, less holy, and less healthy. Every moment that takes by, you have to unplug something to give yourself room, reconnect with God intentionally reconnect with his people. David said I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to thank you among the people. How's he going to thank God among the people? He's going to have to leave the cave and get with people again. He's going to have to make that connection with people is vital. And those of you who are listening by zoom today, I appreciate you so much. But I want to tell you the truth. Zoom was meant, if you're healthy, to be temporary. It's like that crazy-looking little tire that's in your trunk. That is only meant to get you from the place of your emergency to the place where you can get it fixed. You're not supposed to keep driving on that little substitute tire. It will ruin your car. That's what zoom has been for the church. Zoom has been for an emergency. And we continue to use it. It's for an emergency for health and work and all those kinds of things. But if you are alive and healthy, you need to get together with God's people. You need to get back in a small group. You need to come to church, and you are hiding in your cave. And I understand the PJ parade on Sunday morning is more fun PJ parade and pancakes. That's good. That's fun. It doesn't help you. It doesn't help you. You need to find a way you have a day when the main focus of your day is getting with God and His people. You're getting less human every time you avoid it. You need to go to church. So many people have asked me do you think everything that's happening around the world right now is a sign that Jesus is coming back right away?
I say I don't know. And I don't know. But if you believe it, you sure better get yourself to church. You sure better. Hebrews 1025. We're just told straight this. Don't forsake getting together with your brothers and sisters in Christ even more as you see the day approaching. If you think this is the end of the world, you need to get here. You need to connect with his people to do that. We talk about things we say our personal why we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Yes, the Bible never talks about a personal relationship with Christ. But when you look at God's nature, of course, he wants to know each one of us personally. But the personal is not private. Your relationship with God is not private. You're supposed to be sharing all the things that he tells us through His word. I can preach like three days on this alone. We need each other. We need you, and you need us. We need each other. And you say, Oh, but Sunday's my day. There are so many things that need to happen on Sunday.
If you come to church on Sunday, or if you can't come on Sunday, you have on Saturday night. You need to be with his people. It's important. When Sam's told me after service, he said people, people at church, are like battery chargers. If your battery's dead, there's some way they're going to charge you up. Isn't that true? That's just true. They help us. They'll charge your battery, and they'll help you.
When you say there are so many things that happen on Sunday. If you can't come on Saturday night, let me tell you what you're thinking about what happens on Sunday. You got a two-year-old kid's birthday party to go to, right. That's one of the things that happens on Sunday. This is not King Harry getting coronated. This is a two-year-old birthday party. You can go to church for an hour in the morning and still make it to that party. It is crazy. When we are not intentionally connecting with God and His people, the things that we will allow to keep us away from the things that make us healthy. Don't do that. Reconnect with his people. Reconnect with your purpose. David was anointed to be the king of Israel. He could not be a king in the cave. It wasn't going to happen. And neither will you be what you were anointed to be in a cave either. Do you know what God anointed you to be? He anointed you and me to be the lights of the world. him that's straight for
Jesus mouth, he said, You are the light of the world, and what's the light for? It's not for us to sit at our computers and call people out for wrong doctrine, wrong political beliefs, or anything like that. That's not what it's for our job as lights of the world is not to be isolated. He said, We're to be like, we're on a hill, we're supposed to be like a candle on a big chandelier that attracts attention. And why not pay attention to the things that we say, attention to the things that we do. He said When you are the light of the world, your good works, the way you love people, the way you care for people, regardless of their color, their background, their political system, whatever they believe. They can believe all kinds of stuff, and you just love them. Anyways. That's how you love like Jesus. That's how you love him. And you know what they do when they see that, and they recognize that you're connected with Jesus, they might, they might not believe in Jesus. But they say, Wow, that's a pretty impressive thing over there they got going on. That's pretty incredible. He said, They will see your good works, and they will glorify your Father in heaven. Let me just ask you, anybody looking at your life and going, yay, God. If not, you got some intentional connecting you need to do with God with his people with your purpose. We want to be drawn, be drawers of people to God, magnetic for him. And then last, you need to reconnect, reconnect with God's perspective.
We say things like, I just put my mind and neutral, and I didn't think about anything. False. It is physically and mentally impossible. You can't turn off your mind. Your thinking is never neutral. You never quit thinking it influences you far beyond what you would ever imagine. And the essential thing we think about all the time is human beings, and God made us this way. Is that the underlying thought across all our minds all the time? Who am I trusting? What am I trusting? What am I believing? We have to decide what will be the focus of our perspective. And God says He tells us through Colossians and many, many places, says let your focus be on things above, not things below, let your focus be God, not the world, not your political party, not your church, not anything like that. Don't let anything like that be your focus. Let it be God. David said, I'm going to focus on God, I'm going to wake up, and I'm going to cultivate gratitude. The first thing in the morning, I'm going to be grateful. The first thing in the morning, I'm going to do that. The first thing in the morning, I'm going to choose to remember God's faithfulness. And while he's in the cave, he has no evidence that the ban has come back. In comparison, he hasn't seen God yet. He says I will be confident, and I am confident because of my faithful God.
Life in this fallen world was worrisome for David. And it's troubling for you and me sometimes. Sometimes, your marriage is just exhausting. It's just exhausting. And your family is complex. It isn't easy to get too big centers and a bunch of little centers to live in one house with peace and joy all the time. It isn't easy. Sometimes you don't feel like being nice to the neighbor who criticizes everything that you do.
Sometimes you can't stand to hear another minute of news. Sometimes you just get exhausted dealing with your own heart and your mind. And the thoughts that come up unbidden. And you don't want to have
sometimes maybe this morning, and you have to work hard. You have to drag yourself to church.
You have to make yourself go to the small group.
Sometimes you just like to get off the treadmill and zone out, but you can't because you know that in the morning, you have to get up and do it all again. You have to risk another temptation, another misunderstanding, another conflict. Another conversation with a rebellious child. Or another moment when you feel the emotional temperature change.
Another moment when you're looking, forgotten to pull up
and you don't see him.
So you just want to run.
It's okay. On the authority of your Father
and His word. I'll tell you it's okay. It's okay too. Why don't
you just have to run to the right place? You run to your substantial and APR for other
Who opens his wings to shelter you and to go with you wherever you go.
You run to the Father, who has freely said that his favorite people in all of creation are the ones who recognize that they are fundamentally weak and unable, the ones who remember how badly they need him. The ones who run to Him,
they run to him, and he renews their perspective. And then he makes them fully human.
Fully healthy.
He calls them is.
I want to pray with you this morning. Run to your Father. If anybody wants to come forward and pray, you have a particular prayer need. You have some friends here who will go and pray with you.
Father, we ran to you this morning. We thank you so much for who you are. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that it is true. We are witnesses running from you is running into life from death. We're so grateful for your faithfulness. I pray that on this day, every one of us will make a deliberate, powerful choice
to run to you to give up being the person we trust most and placing our faith 100% in you. We ask it in the name of Your Son Jesus Christ, who is our visit report. Amen.
Well, that's all for this week. Thanks again for joining us. Suppose you'd like to contact us or find out more about our ministry, head over to our website at Cornerstone Church dot info. Have a great week.