Our Hope in Christ - Corey Salisbury Rockland Community Church Download

In Psalm 90, Moses describes God’s power and eternal nature. In Christ, we have the ability to be reconciled and saved from His wrath.

Transcript:

Let us pray. Dear Father, as we come before your word this morning, we pray that you would open our ears to hear it, that we might be drawn to look to you as our God, as our one and only Savior.

Father, we pray that you would work through our brother Corey as he brings your word to us, that you would fill him with the Holy Spirit and use him to speak every word that you would will him to speak to us this day. Father, we pray that you'd be glorified in all these things. We ask this in the name of Christ our Lord. Amen. You may be seated. All right. Welcome our, our brother Corey Salisbury here. Very glad to have him here this morning from Christian Hill Church.

All right. Rockland Community Church, how are you doing this morning? We're doing well this morning. Awesome. All right. Well, to introduce myself, my name's Corey Salisbury. I come from Christian Hill Community Church in West Warwick. And I just wanna say, this is an amazing opportunity that the local churches can come together and just have such an opportunity as this. So I just wanna express my gratitude for you guys welcoming me in here, express my gratitude for my family back there who came. Thank you, guys. All right. So, yeah, I just wanna begin with a, a, a word of prayer, if that isn't too redundant, before I get into this. So, Father God, we just thank you that your church is just, shown through these local expressions, Lord.

And we're just so thankful for the unity of that. That's under your direction, under your sovereignty, God. We just bow before you, and we just say thank you so much, that it's such a great opportunity to just be in your word today. So I just pray that as we go into your word, that we would just be convicted where we need to be convicted, encouraged where we need to be encouraged. But Lord, let your glory be made known to us today. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. We live in a world that is consumed by death. We are surrounded with the reality of decay. The news that we read about is full of it. The media that we consume is stung by it. It pervades our very subconsciousness, and it is a problem. You may not even be aware of it, but right now, your body is fighting against death. Several systems in your body are all working together to make sure that your nerves are traveling, your blood is flowing, your food is digesting, and your waste is excreted. If your body gets too cold or too hot, your body will instantly, recognize the imbalance, and it'll send receptors up to the brain, where the brain will either constrict or dilate your blood vessels, which will either cause your muscles to contract spontaneously or your sweat glands to start excreting fluids.

In other words, we shiver when we get cold, and we sweat when we get hot. But why do we work so hard for all this? Why does our body work so hard in order to stop the inevitable? Medicine has advanced, and life expectancy has risen exponentially just in the past few decades, and yet we will still all face death.

Why do we try to swim in a sea that is surrounded by crashing waves? As humans, we are aware of our own demise, and we can choose to live in either one of two ways of life. We can either choose to live in fear or we can choose to live in hope. Naturally, we're afraid of the unknown of death. There's no proof of what happens after, so we tend to just avoid the question.

We just avoid the idea of it as we live in fear. But what I wanna focus on today is the aspect of living in hope. You see, the hope of life after death is found in almost every major religion, each with their own differing questions. Mankind tries to seek to answer two questions: Why are we here now, and where are we going to go after?

Now, like I said, there's differing answers from all these different people. Some will say that martyrdom is the way to go. Others will say ascetic practices will remove us from all earthly pleasures and lead us to an afterlife separate from it. But with so many people saying so many things, where can we really turn our hope?

Who has the final authority for it? Well, if we need an answer to the question of death, we should probably go to the book of life. So today, we're gonna look at Psalm 90. So flip with me there to Psalm 90.

Psalms are in the middle of the Bible, so I'm sure if you just crack that Bible right in the middle, you should be able to find it there. And once we get to Psalm 90, I just wanna provide some context for the Psalm. So when you get to the Psalm, you'll notice that at the top of the superscript, it says that this, this Psalm is attributed as a prayer of Moses, the man of God.

Now, whether or not Moses himself authored and penned down this Psalm himself when he was still alive, or if someone wrote this Psalm long after he was alive and wrote it in his honor, is still a question that's debated today. But what we can definitely know is that Moses was a man who was well acquainted with the idea of death, especially death under the wrath of God.

In the span of just 40 years, Moses witnessed the deaths of every firstborn in Egypt, the armies of Pharaoh, the kings of enemy nations, several groups of apostate Jews that were led by several different rebels, his sister Miriam, his brother Aaron, and finally himself. If any one person were to write a Psalm about death, it would definitely be Moses.

So let's read Psalm 90 and see what Moses has to say. Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn people back to dust, saying, "Return to dust, you mortals." A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.

Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death-- they are like the new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered. We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You've set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to 70 years, or 80, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass away, and we fly away. If only we knew the power of your anger! Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due. Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Relent, Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us-- yes, establish the work of our hands.

So from the start, you'll notice that Moses kind of pushes his focus away from the topic here. He doesn't really focus on death, which is interesting for the Psalms because most of the time Psalms will begin with a lament or a cry for help from their trials to God.

But rather than Moses focusing on the death that surrounds him, Moses focuses his eyes on the God that surrounds his entire situation. Moses puts his eyes to the God of life in the midst of death. In a world full of death, this is what we ought to do. We ought to seek life through it. We're so easily distracted with all the pain and suffering that death can bring.

Now, does that mean we shouldn't grieve? No, absolutely not. That's a terrible thing to preach. Grieving is a natural process that our body goes through in order to experience the full weight, the full burden of death. But we can't just simply wallow in our hurt and wallow in our pain. We need to surrender that to God's living nature.

And we hear about God's living nature as Moses describes God as a dwelling place for all, throughout all generations. Now, the idea of dwelling place is probably familiar with some of you. Pastor Tom just preached on Psalm 84 last week, and Psalm 84 says, "Better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere."

So we, we understand God's dwelling place to be a place of glory, a place of wonder. But rather than having courts in his time, Moses was not familiar with the temple mount that was set in Jerusalem. There was no set place or set dwelling place of God. But Moses was more familiar with the tabernacle. The tabernacle was almost like a predecessor to the tem...