Restoration

Okay, we are finishing Psalm 51. And next week I will do a Psalm 51 review. So if there's any questions you had where you said, I didn't understand this or you never explained this, this is your chance. Bring them to me and I will then have some time to answer those. look them up or study things and then I'll teach that next week. But today what I want to do is I want to complete what we started which was a three part alliterative series called Repentance, Reconciliation and Restoration.

And for no particular reason they all started with letter R. Those concepts are all very clearly espoused in Psalm 51. And there's certainly other concepts that we didn't discuss in Psalm 51. And there's more things we could have taught from it. Or there's probably more words starting with different letters we could have used. But we talked about repentance.

And we talked about reconciliation. And now I want to talk about restoration. And so let me read a little bit of Psalm 51. I'm going to read just verses 8, 10, 12, and 15 right now. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice.

Verse 10, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. and then verse 15, O Lord open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise so I want to remind you of something that is written on a piece of paper right behind my coffee mug by Nick's feet so if you would bring me that I was grossly unprepared today because I forgot to print things and so I'm looking at my phone here thank you Nick so this is what I want to remind you of At the end of Psalm 51, I said that Psalm 51 concludes with its thesis, which is that once repentance is authentic, reconciliation is secured, and restoration is in process, the religious duties that are instituted by God and performed by men will be pleasing to Him. Acceptable sacrifices will be fragrant and pleasing aromas to Him, and the result of our spirit-led religious worship. and so if you look at the end of Psalm 51 the last verse David says then you will delight in right sacrifices in burnt offerings, in whole burnt offerings then bulls will be offered on your altar that verse, those phrases that I just read follow verse 16 which David said for you will not delight in sacrifice or I would give it you will not be pleased with a burnt offering So somehow we have to explain how in the span of three verses, David goes from knowing God wouldn't be pleased with a burnt offering to proclaiming that God will delight in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings.

And so the answer is in the heart of the one making the offer. a burnt offering or a whole burnt offering or a bull or a thousand bulls or whatever sacrifice you think that you can give to god which would never be as much as david was capable of giving since he was much more wealthy than anyone in this room but the sacrifice that you can give to god the very best you could possibly give him if accompanied by your persistence in wickedness is meaningless. Now we thank God that in Jesus Christ we will all, to some extent, persist in wickedness a little bit. And we will all, at least once in a while, dip back into some sin.

And everything we do will still be somewhat stained by our corruptible flesh and the sin in it. But we are able to give God pleasing sacrifices because of Jesus Christ. So we don't come to Him because of our cleanliness. We come because of Jesus' cleanliness. But God sees your heart. And God knows if you're sitting in His worship and you're outwardly manifesting the things that you think He said are worship while inwardly not being one of His.

He knows that. and you know it too now you're not God but everybody in this room I would venture to say knows what it's like when someone in your life is outwardly going through motions just to appease you but you know that inwardly they're not really trying to be pleasing to you they actually have no interest in being pleasing to you and for some of the younger children maybe this isn't an experience you've grasped yet But I think especially for people who are older, especially married couples, older young adults like Nick and Jade and Allie, that there's been experiences in your life where someone has done what they think outwardly ought to be done, but you know they didn't really want to do it. So what we want is we want hearts that are consecrated to God. and that is how our sacrifice will be acceptable to him. Then we can do the religious duties that he has instituted.

So repentance must be authentic. We must truly want to turn from the things of the world We want to truly turn from the things that have ensnared us and we want to turn to Christ Reconciliation secured You must be born again You must be adopted as a child of God in order to have any chance of coming to him as your father and asking him for anything in the name of his son Jesus Christ but thirdly restoration will need to be in process so we've all heard the phrase carnal Christian and well we haven't all heard the phrase carnal Christian thank you for correcting me that's good you should nod when I say something wrong like that many of you have heard the phrase carnal Christian and the word carnal Christian comes from the Bible where Paul tells the Corinthians that they're still carnal and what many people in our time have decided is that there's such a thing as a spiritual Christian and a carnal Christian and that there are people who become Christian but they really just still live in the flesh and live in the world and live in sin and that there's other people that decide that they're going to be like the holy righteous ones and they create this separation and the Bible doesn't define it that way but the Bible does tell us that there are people who even in Christianity fall into sin. You see it in our confession.

In multiple different places it reveals that God allows His children to have seasons of sin for a number of reasons. There's a number of reasons why God allows even His very own children to commit egregious sins. And they're all very good reasons because God is just and perfect. But God's goal in the testing of His children and often by letting them fall into sin, is always restoration.

And that is why, if you are ever involved in what we call church discipline, church discipline has at its goal and at its start the concept of restoration. What we want, part of Galatians 6.1, let's just try to define this concept. What we want, when somebody is straying away from the faith, when somebody is not acting correctly, what we want is to have hearts that desire to see the person restored to fellowship, restored to fellowship with God and with the church.

A lot of people define church discipline as excommunication. If you meet someone who, when they talk about church discipline, you can tell that they're only thinking about kicking someone out because the person persists in sin, you should try to investigate and maybe correct them, Let them know that church discipline is actually a heart desire that wants to see the erring, backsliding Christian corrected and brought into a right relationship with God and with the church. Look at verse 1 of Galatians 6.

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. keep watch on yourself lest you too be tempted bear one another's burdens and fulfill the law of Christ when you catch someone in sin it's not a gotcha moment it's not a ha ha I knew you were a bad guy the whole time that's not the goal here when you find out that somebody who God dearly loved so much that he punished his own son on the cross for that person by their profession of faith you your desire should be to help them to overcome any temporary sin that they're caught up in. You should have compassion, understanding that, as it says in verse, well, the end of verse one, you too may be tempted in the same way. The difference between you, Mr.

Successful Christian, and the other person who you're able to see the error of their ways is God's grace alone in your life. and God's merciful carrying you along in a way that he did not choose to carry them along to that point. I've noticed in my own life that sometimes the most difficult times of my life with various forms of temptation are when I'm trying to help someone else with the same kind of thing. So I always regret when someone calls me and says, hey man, I'm having a little trouble with my wife.

Can you talk to me? And I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll talk to you. And like, sure enough, that week, somebody else is having a little trouble with his wife all of a sudden. So it seems like our pride gets the best of us very easily, and it deceives us very easily. And God has been very gentle with us, and God disciplines us. And so he wants to restore us, and he wants us to want to restore each other.

And so turn back to Psalm 51. And let's talk a little bit about how Psalm 51 brings up restoration. And then we'll talk about some bones. Maybe a little bit of pride. And dogs. So there's your outline, if you're looking for an outline.

Bones, pride, and dogs. See if I remember to get to all of them. Like I said, I didn't remember to bring my notes this time. Mary, are you taking notes? Okay, so I don't even have anybody help with me. Alright, so verse 8 though, Psalm 51.

David, who has sinned egregiously against God, he sinned egregiously against the nation of Israel, he sinned against Uriah, his friend, he sinned against Bathsheba, who's actually now his wife, or becomes his wife shortly thereafter, depending on when he prayed the prayer. He says, let me hear joy and gladness in verse 8. in verse 12 he says restore to me the joy of your salvation what i want you to understand is that when we talk about restoration restoring something means bringing it back to the state it was once in So when you restore like an old table or an old car or whatever other things people restore I'm terrible with illustrations sometimes. I'm so, the only thing I can think of is football analogies.

We don't restore much in football. But when you restore something, you take something that once was and it's become a little bit dilapidated and then you restore it to what it once was. So you sand it down and you repaint it and now it looks nice again. But you don't make something new. I don't think this is talking about being born again. I think this is the cry of a Christian.

When you get saved, you don't ask God, restore me. When you get saved, you need to be completely and totally changed into a new creature. There's no restoration. You're a new person. And if you want to say you've been restored to like somehow your pre-fall state or something like that, I don't think that's how it works. It doesn't happen that way.

This is about a Christian who has tasted and seen that the Lord is good. He's walked with God. In this case, it's a prophet of God and a king. So two of the offices that Christ fulfills, David was fulfilling and was a type of. And this is a person who has known God. He's known the grace of God, the mercy of God, the blessings of God.

God rebukes him in 2 Samuel 12 where that preceded this psalm. And he tells him, I gave you all these things and I would have given you much more if you'd asked me. That's what he says through Nathan to him, remember? And David, David's saying, restore me. I want to feel the joy and the closeness and the fellowship that I once had before I broke it with my sin.

That's what David's talking about. He's not asking to be restored like brand new, like he never knew God before. This is the cry of a person who knew God, willingly and presumptively fell into sin. I almost hate to say fell into, it sounds too passive. Jumped into sin, we'll say. And this is a person who is realizing his folly, who has felt the closeness of God and then has felt even being forsaken.

And he is crying out to God, restore to me the joy of your salvation. Let me hear joy and gladness. He says in verse 8, let the bones that you have broken rejoice. This is kind of neat. If you turn to Psalm 32, so you can you can have a lot of fun prepping for a sermon because you can just kind of pick one word and just start looking at bones and bones are spoken of a lot in scripture remember Joseph said they carried his bones out of Egypt remember and they sure did something else in verse 32 Psalm 32 another cry of David after this sin is forgiven David says, we'll just start at the beginning blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven whose sin is covered, that's quoted in Romans 5 I believe he says blessed is the man against whom Yahweh counts no iniquity in whose spirit there is no deceit blessed is a really neat fancy word in King James we would say blessed there's different ways people have said that word I think and we say the word bless you and if somebody sneezes there's probably someone who will say bless you but when it really comes down to it blessing just means happiness I know there's a little more to some of it than that but saying happy joyful I realize there's a difference between what we call happiness and joy it's not the point here the point is that you have joy when your sin is forgiven you have joy when the Lord counts no iniquity against you and that's because there's iniquity in you and I just want to just to make you think for a second it says blessed is the man against whom Yahweh counts no iniquity that man is joyful, that man is happy and now let me ask you this what about the man that the Lord counted iniquity against and he never even committed any so if the Lord not counting iniquity against you is blessing how do you think it felt to our Lord Jesus to have all of the iniquity of his people counted against him although he had done no wrong it would be one thing if God changed his mind which he wouldn't do and decided to punish you for your sin even though you know you thought you got forgiveness or something I guess that's not even possible, but I guess in theory, like, okay, you screwed up, you didn't really believe.

But this is a man that committed no sin. And he deserved to have unceasing joy. He deserved it. And yet, he felt the cursedness of the Lord holding iniquity against him, counting iniquity against him. If anyone in here has ever been falsely accused, even for a moment, you know how it feels. You kids, when Johnny runs in and says, Daddy, Daddy, Becky did this.

I'm trying to find names that aren't in the room here. So nobody thinks I'm talking about it. Becky did this to me. Like, I did not do that. Right? Isn't that what you do when somebody falsely accuses you?

And yet in some ways, of course, Jesus willingly went to the cross. But Jesus was falsely accused. falsely accused by many but even more so forsaken by God for the sins of his people but listen to what David says about his bones he says for when I kept silent my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long day and night your hand was heavy upon me my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer So David has experienced the pain of living with his sin and guilt While David's sin was unconfessed, while he was still covering it up, while David was still trying to, in a sense, wrap himself in fig leaves, David experienced his bones wasting away physical sickness comes upon us as the result of our sin I'm not saying it's a one to one thing I'm not saying Bert must have some sin that's why he's got pink eye I'm not saying that but it does tell us in 1 Corinthians 11 that's why many of you are sick and some have died because you're taking communion unworthily how we worship God is important and so there's a principle in play here that you will feel the effects of your sin you will feel the weight of your guilt especially while it's unconfessed and once it's confessed and forgiven you work backwards this is a chiastic psalm if you read it you can read it in and then back out and then if you re-read it you can see how the verses correspond with each other if you don't know what a chiasm is It's like a Hebrew poetry thing where it starts out going one way, and then it goes a different way, and then it comes back, and it creates like a shape. But David experiences the cursedness of his sin, not feeling forgiven.

So even though your sin is forgiven by God if you're a Christian, you will not experience the sense of that. And your bones waste away, he says. he says my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long but then in verse 5 David says I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity I said I will confess my transgressions to Yahweh he said you forgave the iniquity of my sin if you look at Psalm 31 just a page over in most of your Bibles verse 10 David said for my life is spent with sorrow and my years with sighing my strength fails why because of my iniquity and my bones waste away well praise God can you imagine praise God for a moment that when you stray even sometimes only in your heart that his love toward you is so great that he will come and chase in you to the point of even afflicting you with physical illness if that's what it takes to bring you back to him. Because most of you, when you feel strong, it's when you don't think you need God.

But then all of a sudden, when a little microscopic virus knocks you out for a few days, you're praying a little more than normal. you're walking along doing good things and then one day you twist your ankle and all of a sudden you can't even walk straight a lot of times that's when we come to God oh God I need your help now we should learn to come to him all the time another reminder this is Jesus Christ speaking as well Jesus Christ who never sinned experienced this sense of being forsaken verse 11 because of my adversaries I become a reproach man that never sinned did that for you and me I'll turn to Proverbs 3 David needs healing David needs his bones to feel better Proverbs 3 5-8 trust in Yahweh with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes. Fear Yahweh and turn away from evil.

You can claim these verses for all sorts of things if you want, but ultimately it's saying you're supposed to believe in Jesus Christ. This is about salvation. Remember I told you before, when you see fear Yahweh in the Old Testament, I want you to think salvation. I want you to think believing the truth about God in such a way that you actually fear his judgments and tremble before His word that you might believe in His promise that He sent a Messiah to save you.

But look at verse 8. If you do these things, it will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones. Kind of funny, all these talk of bones. You go through the whole Bible, you got Ezekiel and the dry bones. You got Jesus' bones not being broken, which is a fulfillment of the prophecy from Psalm 34. Lots of stuff about bones.

It's kind of fun. But what I want you to understand is that David needs to be restored. And God promises to restore. David says, let me hear joy and gladness. And I believe that God granted that prayer. I believe God let him hear joy and gladness again.

And so I am not going to tell you that Christians never get depressed. And I'm not going to tell you that Christians never get clinically depressed. I think it happens and it's possible. I think we live in a hyper-psychological society right now where all forms of I don't feel right right now have now been diagnosed as some form of clinical depression or some kind of disorder.

And the easy thing to do has been let's just hand people pills that make them feel different. And let's relieve that one particular symptom that we've declared as bad as the psychologists of the day. And I think what we've done is we've actually created an entire society of chemically dependent people, most of whom are, I think, more open to demonic possession or at least influence. and we've created a whole group of people that have now become numb to the actual pain that comes in life sometimes from not knowing the Lord.

The pain that people suffer because of their sin that I would like to believe is the Lord trying to get a hold of people, we are numbing them from it with something other than Jesus Christ. And so if you are a person that has dealt with depression and things like that, don't mishear me now. I think it's possible that you can have a physical ailment, that there are things that happen to us that can change body chemistry and we can be depressed.

But I also think that sometimes, and I would venture to say that our first instinct when we are Christians, when we have lost joy, when we have what we would call depression or despair or some of those types of things that come in our life. I think our first instinct and inclination needs to be to consider whether we are not hearing joy and gladness because of our own iniquity. To consider, not that it's a direct thing, but to consider that we should be rooting out sin in our lives.

If you want the joy of your salvation restored to you, like it says in verse 12, I would argue that you ought to be on your knees confessing sin to God and asking him to reveal the sin that you don't even realize is in you and I will tell you that I have known Christians who claimed to have experienced some periods of depression and difficulty who through counseling and through help from a pastor or someone else in the church who worked with them on the word of God that they have trusted in Christ alone to carry them through and it has carried them through and they are overjoyed for it. And the fact that for most secular people that don't believe in Christ that it will not have that same effect necessarily doesn't invalidate the truth that what they need is Christ. So we have to be very careful with people.

When somebody's depressed, you can't be one of Job's friends and just say, well, you must have done something. That's not what I'm advocating here. But on a personal level, when you are a person who is a committed member to a local church, you're in regular discipleship relationships, there's people in your life who know if you're off that week or not, and you're opening up to people and you're regularly confessing things to people.

I think that in those situations, when you hit one of those lows, there will be people who can either help you out of it or at least bear with you as you go through it. And I think sometimes it might be God's will that the Christians should suffer in that way rather than just basically appease their flesh and make them not feel it anymore. So Mary, what was the second point in the outline?

Mary, remember? Dogs and bones and dogs. What was the other one? what was it I can't hear you oh pride that's right I couldn't hear you sorry thank you turn to Psalm 31 again one of the problems we have when we don't confess well one of the reasons we don't confess is pride Psalm 31 verse 23 we'll just skip a few verses there love Yahweh all you his saints Yahweh preserves the faithful but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride.

And he says, be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for Yahweh. It's just like this little line inserted there. He abundantly repays the one who acts in pride. Now you could say a lot of things about David. He committed adultery. He committed murder.

He probably lied a lot about it, I would guess, even though it's not stated clearly. He was hypocritical in his judgment of the man who took the other guy's lamb in the hypothetical story Nathan gave him. But underlying every single one of those sins was pride. In every single case, David replaced God and God's law effectively with David and David's law.

David's pride is what kept him from doing the right things it's what kept him from telling on himself early before things even got bad it's what kept him from confessing his sin when he found out Bathsheba was pregnant David's pride underlied every single one of those sins and if God's going to abundantly repay the one who acts in pride and God says be assured they will not go unpunished says everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to God that's all in Proverbs 16 if God's going to abundantly repay those who act in pride I think what we ought to do is we ought to be considering our pride and we ought to be able to be honest about it and I think we also have to recognize that if God's going to abundantly repay those who act in pride and you have been forgiven of all your iniquities and your slate has been washed clean and you've been granted the righteousness of Christ that you have to once again consider that even every what I'll call little tiny act of pride even though they're not tiny you don't see them They're not like outward sins, usually. That Jesus Christ was abundantly repaid for every one of those. And so I'm not here to make you feel bad.

That's not the goal. But I think that it motivates us sometimes to recognize the sacrifice that was made on our behalf. So that you can even sit here right now and not be struck by the fire of God. Because everything that you're doing is wicked in its sight if it wasn't for Jesus Christ's blood covering you. I don't think we get that. we don't meditate it on enough.

We look at our kids and we think they're all sweet so God probably loves them we figure and they're cute. We look at ourselves and think well I'm not as bad as the other guy or as my dad or whatever it happens to be. And I think we forget that Jesus Christ's blood had to be shed so that we could even sit here and not be under the abiding wrath of God.

And so I want you to meditate on that because I love you. And I want you to understand that there is a truth that we can be restored. I'm trying to remember. Oh yeah, turn to 2 Samuel 9. It's going to seem unrelated at first. I want you to turn to 2 Samuel 9.

So I want you to understand that there is restoration. If all God ever did was take you and say, you know what, I'm going to call you a forgiven sinner, and then you just went along the rest of your life being the same person you always were, but he still took you to heaven, that would be abundant mercy. That would be grace beyond what we could imagine or deserve.

But that is not what God promises. just as surely as God promises that you will be glorified if you're justified God promises you will be sanctified if you're justified this is why we confront people that we find living in sin because we believe that that is an indicator that they are either under the chastisement of their father and we can maybe try to help them out a bit like Galatians 6 once said or it's an indicator that they don't actually belong among us because the Bible promises sanctification. What that means I just used a bunch of those big words, right? When I said glorification that means you're going to go to heaven.

So if you're a Christian who's been justified, meaning God has declared you righteous in His sight because of the blood of Christ I can promise you that you're going to go to heaven. You'll be glorified one day. No matter how bad it gets on this earth. If you've been justified, you'll be glorified. and what I'm trying to tell you is that in between the point of your justification that's what we usually call being born again or for some of you when you pray to God for salvation in between the time that you get to know the Lord for the first time and when you actually go see him face to face God is going to continuously change you so that you'll be conformed to his image in your flesh and in your heart and soul this is why you should see a progressive growth in your life of overcoming sin.

If you've been a Christian for however many years now, and you can't look back a couple years and see how you've changed from that time, you need to ask yourself, why am I not growing? It's like really simple. If I gave you a plant and the plant didn't grow, would you think it's alive or dead? Dead. Yeah, if your baby comes out and your baby won't eat, what do you think is going to happen?

Do you think the baby is going to thrive or die? Good parents freak out if their kid is not eating. Some of you have grandpas, grandmas, older parents, whatever it is. When the older people, I've been around a few times, when they stop eating, what do you know is happening next? Some of you have watched it happen. Grandpa won't eat anymore.

I remember being a kid being like, what does that mean? Is grandma going to lose weight? I didn't know. now I know like oh grandpa won't eat anymore it means grandpa's not going to take in any nourishment or any life giving sustenance and grandpa's going to die and if you're a Christian spiritually and you're not doing anything that resembles growing then we assume you're dying and Christians aren't dying Christians are living and so sanctification is promised and if you're going to be restored to fellowship with God God is going to change you in a way where your life will reflect what it looks like to know Jesus Christ.

We call it being conformed to His image. So it doesn't mean you become holy as He was. But it does mean that you start to love the things that He loves and hate the things that He hates. And you start to have more fear of being displeasing to your Father in Heaven than you do of anybody on this earth. and it means that you start to want to actually do the things that God would want you to do 2nd Samuel 9 restoration a little bit of a stretch I'll admit but I like this story and David said is there still anyone left of the house of Saul that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake so remember David's friend was Jonathan right and he said he loved him so this love the whole different story this is love for Jonathan was was like greater or better than his love for even a woman And the homosexuals have turned that into like well maybe they were gay they said No, listen, the whole point of the passage, the whole point of the passage is that David had such love for Jonathan that it wasn't clouded by any other kind of thing.

It was a true spiritual connection that they had in the Lord. One of the reasons why men marry women and women marry men is because of the physical attraction that God creates in two people when he makes them love each other. When you find somebody that you love without that happening, that's pretty special too. And so David's love for Jonathan was holy. but so it says now there was a servant of the house of Saul his name was Ziba and they called him to David and the king said to him are you Ziba and he said I am your servant and the king said this is David is there not still someone of the house of Saul that I may show the kindness of God to him now remember when we read the Old Testament we're reading types and shadows of the Messiah who was to come so get out of your mind for a moment like oh this is like a This is one of those Old Testament stories where it's David, and he's probably wearing a white robe, and he's got a beard, because I saw the picture once.

Get some of that stuff out of your mind, and imagine that God is trying to paint a picture of what he's going to do in Jesus Christ one day for his people. So get that on your mind when you read the Old Testament. And he says, Ziba said to the king, There is still a son of Jonathan. He is crippled in his feet. the king said to him where is he and Ziba said to the king he is in the house of Machir the son of Amiel at Lodabar then king David sent and brought him from the house of Machir the son of Amiel at Lodabar I shouldn't do this because I should take notes first but Amiel I think was Bathsheba's dad too it's kind of interesting how they're all related But anyway, maybe it's a different amulet.

I shouldn't do that in the old sermon, but it just caught me. At Lodabar, and Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, son of Saul, came to David and fell to his face and paid homage. Mephibosheth didn't suffer from pride. Mephibosheth may have been one of the most gifted people in the history of the world by God and that he was made lame at a young age before it was even his fault.

And Mephibosheth could have grown up resenting that God had done that to him. Why did you let this woman drop me when I was a little guy, God? He could have been angry at God. A lot of people would have said amen and justified it. But God gifted Mephibosheth with humility. And David said, Mephibosheth.

And he answered, Behold, I am your servant. And David said to him, Do not fear, for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan, and I will restore to you all the land of Saul your father, and you shall eat at my table always. And he paid homage and said, What is your servant that you should show regard for a dead dog such as I? Mephibosheth was the grandson of the previous king like if anyone had a claim to say hey I'm owed something it'd be Mephibosheth and we know a lot of people like that who because their grandma or grandpa had something good or bad happen to them they think they're owed something today because something bad happened to them that they were born into that wasn't their choice, all of a sudden God's unjust.

But you have Mephibosheth. It says he ate at David's table like one of the king's sons. It says in verse 11, Mephibosheth is a picture of a Christian. Someone who comes to the king and can do nothing but honor the king and say, I don't deserve anything. I'm nothing but a dead dog. And then, eats at the king's table all the rest of his life?

How does that happen? Turn to Matthew 8. It happens because God rewards the humble and He hates the pride. He opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will exalt you, James told us. Matthew 8, there's the faith of the centurion is the heading in the ESV.

And in verse 10, Jesus heard the centurion basically proclaim his faith in him. He says, truly I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west, he says, and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. He says, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into outer darkness.

So this coming to the king's table is a picture of heaven. Turn to Matthew 15. Verse 21. And Jesus, well, sometimes the way the ESV breaks things up probably makes it harder to actually probably get the context. If we go back, Jesus says in verse 18, what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and that's what defiles a person. He says, for out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder adultery sexual morality theft false witness and slander He says these are what defile a person but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone So Jesus here proclaims what we about to see in the next passage basically that the ceremonial laws that the Jews tried to follow weren't what cleansed them in the first place.

It would have been the faith, right? Remember what I said? Religious duties performed by men, even if instituted by God, are absolutely worthless if done from a wicked heart. and they're loved by God if they're done from a pure heart. So these guys were having evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual morality, theft, false witness, slander, and then they were washing their hands and straining out gnats from their cups so they wouldn't eat an unclean little animal so that they could feel religiously good about themselves.

But listen to verse 21. Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon, And behold, a Canaanite woman, so a non-Jew from that region, came out and was crying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. And he didn't answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, Send her away, for she's crying out after us.

This person wouldn't stop. She wanted Jesus. And she wouldn't leave them alone. he answered I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel but she came and knelt before him saying Lord help me and he answered he says look it's not right to give the children's bread and throw it to the dogs right so he's talking about taking bread from a child and giving it to a dog and he's trying to say well I was I came for Israel, right?

So it wouldn't be right to give this to a dog. The Gentile was called a dog by the Jews. And this woman, at this point, if she was a 21st century feminist, would have got up and slapped them. Called them the patriarchy. And then they would have canceled them on TikTok. But instead, she said, yes, Lord. yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table and then Jesus answered her oh woman great is your faith be it done for you as you desire and her daughter was healed instantly people who come to the Lord Jesus and can acknowledge themselves to be dead dogs before him can acknowledge themselves to be unworthy to actually be in his presence.

And people who come and actually realize, look, I don't even need the loaf of bread. Give me your crumbs, because your crumbs are better than the best I can come up with. It's a weird analogy. The smallest little piece of the grace of God, if it could be cut up, is more infinitely better than everything that the rest of the world could all come up with if we worked together for millions and billions of years to create the best possible thing.

And yet God's grace is abundant, and it overflows. David said, my cup overflows. Jesus said that too. My cup overflows. So Jesus restores people. He restores people who come to Him in humility.

He restored Peter after Peter denied him three times after saying he would never deny him. He restored Mark, who Paul said, get that guy away from me. I don't want that guy with me. And then later Paul says, send Mark. He's useful to me in the ministry. This is the God that we serve.

He's a God who even after the king of Israel sinned in ways that would get you in trouble even in our wicked culture right now. He restored David to the point where David is still considered a man after God's heart. Where being a son of David was the title given to Jesus which meant he was the Messiah and the rightful king of Israel and the rightful heir to the throne.

Or even this Gentile woman knew Oh, she said, oh Lord, son of David, right? Jesus restores people. And so we should have that desire to restore others. You should have a desire to forgive Christians who sin against you. We should have a desire to see people restored to fellowship. One caveat, maybe more than one. we don't take people that have broken God's law in certain ways and necessarily put them back in positions where they can further abuse people.

So, for example, if a man stands up and says, I'm a man of God and I'm going to preach the word and I'm going to pastor a church, and then he's found to be with some kind of sin, like spiritual abuse of people, anger, sexual immorality, immorality, particularly if it's using his position as an authority to take advantage of someone else, those people don't ever belong back into leadership. They don't ever belong back as pastors. But they do belong and resort to the fellowship and treated as other Christians who've been forgiven.

So there is wisdom that we have to employ where we don't want to make it so easy for a wolf to just pretend he's repentant and we put him back in a position to abuse people or hurt women or children. And so what I want you to understand is that God can use you. This is one of the difficult things about preaching is it's very easy to turn it into like an analytics lesson almost.

It's easy to just open it and just preach the word verse by verse and say this is just the next verse and I'm just going to tell you what it says. And if you like it, good for you. And if you don't like it, that's because the Holy Spirit is convicting you. And I'm just telling you the truth and those kinds of things. And that's what we want someone to do.

But part of what happens in a local church context is that it becomes very personal. Because what I want to see is the people in this room who have strayed from the Lord. Or who will someday have a difficult day, week, month. I want people to know that God can still use them. that God can restore them even after they have sinned against Him and that He can actually give them a life where they actually hear joy and gladness again where the bones that are broken are healed and they rejoice I want you to understand that And some of you aren even Christian yet And someday you're going to become a Christian, Lord willing.

And you're going to feel on fire. And you're going to think nothing would ever bring me down. And I do it sometimes, just as a Christian. I wake up on a Monday, like, I'm going to do so much better this week. And then something happens. and I find myself not quite in the same feeling anymore. And I just want you to know that God can restore you.

And God will restore you. Just like he did David and so many others. And in some of these people's cases, he did great things with them. David, arguably one of the worst Christian sinners in the history of time that we know of. Arguably one of the best men. It's all about God.

It's all about Jesus Christ being glorified. And what I want you to do is I want you to want him to be glorified in your life and to pray that he would glorify himself through granting you obedience and faith That he would not have to what does it say the horses you control the horse with the bridle, right? A rod is for the back of fools. Just submit to him now.

Submit to him right now. Children, submit to your parents. Everybody in here would love to take the strap and just throw it away. we'd all love that or just save it for your grandkids at least like if I never had to spank a kid again that would be joy for me nobody wants to do that so children submit to your parents now obey them now and then similarly we do that with the Lord obey him before he needs to chasten you let me pray Father your word return void to you.

And so we thank you that we can rejoice in the God of our salvation. We know that there are times when the reality of our salvation is not evident in our lives And it not evident in our actions And it not evident in our feelings And we thank you Father that your truth is unchangeable that your character is perfect, and that we can always know, even when we don't feel like it, we can always know that your promises are true. That even Jesus Christ, when he said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? said it with complete confidence that he would be raised from the dead total confidence that he would sing the praises of the Lord at the end of the same psalm he was quoting psalm 22 and so we thank you Lord that when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we can fear no evil because you are with us and your rod and your staff, they comfort us.

But they comfort us because we know that they're there to provide discipline, to restore us. So I pray that that would be a reality in our lives even today, Lord, that it would begin in our hearts. Amen.