Life in 3D

Psalm 108. The words will be on the screen or you can follow along in your brown bibles provided or whatever you have there.

! Psalm 108 as we kind of start off this series on worship.!

Psalm 108.

The words of your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 10.

The words of your glory be over Philistia.

The words of your glory be over all the earth. The words of your glory be over all the earth. The words of your glory be over all the earth.

We're going to start off with a little geography review here this morning. So, what do you see there? Not the tree, the other thing on the screen. What do you see?

It's a line. Yeah. And how many dimensions does that have? One. We've got a one-dimensional figure, a line. It's very basic.

You see it on graphs. You see it on roads. And if you're driving down the road and you look up, you see more lines, right? We call them power lines. Maybe you've stood in a line before. Lines.

Okay. Let's move on. Here's the next thing in our geography review. What is this? It's a plane. It's a plane.

It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a plane. Right? And how many dimensions does a plane have? Two dimensions. We not only have length, we have width.

So, tabletop is a plane. The floor that your feet are on right now is a plane. And there are different planes. If you don't have too many hills in your lawn, your lawn is a plane.

So, it's not just a line, right? It stretches outward. It has another dimension to it. It's got width to it. It's two-dimensional. That's the next thing. And now the last one.

What is that? It's a cube. It sure is. And how many dimensions? Three dimensions. To our cube. Yes. A little bit more involved yet.

It's got an additional dimension beyond the length and the width. It's got depth to it. It's 3D. It's like that thing you maybe get handed at Christmas time that you open up and you hope that there's something good inside, right?

It's kind of like a Christmas gift. Or it's maybe like your house or your apartment where you live. It's got that third dimension to it.

So, you can go into it and you can walk around in it and you can go up and down the stairs and you can keep all your stuff in it, right? It's 3D. Technically, maybe the house or the apartment might be a rectangular prism.

But it's a three-dimensional figure, like a cube. It's got this space to it. So, one-dimensional, two-dimensional, three-dimensional is a big difference.

And if you think of this in terms of our lives, there's a big difference, too, in terms of the sort of life that's available to us. It's these different sorts of lives. And so, well, maybe think of it this way.

Approaching Christmas, you might have a box or a cube that you can open up at Christmas. But you might also, in the lead-up to Christmas, you might watch or re-watch A Christmas Carol.

Or maybe you'll watch a different version this year. Maybe the 1950s version or the 1980s version or the Muppet version or the Disney version of A Christmas Carol.

It's the one about the ghosts from Christmas past and Christmas present and Christmas future, originally a book by Charles Dickens. And in the story, the main character is Ebenezer Scrooge, right?

He's a miserly old man. And life for Scrooge is pretty one-dimensional. It's about one thing mainly, making money, doing the work, nose to the grindstone, making money.

He doesn't really care about other people. He's got his nose to the grindstone. He doesn't really see. He's not so interested in what's going on around him. At one point, it's said of Scrooge, oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone.

Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. His wealth is of no use to him.

He don't do any good with it. I'm sorry for him. I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself.

Always. So Scrooge, I find, is a good example of a one-dimensional character, someone who had a one-dimensional life. He doesn't stay that way, though.

What the story does is it goes on to tell about Scrooge's transformation. Life for Scrooge went from being all business to being about more than that. He discovered that there's more to life than he thought.

He starts seeing all the stuff around him. All the stuff around him and the people around him, all of it seemed so frivolous. And then that changes.

What made life worth living for Scrooge, it came to change. And he started looking around. And he was really amazed by what he saw when he really opened his eyes and looked around.

And there was this change in what he looked at and how he saw it. And ultimately a change in his heart. In the book, Dickens says this. He walked about the streets, Scrooge did.

And he watched the people hurrying to and fro and patted children on the head and questioned beggars. And looked down into the kitchens of houses and up to the windows and found that everything could yield him pleasure.

He had never dreamed that any walk, that anything could give him so much happiness. And ultimately he became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.

Or any other good old city or town or borough in the good old world. So life for Scrooge took on a new dimension, right?

He went from just going on a line through life, this one-dimensional trek, this one-dimensional journey, to really having his eyes opened and looking around him.

And what's on the horizon. He went from a solo, one-dimensional life to really engaging the world around him, people around him. It was a big change. And there are hints in the story of an even greater transformation for Scrooge.

We know Scrooge had his blinders taken off and he was looking around, started looking around, and really seeing and appreciating the world around him, the people around him. And also the spirit of Christmas, infused with the spirit of Christmas.

Now did Scrooge also look up? I wonder that a little bit. Did Scrooge also look up? Did he come to see the true meaning of Christmas? And the wonder of it all?

That there's a God in heaven above? And that he sent his son to us, into our world? And that what we see with our eyes on this horizontal plane is not all there is?

There's a whole other dimension beyond what we see around us. And how much beyond that horizon did Scrooge come to see and come to experience?

I'm not 100% sure. Of course, Scrooge is a fictional character and we can have different ideas about that. But what I love about the story is how it shows us this move, this shift from one-dimensional to two-dimensional.

And then how it at least gives us a hint at life in 3D. To really learn, though, about life in 3D, we need to open our Bibles.

And today we have our Bibles open to Psalm 108. And it's a good place to be because it takes us into the life of someone who definitely experienced life in 3D, King David.

David may have experienced the fullness of life in 3D as much as anyone other than Jesus ever has. It wasn't always like that, though, of course.

David had his one-dimensional moments, like with Bathsheba, and like when he went overboard on the battlefield, among other examples.

Other times for David, he just kind of led the typical two-dimensional life of work and family and parties and everything else.

The standard stuff of life, earthly life on this horizontal plane. But David also, a lot of the times, in a lot of ways, he also went vertical.

And it's really that vertical dimension that has come to define David. We see it especially in the Psalms. He lived his life in touch with God, with this real awareness of God's presence.

And he had this innate awareness that he belonged to something bigger, a bigger kingdom, beyond his own. He had a purpose from on high, and he knew it.

And he was led from on high, and he lived for a higher calling. And he just prayed a lot and kind of had this ongoing dialogue and conversation with God.

There was this third dimension to his everyday life. The Bible calls David a man after God's own heart. And we know it's not because he was sinless or because he was more pure than anyone else.

No, it had something to do with what we're talking about this morning. Psalm 108 is a psalm of David, sort of like a page out of his journal.

And it shows us David going vertical. In the midst of all the busyness of being king and a military leader and running the kingdom, administering everything, in the midst of all the stuff going there, on the horizontal of his life, David, he goes vertical.

And he leads his people to go vertical, too, and us, too. So taking a closer look, here's kind of an outline of Psalm 108.

And David, he starts here, as a lot of psalms do. He starts with praise. My heart is steadfast, O Lord. Now, what we see is that he lives for God's glory.

He starts with praise. He's living for God's glory, not to make a name for himself. He's living for God's glory. And, I mean, the reality is a lot of the times we are just kind of living for our own glory and to kind of get people to like us.

Right? It's the opposite of what we see here. David starts with praise. And there's a lot of ways in our everyday lives that we can just bring glory to God by doing what he made us to do.

All the little things. Just doing what God made us to do. But David shows us here the importance also of pausing and actually telling God point blank what we appreciate about him, what we think of him, giving him praise.

My heart is steadfast, O God. I will sing and make music with all my soul. Great is your love. Great is your faithfulness. Right? It reaches to the skies.

Talk about vertical. Right? Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth. These psalms, they help us get outside of ourselves.

They give us words to pray. They get us thinking vertically, looking up, looking beyond the horizon to the one who made the horizon, the one who has no horizon. I will sing and make music with all my soul.

They engage our souls. Mostly on a day-to-day basis, right? We're caught up in things like bank balances and report cards and grocery lists.

The psalms engage our souls. They lift up our souls, our hearts. The one who made us, who saved us. In historic liturgies of the Lord's Supper, right near the beginning, there's often this call.

Lift up your hearts. And the people respond, we lift up our hearts to the Lord. It's about entering in to the vertical, right? We lift up our souls, our hearts to the Lord.

Maybe we lift up our eyes, our hands. We lift our Lord's name on high and praise him. From praise, David goes on to petition.

A short petition. Verse 6, he praises God for his love and faithfulness. And then he asks for God's love and faithfulness to show up. He asks for God's help. Save us and help us with your right hand that those you love may be delivered.

It's a prayer for delivering. He's got his eyes up. He's looking to the Lord. He and his people are in need. If he was just kind of living a two-dimensional life, he'd just run to the situation room and start engineering a solution to this problem.

And I'm sure David did his strategizing and his work with his generals and preparing a solution.

But first, he takes it to the Lord in prayer. And at first, he goes to God. He goes vertical. And then the Lord responds.

The Lord responds right in the middle of the psalm. God speaks. The thing is, the 3D life isn't just about knowing there's a God.

And it's not just about living for God, obeying God. It's not just about shooting up an arrow, a prayer to God once in a while in heaven. No, it's about a relationship. In Christ, we get to have a living relationship with the God of the universe.

In the midst of our everyday working, eating, dishwashing, driving around lives, we get to have a living relationship with a God who's personal, who speaks.

We're present to him, and he's present to us. We speak to him, he speaks to us. And just look what he says here in Psalm 108. It says, God has spoken from his sanctuary.

In triumph, I will parcel out Shechem, measure off the valley of Sukkoth. Uliad is mine. Manasseh is mine. Ephraim is my helmet. Judah is my scepter. Moab my wash basin.

Upon Edom, I toss my sandal over. Philistia, I shout in triumph. So, David, you remember, he had just asked for help, right?

Prayer for deliverance. Help, Lord. You said you're loving and faithful. We know you are. Now, deliver us. And this here is God's reply now. And God is basically saying, you can trust me.

I've got you. In fact, I've got all the things in all the places. He reminds David that he's sovereign over all. And David needed this.

As king and military general, just kind of looking out at the landscape and the power struggle on the face of the earth, on that horizontal plane and seeing borders shift and people get exalted and then conquered and all this stuff, it just looked to him most of the time like this stuff just kind of happened willy-nilly based on whichever army was stronger, whichever economy was stronger, whichever alliances panned out better for you, and maybe there was some luck involved.

That's kind of the horizontal, right? It's survival of the fittest. It's being in the right place at the right time. It's kind of this whole chess match thing, making all the right moves, trying to carry the day.

That's seeing the world in 2D, and that's kind of our default. But David here, God comes to him and helps him see the world again in 3D.

God helps David to see that he's the one who's actually moving the pieces, making it happen, in control. One of our statements of faith puts it this way.

Our world belongs to God, not to us or earthly powers, not to demons, fate or chance. The earth is the Lord.

And that was God's message to David, to his people, to us. And then after God speaks, David again speaks.

You know, there's this back and forth, this dynamic relationship. David speaks, and again now here, well, it's a lament. He cries out to the Lord.

And we know from Scripture that lament does not show a lack of faith. Actually, quite the opposite. This comes from a deep place. David cries out to God, who will bring me to the fortified city?

Who will lead me to Edom? Is it not you, O God, you who have rejected us and no longer go out with our armies? That's what it felt like to David.

And he voices that here. It felt like God wasn't there, wasn't with them, wasn't helping them. And David, he's just honest about that. Most of the time when we feel that way, like God's absent, we tend to kind of pout to ourselves or complain to others.

David, he just goes right to God. He goes right to God with his complaints, with his questions. He knows God can handle it. He pours out his heart to the Lord.

There's an honesty and there's an openness to his relationship with God. And then following the lament, there's another petition that flows right from it.

Lord, give us aid against the enemy for the help of man is worthless. David knows in his better moments, he knows that what happens on the horizontal doesn't happen without the vertical, without the Lord intervening.

We can do our darndest without God. It ain't happening. He testifies to this and he prays, Lord, give us help, aid against the enemy. Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.

David knows this. So David, again, he asks for God's help. And then he ends, he ends with what's essentially a profession of faith, a testimony of faith.

With God, we will gain the victory. And he will trample down our enemies. So David's gotten to know the Lord.

He knows what God can do. And he's gone to God. And now he's leaving things in God's hands. He knows the battle belongs to the Lord. It's that blessed assurance.

And he's reassuring himself. And he's reassuring his people. The battle belongs to the Lord. The last Sunday, we talked about Moses.

Now, Moses was a type of Christ, right? He was just human, but God grabbed hold of him and worked through him in such a way that it kind of foreshadowed Jesus. He was sort of a type of Christ.

A prefiguring of Christ. And we see that, too, now here with David, the type of Christ. And for one thing, it was kind of the way David humbly served and led and how he trusted God and took out Goliath and saved the day and saved his people and led them on to victory.

Pointed ahead to Jesus coming as Messiah, Savior, and Lord. Beyond that, too, though, David's relationship with his heavenly Father pointed ahead in a lot of ways to Jesus.

Just this intimacy that David shared with his heavenly Father pointed ahead to Jesus' relationship with the Father. And how Jesus was kind of in tune with his Father.

Of course, the difference with Jesus is that he's divine, right? He doesn't just kind of tap into the vertical. He's it.

He's our link to heaven. He's our mediator, our intercessor. He embodies the vertical. He's the God-man, fully divine and fully human.

In fact, he's the one who holds all things together. It says in Colossians 1, by him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.

He's the one who holds them all together. Thrones, powers, rulers, authorities, all things were created by him and for him. He's before all things. And in him, all things hold together.

Without Christ, a 1D or two-dimensional life is all we'd have. And we wouldn't even have that, really. But he comes and he joins humanity to God, heaven, and earth.

He hooks us into heaven and gives our lives this exalted purpose and this transcendent hope and hopefulness that drive us on. And I love how, this might be simplistic, but I love how the cross just kind of symbolizes all this for us.

I love how the cross has become a symbol of Christians, Christianity. Well, for one thing, it speaks of Christ, right, and how he really entered into time and space and came to this earth and really spent time on a Roman cross piece.

And through that, he transformed, through his death and resurrection, he transformed things for us, brought us from death to life. Beyond that, too, just the symbolism of the cross, I think, is so helpful for us, really, in showing what it is that Christ does now and what he's doing now.

He's holding it all together, right, the horizontal and the vertical. So, think again of all that stuff on the horizontal plane, spread out before you in the week ahead.

All that stuff, your to-do list, perhaps, your assignment list, your grocery list, your schedule, and what's all on the calendar, and all the stuff that's going to pop up in between over the course of the week, all these things.

Jesus cares about all of us. He does. He lived this life, and he meets us in the midst of it, in the ordinary, in the horizontal.

He connects us in to heaven. In him, all things hold together. Heaven and earth. The life of God and our little lives. Our earthly bodies and our heavenly bodies.

The church on earth and the church above. Our working, playing, parenting, voting lives, and our spiritual, prayerful, worshipful lives.

Held together in Christ. Our life today and our life eternal. Jesus brings them all together. Holds them all together. Kind of like the beams of a cross.

Shows us what Jesus is up to. Holding it all together. Joining us to God. We're united in Christ. And what Christ does, it opens the way for us.

To move from a one-dimensional life to a two-dimensional life and ultimately into a three-dimensional life. Jesus makes it possible for us to have what David had.

Jesus makes it possible. He brings us in. He says in John 10, verse 10, the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.

Have it to the full. He's brought heaven and earth together. Brought us into a relationship with our heavenly father. The God of the universe. Jesus is the person who makes it happen.

And worship is the practice through which we experience it and enjoy it. And through which this new life is nurtured.

Worship. Outside of heaven, there's nowhere else where the horizontal and the vertical come together quite like in worship.

And so I'm excited to get going with this sermon series. We're going to explore together what the Bible has to say about worship and do some learning together and maybe add in a little bit in terms of how we worship here at Covenant.

And just close with one thing. One thing further this morning. So years ago, maybe some of you remember the worship wars of the 1990s.

The worship wars. Well, the CRC commissioned a study committee in the midst of the worship wars to really dig into scripture and see what scripture has to say about worship.

And a little book came out of that. And it's got a lot of good stuff in it. But for now, I'll just kind of leave you with one quote about the drama of worship.

It says this. Worship is not, first of all, a matter of how good the sermon was. Which is a good thing. It's first of all, not a matter of how good the sermon was or how moving the praise band or the choir was.

Worship is not a performance to be evaluated. Worship is a living drama in which Christians are active participants.

The meeting of God and his people of heaven and earth. The person is either in the drama or not. Hockey and football thrive on spectators.

Not so with worship. So where are you at? Just let me ask you that. Where are you at? Are you feeling like your life is pretty one-dimensional right now?

Maybe two-dimensional? As your minister, I guess I'd like to invite you in to a three-dimensional. I guess I'd like you to go deeper.

We're going to spend some time seeking the Lord and seeking Christ together and seeking out what God's word has to say about a rich relationship with our God. That intersects our horizontal plane and our earthly lives.

So I invite you in to a three-dimensional life. And I pray that our worship times together as we gather as God's people here on Sundays and interact throughout the week.

That God would use that to draw us further in to that life. Life to the full that Jesus came to bring us. This three-dimensional life. Let's pray together. What a gift it is, Father, that you want us and that you want a relationship with us and that you're here meeting with us this morning.

We're transformed by your presence by this time with you. And we pray that you will continue to be with us. We offer you our hearts. We lift up our hearts to you, Lord.

We offer you our worship. Receive us now. In Jesus' name. Amen.