A Faith Worth Fighting For - Part Two

Summer in the Psalms ‘22

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

August 7, 2022

A Faith Worth Fighting For Part Two

Let’s turn to Psalm 3. The inscription of Psalm 3 reads:A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.

O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me;
many are saying of my soul, “There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah

But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.
I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill. Selah

I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.
I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.

Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God! For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked. 

Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be on your people! Selah

We talked last week about how David was a fighter, and how Psalm 3 was written during the hardest fight of his life. David’s son Absalom is riding into Jerusalem to seize the throne and David is running for his life. It looks like it’s over for David and his men. It’s just a matter of time and Absalom will be king and David and his men will be caught and executed. The odds are overwhelmingly against David as he runs for his life.

In many ways this seems to me a picture of the church. Rather than advancing, for the most part (at least in America) the church is in retreat. The church has little or no impact on the culture while the culture is having a massive impact on the church. It’s the opposite of what we see in the book of Acts: instead of the church turning the world upside down, the world is turning the church upside down.

More people are leaving the faith than are coming to the faith. Young people especially are leaving the church – and in many cases their Christian faith – in large numbers. Barna reports that church attendance has declined by 40% since 2009. It’s probably declined even more since COVID.

It looks like all is lost for David and some might think all is lost for the church. It’s over, the church is antiquated and has nothing relevant to say or offer to the culture in this day. But David isn’t running to escape, he’s running to regroup. He and his men will fight and fight soon. And I am confident that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church because Jesus promised they wouldn’t. By the way, gates aren’t offensive weapons. No army marches into war holding gates. Gates are defensive weapons to keep the enemy out. When Jesus says the church will march against the kingdom of hell and win he’s describing an advancing church on the offensive not a retreating church on the defensive.

How does David fight in this moment? Over the next several weeks I want us to look at four ways he fights this battle as revealed in Psalm 3.

1. Declare the truth of God’s word before you can see the truth of it in your life (vs. 3)
2. Cry aloud to God! (vs. 4)
3. Fight against evil by doing good in the power of God (6-7)
4. Believe salvation belongs to God and He loves His people. (vs 8)

1. Declare the truth of God’s word before you can see the truth of it in your life (vs. 3)

David tells the Lord there are many voices speaking death over his soul.

O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; ² many are saying of my soul, “There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah(vv. 1-2)

The numbers of enemies, the amount of hostility, and the volume of the voices telling David to give up is overwhelming. Many, many, many.

David doesn’t argue with these voices, he doesn’t reason with them, and he doesn’t agree with them.Instead he simply speaks with boldness what he knows to be truth.

³ But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.

In the battle, David knows the Lord is his shield, his glory, and the lifter of his head. But here’s the thing: David’s not seeing these things to be true in his life at this moment. He’s not being shielded from disaster, he’s getting slammed with one disaster after another. His head isn’t lifted high, he’s not experiencing glory. He is humiliated, defeated, shamed.

He’s speaking from faith what he knows to be true about God and true about him. David believes the truth of God’s word even before he can see the truth of it in his life.

David’s enemies were warriors in armor with swords and shields, our enemies aren’t people, or shields, or swords. Paul tells us that we fight against evil forces in the heavenly realms. Peter warns us that our enemy the devil is like a roaring lion looking for whom he can devour.

This is an hour when the church needs to rise up in the power of the Spirit and the power of God’s word and fight. But we need to be careful. We live in an incredibly combative time and Christians can easily get sucked into fighting the way the world fights. Angry insults, sarcastic putdowns, and all that kind of stuff doesn’t accomplish anything for the kingdom of God. As someone said, when you fight fire with fire, all you end up with is ashes.

The enemy is looking for souls to devour, souls to imprison, and the weapon he uses to devour and imprison and destroy are lies. The goal of those lies is to move people away from the knowledge and truth of Jesus Christ.

Paul says the way the Christian fights is by tearing down strongholds of lies that rise up against the knowledge and truth of Jesus Christ:

³ For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. ⁴ The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. ⁵ We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 2 Cor. 10:3-5

The strongholds Paul is speaking about are strongholds of lies. The bricks of these strongholds are lies. Lies take root in our minds and become strongholds that don’t let go of our thinking easily. These lies fight every attempt of truth to get in.

Paul says we don’t fight the way the world fights, we don’t fight with the weapons the world fights with. The truth of Christ and God’s word has the power of God to demolish strongholds and bring thoughts captive to Jesus Christ, the Lord of all.

These many voices are speaking demonic, poisonous lies over David – to his soul! – and if he listened to them his soul would shrivel and die. If he listened to them, he would believe God wasn’t for him, there was no hope for him, he was past saving.

How many people are living in that place of hopelessness? Demonic voices speaking lies like, “there is no God.” “Life is meaningless.” “You are worthless.” “There is no such thing as absolute truth. There is no such thing as right and wrong.”

The way we fight, believer, is by speaking the truth of God’s word. Not arguing or insulting or hating but declaring the truth of God’s word in a climate where people can’t see the truth of God’s word. Billy Graham used to say over and over again, “the Bible says…”

Our culture has a strange relationship with truth. We’ve tried to turn objective things into subjective things. People talk about “your truth” and “my truth” as if truth is malleable when it’s not. Some things are malleable – you can have your opinion, I can have mine. We all have our unique perspectives. But truth isn’t malleable. It can’t be formed and shaped to fit what we want it to fit. Truth doesn’t move towards us. We can move towards truth or away from truth but it doesn’t move towards us.

There isn’t “your truth” or “my truth”. There is THE Truth, and we either move toward it or away from it. There’s more that I was going to say about that, but I felt God arrest my attention and adjust me by saying, “truth doesn’t move towards people, but love does.”

Jesus came to move towards people with love. He moved towards the hurting, the broken, the marginalized, the outcast. Jesus moved towards people who’s lives were full of sin. Prostitution, adultery, stealing. Tax collectors who enriched themselves through the misery of others, religious snobs, and godless pagans alike, Jesus moved towards all kinds of people with love.

In that sense truth did move towards people in that Jesus, who is Truth, moved towards them. But Jesus didn’t conform the truth to their lives he invited them to conform their lives to the truth. It’s the truth that sets us free. It’s the rejection of truth that destroys us. Satan is the father of lies, his primary weapon is lies, and he’s good at it.

It isn’t possible to love without speaking the truth, but it is possible to speak the truth without love. And I think the church needs to admit that too often we have. One of the things I think that has turned a lot of people off to the church is when we speak the truth without love. We might think they’re rejecting the truth but really they’re rejecting our misrepresentation of the heart of God by speaking the truth without love.

Because we can speak 100% truth and be 100% out of phase with God’s heart. What happens then is truth gets distorted by our sin and is as toxic as a lie.

• Truth in the hands of proud people can puff us up like the self-righteous Pharisee in the temple who thanked God he wasn’t like other people, including the poor tax collector.
• Truth in the hands of critical people can become a sword that cuts people down.
• Truth in the hands of a gossip can be used to expose people to ridicule in order to inflate their own sense of self-worth
• Truth in the hands of the uncompassionate can be used to wound, rather than heal, the hurting.

Jesus is 100% holy yet he moved towards sinners with love. He didn’t move truth towards them, he sought to bring them to the truth, but he did it with love and he calls the church to do the same.

Jesus calls us to love people – regardless of who they are or what they’ve done or what they believe. We don’t have to agree with them. We don’t have to celebrate what they celebrate in order to love them, but Jesus does call us to love them.

There’s a lot of hurting, broken people in the world. Imprisoned in demonic strongholds that to them just looks like life. It’s just my life, it’s just what I believe, it’s just how I live. But lies imprison them and keep them chained to misery and emptiness and separate them from their Creator.

David spoke the intensely positive, steadfastly loving promises of God over his own life in response to the lies being spoken to his soul. We are to speak the promises of Christ through the gospel which tells the sinner, the lost, the hurting, the hardened, and even the hateful, that Jesus died for your sins. If you will receive him and believe in him, he will exchange his righteousness for your sin and restore you to God in loving relationship.

Here's a truth: Jesus said he didn’t come to judge the world but to save it. I think there’s too much judging going on in the church. We need less judging and more coming alongside. Not to coddle the sin.

Some of them might be among the many voices speaking against us, but they aren’t our enemy.