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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > Without God's blessing, everything is pointless | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Psalm 95:1-3 Hymn 63:1,5 Psalm 127:1,2 Hymn 1 Hymn 71 Scripture reading: Ecclesiastes 2 Catechism lesson and text: Lord's Day 40 and Psalm 127:1-2 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
You don’t have to look far in the world to find people who think life ultimately has no point. There are unbelievers who will say it in the most direct and confronting way. They’ll tell you life has no ultimate meaning apart from whatever meaning you make for yourself. All we are, they say, is “ugly giant bags of mostly water.” The universe is just a collection of particles randomly existing and sometimes colliding. Ultimately, as Macbeth says in the Shakespeare play, our lives are just “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
Doesn’t it sound much like the author of Ecclesiastes? That book is well-known for its refrain “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Chapter 2 of the book takes up that theme and develops it further. There’s vanity in collecting possessions for yourself and pursuing pleasure. Because the fool dies just like the wise, living wisely is pointless. Then chapter 2 ends by telling us how working hard is also futile, a striving after wind. That’s in God’s Word. His inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word.
Does God really mean to tell us then that life is pointless? No, because you have to remember how Ecclesiastes works as part of God’s Word. One of the key phrases to unlock the meaning of Ecclesiastes is “under the sun.” “Under the sun” is the author’s code for “life apart from a genuine acknowledgement of God and relationship with him.” Life “under the sun” is vain and futile. Life without acknowledging God and being in a healthy relationship with him is vain. It’s when we acknowledge him and live with him like we should that our lives are full of meaning and purpose.
The fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer lines up with this important biblical insight. This petition of the Lord’s Prayer is completely grounded in our world, our lives, and our needs. We’re asking God for something for ourselves that we desperately need. What we need is laid out in Psalm 127:1,2 and that’s going to be our focus this afternoon. I preach to you God’s Word and we’ll see how Without God’s blessing, everything is pointless.
We’ll learn how this wise insight impacts:
- Our thoughts
- Our words
- Our deeds
Psalm 127 is unique in combining several features. It’s one of only two psalms in the Bible that were written by Solomon. It’s a “Song of Ascents,” which means it was sung by Jewish pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem to celebrate special feasts. Finally, most notably, it’s what we call a wisdom psalm. We often think of Psalms as being songs of praise to God and many of them do that. But Psalm 127 is directed to God’s people. In Psalm 127, wise King Solomon is passing on a wise insight we all need to take note of.
That wise insight is related to human activity. If you look at verses 1 and 2, you see all these different things people might do. There’s building, guarding, rising up early, and working hard. In some way, all these activities still take place today all these thousands of years later. People still build – they build homes, they build families. People still guard their communities. We have a military to protect our nation from potential enemies and we have police officers who patrol our streets. People continue to rise up early and work hard for a living. But the meaning of verses 1 and 2 isn’t limited to these types of human activities. These activities are just representing everything we do as human beings.
Well, besides human activity, there’s also what God does in these verses. God builds, God guards, God gives sleep. The question is: how does God’s work relate to ours? That’s where the little word “if” comes into play. If God doesn’t build, our building is in vain. If God doesn’t guard, our guarding is futile. What this is saying is that we depend on God’s blessing for our activity to accomplish anything and to mean anything. As Paul says in Acts 17, it’s in God that we live and move and have our being. We can’t do anything without him. He’s the Almighty Creator and we’re his feeble, weak creatures who depend on him. It’s wise to recognize this truth.
It’s wise to take this truth and apply it to our lives. We’ll start with our thoughts. On a Sunday when we go to church, it’s hard not to be confronted with the reality of our dependence on God. At the beginning of our service, there’s the votum: “Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” That comes from Psalm 124:8. We hear it often from elsewhere in the Bible too. Of course, we could ignore what we hear from God’s Word at church. We could be indifferent towards it. But if we take God’s Word seriously, if we’re praying seriously and singing self-consciously, we’ll be thinking at length about how much we depend on God’s blessing in our lives. The challenge could be there even in church that we don’t think about, but the challenge is much more likely to be there on Monday morning and what follows in our week from there.
You go to work and suddenly you’re confronted with all sorts of pressures and questions. As you make your way through your day and through your work week, it can be so easy to not have God in your thoughts at all. That phenomenon isn’t limited to the workplace, it could happen as a university student too. It could happen if you’re retired and spending most of your time at home. It happens that our week goes forward and we don’t think about God much, if at all. We’re not self-consciously aware that anything we do can’t prosper or flourish without his blessing. Without him in our daily calling, whatever it is, everything would amount to nothing. It would be pointless.
So how do we get God back into our thoughts during the week? This is where the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer helps us. “Give us this day our daily bread.” When our Lord Jesus taught us this, he intended that this would be our daily prayer. Not that we would pray the Lord’s Prayer every day, but that we would pray along these lines. He wants us to pray for God’s work in our hearts so we’d acknowledge him in our thoughts every day as the source of every blessing. So we’d acknowledge in our thoughts that we’re dependent on his blessing.
That’s still kind of abstract, so let me make it more concrete for you. Christ speaks in the fourth petition about “daily bread.” Every day we eat. Every meal we take is an opportunity to put this into practice. There are several places in the gospels where we see Jesus eating. It’s notable that when he does, he always prays first. He did that for two reasons. First, it was part of his obedience to the first commandment. The first commandment requires us to call on God alone for everything we need. We so often fail in doing that, but Jesus didn’t. His obedience is ours. This is part of the gospel. But this gospel truth then leads us forward in the way we should go. Since we’re Christ’s disciples, we’re to follow his lead, walk in his footsteps. He prayed before he ate his meals, therefore we should too.
As we pray before our meals, we have an opportunity to ask God to bring our thoughts always to remembrance of him. We have an opportunity to ask God to help us acknowledge him in our thoughts throughout our day. In our prayers, we should say something like “O God, I know that all my care and labour cannot do me any good without your blessing. I need you, Father, and I depend on you. I need you to bless what I’m doing today.”
So this wise insight impacts our thoughts and how we pray about them. The same is true for our words. Again, look at the way we use our words on Sunday. We’re in church and we’re opening our mouths and saying things. Sometimes we pray together out loud in unison. At other times, we sing. We sing the words of the Psalms and the Hymns in our Book of Praise. We confess our faith in God every Sunday afternoon. We’re constantly expressing with words our dependence on God and on his blessing. Of course it can happen that you’re speaking the words without meaning them or just out of religious ritual. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that when we’re in church we mean what we say.
But as we get out there into the world, the bold words that we spoke on Sunday can sometimes fall to the wayside. The Bible tells us over and over again to use our words to show the world that we depend on God and that we want to exalt him. For example, think of Psalm 96:3, “Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!” The Hebrew word translated as “declare” means to report, to relate, to tell. It’s an activity done with words spoken. Yet do we do it?
Our Saviour Jesus did. With his words each day on this earth, he spoke of his absolute dependence on God. When he was tempted by Satan, he spoke the words of Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” That’s how Christ lived. Where we so often do, he never hesitated. He didn’t have the fear we do, he didn’t have the indifference we sometimes do, he didn’t have the forgetfulness we often do. That’s great, because what he did is part of how the gospel benefits us. When we believe in Jesus, then the Bible says we are in him. When we’re in him, God sees us not as we are by ourselves, but as we are in Christ. That’s a great encouragement.
But then it also leads us to prayer every day. Like Christ, we want to be those who use our words to acknowledge our dependence on God. Not just on Sundays, but all the time, whenever we get an opportunity to do so. Obvious opportunities sometimes come. Perhaps you’re a successful business owner. People might ask you about your success and what’s behind it. You could talk up yourself and your good business sense. You could mention the great employees that you have. But at a moment like that, you should also use your words to say, “I wouldn’t be where I am without God’s blessing. Without him, I wouldn’t be anything and my business wouldn’t be anything.” To be able to speak like that when the opportunity arises, Jesus teaches us to pray regularly for it. It’s not something that comes naturally to any of us – we need the Holy Spirit to give us strength and courage to acknowledge God with our words. So we pray. We pray like this, “O Father, I want to acknowledge you and your blessing in how I speak. When the opportunity comes, please give me strength and courage with your Holy Spirit. Please give me your help so I can properly acknowledge you and my dependence on you and your blessing.”
Last of all, we want to consider how the wise insight of Psalm 127:1,2 impacts our deeds.
Like we noted earlier, Psalm 127 speaks about our deeds. Life is full of them. Sometimes there’s a more obvious correlation between our deeds and God’s blessing. For example, when you’re literally building a house, as you put in your effort, and as God blesses your efforts, at the end of it, you can see a house. Someone can go and live in that house.
But when Psalm 127 speaks of building the house, it means a little more than literally building residences for people to dwell in. The immediate context of Psalm 127 speaks about children. Verses 3 to 5 speak about the blessing that children are to their parents. Psalm 128 continues with that theme. And if we go to the psalm preceding, to Psalm 126, it also speaks about the covenant community. So building the house in verses 1 and 2 of Psalm 127 should also be seen as deeds involving family and church life.
Think about raising children. Sometimes we put the effort into raising our children in a godly way and we right away see some good, some blessing over our efforts. But it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes we try to raise our children in a Christian way and there doesn’t appear to be any fruit, any blessing. We love those children, of course, but they don’t seem to be responding to God’s call to them to repent and believe the gospel. Where is God’s blessing? We acknowledged him and our dependence on his blessing, but it didn’t seem to work out. We can get upset and frustrated at that. Maybe it seems like we did our part but God didn’t come through on his side.
Loved ones, God doesn’t guarantee that he will “build the house” in the way we expect him to. He is not bound to our ideas of what should and shouldn’t be done. God is sovereign. He is the Creator, we’re his creatures. He is infinitely wise and we’re not. He calls us to trust him that when we do our work in faithful dependence on him, he will bless it in his way. He will bless it for his purposes, not ours. He will bless it in his time. He will bless it in the best and wisest way. We’re called to be humble and patiently trust him, trust that our heavenly Father knows best, also when it comes to our kids. And we ought to regularly express that in prayer too. As we express that in prayer, God will work patient trust in him in our hearts to greater degrees as well.
Another area of deeds which we ought to think about here is with regard to church life, and particularly to our giving. Christ is teaching us to pray, “Our care and labour cannot do us any good without your blessing.” Our gifts for the support of the church cannot do us or anyone else any good without God’s blessing. When you give, send it along with a prayer. “O Father, in thankfulness I dedicate this offering to you and I pray that you would add your blessing to it so that it may do good for your church.”
But sometimes there is a reluctance or even outright refusal to make voluntary contributions for the support of the church. Are you among that group of the congregation that gives little or nothing? Sometimes this happens because people are afraid. They live on a tight budget and there’s not enough left to give to the Lord. At least that’s the thinking. There are a couple of different ways God addresses this in the Bible.
One way is in 2 Corinthians 8. In that chapter, Paul is encouraging the Corinthians to be generous in their giving. He grounds what he’s saying in the gospel. He says in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” We have been made rich through Christ, through the gospel. Christ’s generosity in making us so spiritually rich is meant to spur us on to deeds of generosity in this world.
Then we can also come back to Psalm 127. God’s activity in building the house is essential for it to matter. But we can’t ignore the human activity spoken of here too. When it comes to raising our children, we can’t use God and his activity to excuse our lack of activity. We can’t say things like, “Well, God is sovereign over human beings, he knows who is elect and who isn’t, and so there’s no point in me trying to raise my children in a Christian way. If he wants them to be Christians, he’ll make them Christians. It’s not up to me.” No, that’s not a biblical way to talk. God gives a calling and responsibility to Christian parents. You have to take that seriously and you can’t slough it off by referring to God’s sovereignty in election.
It’s the same kind of thing with our giving. When it comes to our giving and the church, we can’t use God and his activity to excuse what we’re not doing. We can’t say things like, “Well, God builds his church, he does it all ultimately, so there’s no need or there’s no point in me being generous and maybe even being self-sacrificial in my giving. God has it under control and he doesn’t need me.” No, again, that’s not a biblical way to reason. God calls us through Christ to be generous, even to be self-sacrificial like Christ was. He calls us to give of our first-fruits, trusting he will provide for our needs, and that he’ll add his blessing to our giving. And that’s how we have to pray about it too. “Father, I’m going to do what you’ve called me to do even if it’s hard, and I’ll trust that you will bless what I’m doing.”
Loved ones, with God in our lives, nothing is pointless. Everything has a meaning, everything has a purpose. But God not only wants us to see that truth, he also wants us to acknowledge it in prayer to and live in its light. The reality is that God is there and it’s him and his blessing we’re dependent on every day for everything we think, say, and do. AMEN.
PRAYER
O God our Father,
You are the Almighty wise God, and we are your creatures fully dependent on you. In you we live and move and have our being. In everything we do, we need your blessing. Would you please provide us with all we need every day, both for our bodies and for our souls. Please especially add your blessing to the Christian parents among us seeking to raise their kids in your ways. Please help them always to prayerfully depend on you. And Father, please help us all with your Holy Spirit so that in whatever we’re doing we acknowledge you as the only fountain of all good. Thank you for the teaching of your Word this afternoon and we pray that it will remain with us to guide our lives, not only in the week ahead, but even beyond that too.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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