Climbers No.5 Prosperity

We're going to sing Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart, number 170 in Mission Praise. Give thanks with a grateful heart, give thanks to the Holy One, give thanks because it's a grateful heart, a grateful heart, a grateful heart, a grateful heart, a grateful heart. Because of what the Lord has done for us, give thanks.

Let's turn in the Word of God to the book of Psalms, Psalm 128, the Pilgrim Psalms. These are the Psalms that you climb as you try to get through the Everest of life, realizing that it's the purposes of God that you and I should go higher, always onward, always upward, until the day comes when it happens in the experience of Enoch, you climb so high, you walk so far that God says it's nearer to my place than yours, so come home with me. Psalm 128, blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in all his ways, you will eat the fruit of your labor, blessings and prosperity will be yours, your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house, your sons will be like olive shoots around your table, thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord.

May the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life, may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem, and may you live to see your children's children. That's such a short reading, let's go back to Psalm 1 where the same ground in differing language is actually covered. Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night, he is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither, whatever he does prospers, not so the wicked, they're like chaff that the wind blows away, therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous, for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

But back again to Psalm 128 which not only follows Psalm 127 chronologically but picks up on some of the teachings of the 127th Psalm and gives perhaps a different perspective in as much as in Psalm 128 is recorded the need for our activity, our cooperation with God in the achievement of the gracious blessings which He has prepared to bestow upon us. Now, it was my privilege not that long ago from this pulpit to preach from Romans 8.28 and I did so by putting in a caveat that is a clause right at the very beginning when I said that handling Romans 8.28 you really do need a great deal of care. It's not the sort of verse, all things work together for good to them that please God, to those who are the called according to His purpose, that stripped from context you can always cope with because there are circumstances in life when Romans 8.28 seems to be a most inappropriate verse of Scripture and unless you placed it back into the context of that mighty passage where the Apostle has also declared the problems through which he has gone and the sufferings which he still anticipates, then as I say it can really almost wreck your faith as you wonder why Romans 8.28 doesn't apply in the particular circumstance which is confronting you.

Well, here again I argue in Psalm 128, you have to come and look at this psalm which is really a simple philosophy. It's a declaration from the psalmist of the way that ideally speaking things work out in the life of the ordinary man and you use that word generically, it crosses the sex, the ordinary man, the ordinary woman and it does indeed seem to be full of bounty. It almost seems too good to be true and if you were to place this Psalm 128 over against Habakkuk and the stories recorded there or indeed the book of Job, you might wonder to yourself how it is that Psalm 128 and what it promises in terms of prosperity, health, quietness, joie de vivre, how it is that Job didn't seem to experience it at least not all the years of his life and indeed circumstances in the prophecy of Habakkuk which don't seem to dovetail with this.

Indeed, I argue that if you took Psalm 128 and placed it into certain of the passages that Paul brings to us in the epistles beside the one I've already cited in Romans 8, then you would be in difficulty, but not really. You see, what you need to realize when you read the Word of God is that you don't use the lucky dip method. Now I was brought up in the days when promise boxes were extant when they were available, the days when Dick Barton was still thrilling boys and girls at quarter to seven on a midday evening.

With the promise box, what you did was you took a pair of tweezers and you plucked out one of the promises and you read it and you applied it for that day, and in one sense it's very good. It contains the bank of what God says, but it does take it without context. And one of the things that you and I always have to remember about Scripture is that we are called to cover the whole counsel of God.

And you need to place a psalm like this within the context of the whole counsel of God. Here it is idealized. What can be and doubtless was for many Hebrews, the blessings that they received as husband and wife in a family situation, respecting God, knew the sunshine of His love upon them.

But there were other circumstances where perhaps qualifying aspects of Scripture also need to be brought to bear. Now it will do us good whether our lot seems to have fallen on pleasant places as delineated in this psalm or whether we're going through great difficulties, whether we're family men and women or whether we're on our own, or whether we have children or whether we do not have children. I say that there are certain things basic here which will be of great blessing to you.

Now I lead off with another question. Why in terms of the evangelical, the Christian home, do we try to ensure that all the great stages of life have some reference to the church and what the church ministries offer? Let me explain what I mean. Here is a proud mom and dad with their first child, and they come to the tab or a similar sort of church, and they offer the baby and themselves to the Lord.

Why do they do this? Because they recognize that the blessings of parenthood have as their source none other than God Himself. Similarly, as witnessed here yesterday, a couple walked down the aisle, and we happily listened to their exchange of vows, and they come under the blessing and the cover of the church as we ask the Lord to be with them in their marriage. Or let me give you another scenario which happens so frequently here at the tab.

Here is an older brother or sister. The tremendous hour of death has come, and they have slipped from this life into the next, and invariably what happens? We have a memorial service. Sometimes we bring the coffin in.

Sometimes the coffin is up at the crematorium chapel or at the cemetery. But nonetheless, we stop at the end of life, and we reminisce upon the span of years that that person has been here. So, if you'll pardon the expression, at the stages that sometimes are referred to as the hatch and the match and the dispatch of life, birth, marriage, and death, we invoke the blessing of God.

Why? Well, I argue the answer is in the fifth verse of this psalm. May the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life. When you were an infant at your mother's breast, when you were possibly pledging yourself in union to someone in marriage, and in that final tremendous hour when the sands have gone through the glass, you need the blessings of God.

And of course, in Old Testament language, those blessings come from Zion. Zion stands for Jerusalem. Both words set the scene of the temple, the place where God in Shekinah glory would come down, and of course, it was natural for the pilgrims, at least three times a year, if they could, to make their pilgrimage to the holy city.

For what reason? To ask for the blessings of God, whether they were a couple like Joseph and Mary taking the infant Christ to the temple, whether it was a question of an old age pensioner about to sing his nunc dimittis, Lord, now let us thou thy servant depart in peace, whether it was a married man with his teenage family and his wife, he knew that more than anything else in life, he required the continuing blessings of God to be upon him. And that's the reason I say why these early pilgrims would go, some of them from Galilee, and eventually climb up the hills that would lead them to Zion, and there they would seek the priestly blessing, and someone standing as a descendant spiritually speaking of Aaron would say, the Lord bless you, the Lord keep you, the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you, the Lord give you peace, may the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life. Now, when you start to crack this text open a little more, or this passage, and come right to the beginning, you see here several things that are lifted out which help us to see the sort of person who receives God's blessing and the area in life in which they require that particular hand of blessing to be upon them.

Blessed are all who fear the Lord. And that is repeated in the fourth verse, thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord. So this is the caveat.

This is something that you need, first of all, as you approach the breadth of this text, to have in mind that what is contained here is directed to those who are serious about God, those who fear the Lord. You don't hear too much, perhaps you do to some degree in the evangelical pulpit, but by enlarging chrysanthemum, you don't hear a lot about the fear of God. Now, of course, that fear is not the cringing fear that a victim may have as the lion is about to pounce.

It's that fear which has as a synonym respect. Do you fear God? Well, there's a sense in which I don't. I'm glad to be in His company.

His compassions, they fail not. They're new every morning. He takes my sin and He separates that sin from me as far as the east is from the west.

He invites me to come to Him in the words of His Son, Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And yet, and yet there is a sense in which I'm afraid of Him. His holiness, His impeccable character, His fidelity, they beggar mine.

They make my attempts to be a disciple almost a mockery as I claim that word. Remember the story I owe it actually in terms of finding it to C.S. Lewis, but actually it's traceable back to the narrative of the wind in the willows. I've used it before, pardon me, but it really does encapsulate the drift of what I'm trying to say.

Here's Mole and Ratty, these two bosom pals from the animal world, and they're in a boat and one of them's pulling on the oars and they're going towards the island of Pan where their God is. And Mole says to Rat, aren't you afraid? And the Rat says, no, afraid? Afraid of Pan? Oh Mole, I'm not afraid. Five minutes go by and the boat approaches the island.

And yet, oh Mole, I am afraid. Oh, how I fear Thee, living God, with reverential fear. The man for whom this psalm applies is a man, is a person who fears the Lord, is someone who walks in his way.

Psalm 1 puts it in a negative fashion, blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. You want to know God's hand upon your life? Then stand in the direction where he will go by. Here is Moses on Mount Sinai, or rather on Horeb, and you recall on one occasion he says to the Lord, I will not go forward and do what you want me to do unless you show me your glory.

Lord, teach me your ways. Now Moses is long in the tooth. He's not a young lad with his wife bringing their first child to the Lord.

He's an elderly man. He's been preaching for some time. Yet he says, Lord, I want to be shown your ways.

Here's Bartimaeus. He's a blind man. He knows that Jesus is passing through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem, and so Bartimaeus places himself in the main highway along which Jesus will pass.

There are corridors down which our God will go. There are places where you might go to where you are on your own, because those places are not frequented by God, who knows of them, but like Sodom and Gomorrah, does not want to stay there. So the man who is blessed of God is the man who fears the Lord, is the man who walks in his ways.

There is a sense in which you could say that God blesses the Labour Party. Now let me recover two-thirds of the congregation at this point by qualifying what I have to say. You see, in that previous psalm, reference is made, as Tim brought it out clearly last week, to the person who works every hour, the person who is engaged in an overkill as far as work is concerned.

But the Puritan work ethic tells us that it is right to work for your food. Martin Luther points out that even before the fall, when God placed Adam in a garden, He didn't place him there to be an idol. He was the first botanist.

He was the first zoologist, a man with great acumen. His intellectual powers were to be used. When the writer of Proverbs, King Solomon, has in front of him the lazy fellow who expects to live off the state, though he himself has no sickness, which might be an excuse.

Not only does he call him a sluggard, but he sends him to the ant and says, look after him and watch the way that he labors. So here, the man who is going to know the blessings of God is someone who will put some energy into ensuring that he has money, that he is able, presumably, to buy his house and develop his land. Then the Jews had no problems whatsoever with being materially prosperous, as long as that prosperity was related to its source and used to the honor and to the glory of God.

So this is a man who is blessed. He reveres the Lord. He walks in His ways.

And with the grace of work, he is able to enter into its good and still remain dependent upon the Lord, acknowledging that He is the source of every good and perfect gift. So you're seeing this picture emerge, this ideal picture of the person who is walking reverently, through life, all of his days in the company of God. Now, not only does he know blessings in his work, but in the area of marital relationship.

In fact, this is the psalm for a married couple. In many senses, it could well be used in a marriage service. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine.

And there is no more choice, no more beautiful description in the whole of Scripture to describe a married woman than with this particular phrase. She is someone who ministers to the needs of her husband, as he in turn will minister to her needs. The word fruitful encapsulates the best, as it was, of the relationship between Abraham and Sarah, reckoned to be one of the three most beautiful women in the ancient world.

It encapsulates the more erotic teaching of the Song of Solomon. Everything that is good, the bluntness, the frankness, the adult language of the book of Proverbs, it's all there. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house with your sons.

Now, it seems rather chauvinistic, your, your, your. I was in Dubai airport trying to get back here last Sunday morning, early in the morning, when good people like you would be asleep. And there was a man with his two wives, don't get too hot under the collar, he was Muslim.

And I have never seen any women so draped as they were. I mean, there wasn't even the slit between the black, what they call the thing, over the head that is normally the case, so they could see out of it. And I was watching this man as he was dealing with the needs of his wives.

I mean, one had got a child who was screaming its head off, and the wife was requiring some coffee, and it was an extraordinary situation. I mean, here is this lady, so bedraped, with a child in her hand, husband comes, pushes some coffee in the other hand, and I thought he's as inept as a Western man would be, and then she has to try to get the coffee through her veil, up through her lips. I mean, it was a camera-seeking moment, but I daren't do it.

And it seemed to me that this man was making a statement, these are his wives, no one else will see them, and apart from the out-of-focus glimpse that they would get of life in the airport because of the black veil, they would see no other man. Now, that may be Muslim, it's not Judaism, neither is it Christian. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house.

Alongside the wall of your house is actually Hebrew expression, and the idea is this, of the traditional home in Palestine, where every room opened out to the courtyard, and here is this faithful wife going from one side of the room to another side of the room, looking after it, and so forth. Oh, you say, it still sounds a bit chauvinistic to me. Not a bit.

You see, the Bible puts a premium on the ministry of being a wife. I sometimes am concerned for our young women folk when they get married, they've done specialist jobs, they've got brains that some of us men would envy, and here they are now in the kindergarten with a child, and so on and so forth, and sometimes it must be a bit of a drag. And the Bible says, no, a woman who is a fruitful wife looking after her children is honored by God in the performance of her duties.

Blessed, blessed Mary, are you amongst all women. Why? Not because she was a computer technologist, not because she was a consultant, medical person, both these things being very honorable, but blessed are you because from the fruit of your womb will come the Lord Jesus, and because God has identified you as having those maternal characteristics to the extent that he can entrust you with the upbringing of his son. This is the idealized family setting with husband and wife alongside one another, sharing the home.

Your wife is a fruitful vine within your house. Your sons like olive shoots. The olive is a very interesting plant.

If you go out to the Middle East, indeed, not just to the Middle East, you'll find examples of what the psalmist was referring to and understand what he was saying. The fruitfulness of the vine is now matched by the fertility of the olive. Now the olive will have a main stem.

It could be quite old, and it could be gnarled, but when you look away from the olive, a little distance away, maybe three yards, maybe not as much as that, you'll find other shoots. They're taking their life from the main olive, and should it be the case that the wind blows so furiously and the old olive crumbles as a result, or should it be that it's chopped down, then there is any one of innumerable shoots which will continue growth and be able to perform the same function as the old olive branch. And this is a picture of blessing that you find within this psalm.

Your wife, a fruitful vine. Your sons, like olive shoots, round your table. Do you know what the Bible suggests is one of the greatest blessings? Fortunately, it will never be mine.

It's to be a granddad. May you live to see your children's children. I was reading earlier on this morning from Gordon MacDonald's new wonderful book, The Life God Blesses, and there he's got a chapter which speaks about what kind of man he wants to be when he is old.

I'm glad I read that chapter because MacDonald's older than me and it made me feel comfortable. And he said that on one occasion he was with some of his colleagues and he was asking them who had had the greatest influence on their lives. In a discussion with a group of men, I asked, who has been the most influential man in your personal life? Of the dozen or more who had joined the conversation, the majority identified their grandfathers as the most influential.

All the blessings are being a grandfather to your sons' children. Seeing them live, or you living in order to see them. MacDonald goes on and he speaks about one particular grandparent and even with respect to parents, the even greater sensitivity that a man who's passed his degree long before you did in parenthood might have acquired.

Let me tell you a story that characterizes the kind of man my grandfather was, one man said. He was a farmer and he had all the regular kinds of farm machinery, trucks, tractors, that sort of thing, and he taught me how to drive each of them in the summer. Well, there was one this day.

There was this one day, I was about 12, when he and I were out in the field and he said to me, run back to the barn and bring the truck out here. I was thrilled that he'd asked, and I went to the barn, got into the truck and started to back it out, but I turned the wheels too quickly and suddenly I had the front bumper of the truck wedged into the side of the door, and it seemed as though if I went forward or backward I was going to hurt either the truck or the barn. I was devastated because I figured that Grandad would see that I wasn't old enough to be driving his machinery, but I had no choice.

So I went out to the field and said, Grandad, you've got to come and help me. The truck's stuck in the doorway. He stood there for a moment quietly looking at me, stroking his short beard, and then he said, son, it seems to me that you got the thing stuck.

You can go back and get it unstuck. I never loved my grandfather more than I did at that moment. My father would have said something like this, can't I ever trust you to do something right? How many times do I have to tell you to do something? And so forth.

The passing of the years, the acquiring of experience, the gentleness, the forgiving, the compassionate nature, it should be part and parcel of the parent who lives to see his children's children in the way that he behaves, she behaves towards them. Time is virtually gone, and we're going to come around the Lord's table in just a few moments. Let's try to summarize what is being said.

You see, here is this man, here are this group of pilgrims, and perhaps they're just about to take their leave from Jerusalem. They're at different stages in their lives. We're taking this as typical or an example of men and women requiring blessing, and here is highlighted that particular blessing in families, because God puts a premium on families.

If you never made it into a family in terms of your own walk through life, obviously you were born into one, but I mean if you never married yourself, it doesn't exclude you from the overarching teaching of this text, which is that God from Zion wants to bless you all the days of your life. So here are some of you and your parents. I say go to this text and take the nourishment from it.

You who are fathers, you who are wives, you who are husbands, just look to this text as an idealized presentation of what your life can be like, and ask God for its fulfillment. Remember however, that even if you're not in that category, there is a sense in which all of us as we get older can have an increasing impact upon a younger generation, and there is a sense in which everyone here who is over sixty has lived to see the children's children either of your own family circle or of others. And you ought to take that as a blessing from God that you have lived to that particular generation, to see that particular generation.

And you ought to come to the Lord as everyone is, and latch on to verse 5 and ask that the Lord from Zion will bless you all the days of your life. And you ought to appreciate that that blessing is in some degree correlated to, related to the attitude that you have to this God. It's not cavalierly to be entered into.

You can't do that with Scripture. Blessed are all those who fear the Lord, who walk in His ways. This God, who centuries after the psalmist had written, visited Zion again, came in the person of His blessed Son, and made it possible for the likes of you and me to enter into a faith relationship with God through Him.

Zion spiritually in the New Testament speaks of the church, and the head of the church is none other than our beloved Lord. Every good and perfect gift comes from Him. You want to know increasing blessings upon your life.

Walk in the ways that He walks. This will not guarantee you material prosperity. I go further.

It will not even guarantee you physical health and strength. I'll go even further. It does not even guarantee that God will take your way down the marriage track.

But what it does mean is this. In all the changing scenes of life, in the high days, in the heavy days, in the sunshine, in the darkness, when everything is clear, when sometimes it's blurred, when you're going through a Job experience, though he slay me, yet will I trust him, or whether you're basking in almost ecstasy as on the day of Pentecost. This God is your God, and from Zion, He directs blessings suited to your particular circumstances.

Amen. I just found my notes. I've been looking for them at the beginning, and that is quite true, actually.

Let's go to Be Thou My Vision, O Lord of My Heart. Have I got that right? O Lord of My Heart, nought be all else to me save that Thou art. Number 51, and we'll arrange this communion furniture, and Brother Tim will lead us as we take bread and wine, and then there'll just be a moment for final worship and reflection on where we've been this morning.

51, this grand old hymn. Let's stand. Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of My Heart, nought be all else to me save that Thou art.

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of My Heart, nought be all else to me save that Thou art. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive.

When the life flowed from His body, seemed like Jesus' mission failed. But His sacrifice accomplished, victory over sin and hell. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive.

He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. In the grave God did not leave Him, for His body to decay. Raised to life through great awakening, Satan's body overcame.

He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. If there were no resurrection, we ourselves could not be saved.

But the Son of God is living, so our hope is not in vain. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive.

When the Lord rise out of heaven, like the angels at His side. They will sound the final trumpet, from the grave He shall arise. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive.

He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. He has given life immortal, we shall see Him face to face. Through eternity we'll praise Him, Christ the champion of all things.

He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. He has risen, He has risen, He has risen, Jesus is alive. Father, I place into Your hands the things I've done.

Father, I place into Your hands the times that I've been through. Father, I place into Your hands the way that I should go. For I know I always can trust You.

Father, I place into Your hands my friends and family. Father, I place into Your hands the things that trouble me. Father, I place into Your hands the person I would be.

For I know I always can trust You. Father, we love to see Your face, we love to hear Your voice. Father, we love to sing Your praise and in Your name rejoice.

Father, we love to walk with You and in Your presence rest. For we know we always can trust You. Father, I want to be with You and do the things You do.

Father, I want to speak the words that You are speaking to. Father, I want to love the ones that You will draw to You. For I know that I am one with You.