Since He Is Your Lord, Bow To Him

So this morning, we're going to be studying not Deuteronomy, which we've been working our way through, or I've been working my way through, but we're going to take time to go through Psalm 45. I was gone a couple of Sundays ago. My family and I were on vacation up in Wisconsin, and I have a good friend, Jeremy Vandergallion, up there. He's a pastor, and he's on sabbatical, and he was filming his pulpit, and so he said, hey, if you... you want to come up and spend a week with your family? And I said, sure, we'd love to. And he said, would you also want to preach? And I said, sure, I'd love to, having no idea what I was supposed to preach on. They preach through 10 psalms every summer. And I landed on the week that was Psalm 45. And when I read Psalm 45, I don't know that I'd ever read Psalm 45 before, at least read it with an eye to having to say something about it. Psalm 45 is most like the Song of Solomon in terms of reading it.

It's not a psalm of lament. It's not a psalm of suffering. It's not a psalm of abstract praise. It's a psalm about the wedding feast of Jesus Christ to his bride, the church, in the future, written a long, long time ago. It's a beautiful psalm. It's full of love and joy and gladness. And so as we study it this morning, my hope is that God will lift our hearts up from the daily grind, the practical things that we have to do later today and tomorrow and all of those responsibilities. We have those things and they're always going to be with us. They may change one for another, but they're always going to be there. But as Christians, there should be something more to our lives than just our responsibilities and just the logistics of life and what do we need to do tomorrow and what are our plans and how's that all going to work out. We ought to have our eyes fixed on Jesus.

And we have to look forward to a time when he returns and when he welcomes his bride, pure and spotless, into his presence. And so that's what our psalm's about this morning. That's what our sermon's about this morning. And it's my hope that God will lift up our hearts out of those daily responsibilities and help us to fix our eyes on our Lord, our Savior, and our friend, Jesus. Would you please stand as we read Psalm 45? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. For the choir master, to the tune of the lilies. A Mascula of the Sons of Korah, a love song. My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses to the king. My tongue is the pen of a skillful writer. You are the most handsome of all men. Grace has anointed your lips since God has blessed you forever. Strap your sword at your side, almighty warrior. Appear in your majesty and splendor.

In your splendor, ride forth in victory on behalf of truth and humility and justice. May your right hand show your awesome deeds. Your arrows pierce the hearts of the king's foes. The nations fall beneath your feet. Your throne, O God, endures forever, and justice is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore, God, your God, has anointed you above your companions with the oil of joy. All your garments are fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia. From palaces of ivory, the harps make you glad. The daughters of kings are among your honored women. The queen stands at your right hand, adorned with the gold of Ophir. Listen, O daughter. Consider and incline your ear. Forget your people and your father's house, and the king will desire your beauty. Bow to him, for he is your lord. The daughter of Tyre will come with a gift.

Men of wealth will seek your favor. All glorious is the princess in her chamber. Her gown is embroidered with gold. In colorful garments, she is led to the king. Her virgin companions are brought before you. They are led in with joy and gladness. They enter the palace of the king. Your sons will succeed your fathers. You will make them princes throughout the land. I will commemorate your name through all generations. Therefore, the nations will praise you forever and ever. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. The first thing that I want to discuss or work through in this psalm is who this psalm is written to or written about. I said earlier it's written about Jesus. Commentators are not all in agreement about who this psalm is written about. Some say that this is a psalm written about Solomon.

I'm persuaded that it's written about Jesus. Others commentators are as well. I want to point out a couple of things about this king that don't seem to fit with Solomon. Solomon is the closest that comes as opposed to Saul or David or any of the kings of the divided kingdoms. But this psalm assigns things or describes the king in ways that don't fit with Solomon. First of all, he's described as one who rides out into battle carrying a sword. that his arrows are in the hearts of his enemies. Now, that was true of King David. He was a man of bloodshed. He was a man of war. You remember that at the end of his life, King David wanted to build a house for the Lord. And what did the Lord say to him? He says, you're a man of bloodshed. You're a man of war. You're not going to build me a house. I'm going to build you a house. But your son after you, he'll build me a house. And this is what it said in 1 Chronicles 22, verse 9. It says, behold, a son shall be born to you who shall be a man of rest.

Speaking about Solomon, not a man of war, but a man of rest. I will give him rest from all his surrounding enemies for his name shall be Solomon. And I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days. And so Solomon's reign, his time as a king was a time of peace. It was not a time of fighting. It was not a time of contentions or time of war. It was a time of growth, time of building. In verse 6, it also says that addressing it to the king, it says, Your throne, O God, is forever and ever. Now that would be a strange way to address anyone other than God, to call him God. Your throne, O God, is forever. The rest of the psalm also describes a wedding where the bride comes, the queen comes, her attendants come. And there's no such wedding described this clearly in...

the scripture except for Solomon's wedding to the woman from Egypt, Pharaoh's daughter. And yet then she comes with all of her attendants, all of her virgins, and they're presented to the king and we're left going, well, Solomon had lots of women who weren't his wives, but it's hard to reconcile a psalm glorifying or praising his polygamy. That's not what this psalm is doing. It's not saying that it was good for these virgins to have come and to have been received by the king in that way. And so the most natural reading of this psalm, though it's not a literal reading as though there was a man who fit the bill, is that this is not referring to an earthly king, but rather to Jesus. The psalm refers to God's throne. It refers to God anointing this king, which happened three times to Jesus. First at his baptism with the Holy Spirit, then with the prostitute's tears as she wiped and cleaned Jesus' feet, and then with the vessel of nard or perfume that was used. Jesus was anointed in three ways.

And finally, at the end of this Psalm, it says that the King's name will be remembered and that the nations will praise him forever. That can only be said of Jesus. We're not here praising King David that way or King Solomon, as great as their kingdoms may have been. We're not sitting here doing that today. And so I do believe that this Psalm is a Psalm about Jesus, that it's a prophecy or a foretelling of the marriage feast of the Lamb. So what do we learn from this psalm about this king? Well, the first thing we learn about this king is that he's handsome and gracious. Now, is Jesus described in Scripture as being handsome and gracious? Gracious, yes. Right? In John 1, verse 14, it says, What about handsome?

Well, it depends on how. Some of you are shaking your head and saying no. And as we account handsomeness, no. When we think of handsomeness, we think of appearance, right? Saul was handsome. Paul was not handsome. Jesus was not handsome. And Isaiah told us that Jesus was nothing to look at. I'm paraphrasing. But he says that there was nothing in his appearance or his form that was stately or majestic or that would communicate anything about who he was. He was not handsome in that way. But my question to you is, when you consider his teaching, when you consider his behavior and primarily his death for his siblings, his brothers and his sisters, for you and for me, is there anything more handsome or beautiful? In Romans 5, Paul says this.

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. But God showed his own love for us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Is there anything more attractive than that? You husbands, isn't this what we are called to do? In a nutshell, isn't that our work? To lay down our lives for our wives. To sacrifice for them. There's nothing more manly, nothing more virtuous, emulating Jesus Christ than when you do that. That's when your wives will respect you and love you and appreciate you the most. When you're doing what Jesus did, it is truly a handsome thing to do. What else do we know about this king? As I mentioned, he's a king that fights and one that subdues his enemies. It says of him that he should strap his sword on his side, that he's a mighty warrior, that he's to appear in his majesty and splendor, that he's to ride forth into victory on the behalf of truth and humility and justice.

He's to show his awesome deeds and that his arrows pierce the heart of the king's foes, that nations fall beneath his feet. Now, here's a question. When you think of Jesus and you had to describe him to someone said to you, what is Jesus like? Would you say that? Do you think of Jesus as being a reigning king, a great warrior, one who subdues enemies, one who lays nations down? I think many times that's not how we think of Jesus. That's not how we conceive of him. That's not how we talk about him. If we were to talk about what Jesus is or what his character was like or what his essential nature was, loving, gracious, accepting, patient, forgiving, merciful. Now, are those things true? Yes. Are those things in conflict with what this psalm says, though?

Does his mercy and his graciousness and his lovingness, kindness, are those things in conflict with him being a warrior who subdues his enemies? One who rides forth in majesty and splendor? One who's on the side of truth and justice and meekness? This king is not a passive and he's not impotent. He fights and he fights for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness. Can any of us be described that way? Sometimes maybe. For a moment, in a moment, for a short time, can any of those that we look up to be described that way? Perhaps. But who fits this bill? Who's a king who fights because he loves righteousness and hates wickedness? Do we love righteousness? We should. And to some extent, we do. Do we hate wickedness? We should. And to some extent, we do. But it's a conflict with us.

Because of our fallen nature. But with Jesus, with God, with this king described here, it's not a conflict. It's not on again, off again. It's constant. This is something that we should aspire to be. But it's not something that we've seen firsthand. Here's a question. Do we praise God because he loves righteousness? I think we do. We like that he's pure. We like that he's spotless. We like that he's holy. The next question is, Do we praise him and do we love that he hates wickedness? Is that something that we delight in? Are you glad that our Lord and our King hates wickedness? Maybe if it's other people's wickedness, you know, maybe if it's that wickedness over there. But if it's personal wickedness, if it's our wickedness, we're like, well, that's where the love and the grace and the gentleness and the long-suffering, that's where that comes in.

His hatred of wickedness is something that we should praise him for. We should also emulate it. And we should emulate it not just with the sins and the wickedness that's far off from us. We should emulate it with ourselves and with those around us. To be a good friend, to be a good sister, to be a good brother ought to be marked by our hatred of wickedness and our help of one another. when we're in and doing wicked things. Is it love for God or love for our brother or our sister if we see them falling into sin, we see them habitually struggling and not say anything to them? Is that gracious? I contend that that's not gracious. The times that have been most helpful to me, though there's pain associated with it, have been when people have come to me and confronted me about sins in my life.

Whether that's my wife or my children or you guys or someone in presbytery or my neighbor or coworker, we ought to be able to tell the difference between righteousness and wickedness, and we ought to love the one and hate the other. And we ought to say something about it. What else do we know about this king? Well, we know that his throne endures forever. That should be a comfort to us. It shouldn't be that Christians live as though Christianity and Jesus Christ are on life support. They're not. They never have been. They never have been. Do you believe that? Now we look around and we think, oh, it's a bad day, and it's all going to hell in a handbasket, and all we have left are political aspirations and hopes for saving us. It's just not true. This king was raised from the dead. Even death couldn't conquer him or hold him. And so we shouldn't live as the world lives.

Believing that Jesus can be dethroned. Okay? He's our king. He's our master. He's our commander. He's our Lord. He is powerful. And his throne will endure forever. And so when you see other thrones or other armies contend with him, you do know how it will end. In what way and in what time and by what means, you may not know. But it ought to be a comfort to us as God's people that his enthrone endures forever. No one can snuff him out. No one can dethrone him. We have to give up this idea that everything in our lives or in our society is always on the brink of utter chaos, irretrievable damage. To believe these things is to believe that Jesus is about to lose it. And that's not true. Whatever it looks like to us, There isn't a hair that falls from our head without his explicit knowledge and control. He's not near losing his grip on his creation, his rule over it. And we ought to take comfort in that. That doesn't mean we shouldn't care about our society or we shouldn't work to improve it, but we shouldn't do it with this sense of like, it's all going to fall apart and what's going to come and happen to us and to my family afterwards. The same thing that's happened to Christians.

forever, which is that they live in this life in such a way that they prepare themselves to stand before God and to be welcomed into his presence. And whatever the details of that life and that death are, they look to Jesus Christ for their support and their salvation and their refuge. This should be a comfort to us. What else do we know about this king? Here's a good one. He is very happy. He is a happy king. He's both a king that goes to battle and he is a Now we might not look on having oil poured over our heads as a sign of blessing. If someone walked up to you and they had a cup or two of olive oil and they just poured it over your head, we wouldn't take kindly to that. We would see that as some sort of an insult or some sort of an affront. But this would have been seen as a blessing in the Old Testament.

His joy, this oil of joy that he's anointed with, sets him above his companions, sets him apart. And his anointing comes directly from his father. Do you remember when Jesus was baptized and the dove descended on him? Do you remember what the voice said? Say it. Listen to him. Yes. The part he said is the part I was looking for. The last part is important as well. This is my son in whom I am well pleased. It was an anointing. It was a blessing. Here's a question. When Jesus was on earth, did he have joy? We know he had suffering. We know he had persecution. We know he had trials. We know he had pain and hunger. He had all kinds of things. Did he have joy? He had joy. It tells us in Philippians that he had joy set before him, and it was that joy that he had set before him that caused him to endure the cross.

For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame. He had joy. I think it would do us all good to learn to think about Jesus as having joy in the midst of his hardships. Because that's the hard thing, isn't it? When something goes awry, if something doesn't go the way you want it to do, it's like the first thing that's gone is our joy. But our king, he had joy. In the midst of those things, he had joy. And we ought to as well. Joy that... sustains us through this entire life and all the burdens that attend us. What else do we learn about this king? Well, we learn that he has a queen. And we learn that this queen is adorned with the finest and the purest and the most glorious gold. That's the gold of Ophir. And we find that this queen is radiant and Jesus' joy is in her. He loves his bride. Now here's a question for you.

The bride of Jesus Christ is the church. Do you delight in the church? Do you love her? I was glad to me when they said, let us go up to the house of the Lord, says the psalm. Do you delight to come and to be here? Do you delight to be with God's people? Do you think of the church as being radiant and pure? I think too often we think of the church as not in this way, but rather as being full of sinners, hypocrites, liars, people who've hurt us, people who put pressure on us, people who are proud, people who don't help. Well, it is true that the church is full of sinners, but the question we have to answer or deal with is, what church was Jesus looking at with such joy? Was he looking at some other church? Some other people?

Some better people? Where was he getting all of his joy from? Like when he looked at his bride, was he looking at us as we are? Or was he looking at something better than us? I contend that he was looking at us. A church that in herself is not pure, that is full of sinners, that doesn't do what they should do, but it's his bride. And he's the one who will make them pure and make them righteous. And make them glorious. Make them clean. When someone sins against you in the church, our first thought ought to be, they're just a sinner like me. It ought to be your first thought. I wish it were my first thought. It might be my thought the next morning, if I'm doing well. But it ought to be our first thought. When someone sins against us, we can go, listen, what did I expect from a bunch of sinners?

Did I think that when we came in here, we wouldn't step on each other's toes? We wouldn't offend each other. We wouldn't harm each other. We wouldn't neglect our responsibilities. We wouldn't fail. Is that really what we thought? We say, no, no, no, that's not what I think. And I'm like, yeah, but as soon as something pokes us, that seems to be what spills out. I can't believe they said that to me. Have you never said anything like that to somebody else? That's not the point. The point's not what I did. The point's what they did. It's like, well. Jesus tells us we ought to remove the log from our own eye so we can see clearly to remove the speck from our brothers. It's an incredible thing that Jesus loves his bride when she's so full of sin. I find young men, when they want to get married, they have this idea that the wife that they're going to marry, they want a wife that's not a sinner. I know this because I talk to men. They think, well, she's going to have all the submission stuff figured out. And I just kind of chuckle and go, okay.

Good luck. Let me know when you find her. We'll have counseling. What I think about men who want that is that they're immature and that they don't know what their job is. Their job is not to find a pre-manufactured, pre-assembled godly wife who's got it all figured out. Their job is to look at her with love and to make her pure. And so when men are surprised by their wives' sins, I just kind of look at them and go, I'm glad you've realized she's a sinner. You are too. This could be said to wives as well. They want husbands who are great leaders and great at laying down their lives. Good luck. We're all pieces of work. But when you look at another sinner as an individual, as a spouse, or as a body, as a family, what do you expect to see? I think too often we say, well, I've seen, I see sin. And I say, okay, but Jesus sees sin. And look at how he describes his wife here.

She's described as radiant, glorious, pure, dressed in fine gold, the star of the show. The church is not as pure as it's described in this passage, and it will not be as pure as it's described in this passage until Jesus returns. There is no perfect church. There are no perfect pastors. There are no perfect elders. If Jesus adores his church and works to glorify her, to purify her, to cleanse her, and he's given his life for her, then we ought to love her as well. You really ought to love the church. Not because the church is perfect or because they won't fail us. They will. If you've been here a while, I'm sure I failed you. I'm sure that others have failed you as well. And I'm sorry. But you failed too. We all do. And we're in this together, trying to learn what it means to be brothers and sisters and how to serve our Lord and our friend and our Savior.

And be prepared to meet him. I wish it was easier and cleaner and neater. But it's not. And yet Jesus loves his church and so should we. Now concerning this bride. There are two instructions that the psalm gives to the bride. The first is forget your people. And the second is forget your father's house. So this bride is given instructions. We are given instructions. And the instructions are to leave aside the love of the world. and everything it contains. Isn't this exactly what we need to be told? To leave aside the people of the world. Did you hear that? No one went, everyone should have went, you're telling us we should forget about the people of the world? Aren't we supposed to love them? Yes, you're supposed to love them, but you're not supposed to be like them. And you're not supposed to seek their approval. And you're not supposed to play life according to their rules. When I say leave them aside, what I mean is live,

Like a Christian. And what you'll find is that's different than living like the world. There will be friction. There will be conflict. There will be tension. I had a friend this last week. We were talking and he said something about having, he's telling me about how going from really hot showers, he got an ice bath. He's got a lot of money, more than he needs. And so he has a hot tub and he has an ice bath, polar plungy type thing. It's not just a tub you put ice in. Anyway, he goes back and forth. He says, it's great for inflammation. Oh, it's wonderful. He said, it's so nice that, you know, when my girlfriend gets up and gets out of bed in the morning and goes to work, I don't even hear her. And then he caught himself and he's like, well, I know you don't approve of that sort of thing. And I just smiled, looked at him and said, yeah, I don't. You're not a Christian. No, you shouldn't marry a girl. Like, if you love her, marry her. But it created this little bit of tension, just this little passing thing, you know. Can you bear it? I was uncomfortable for a second. Then I was like, yeah, you know.

I don't think you should be living with your girlfriend, but you already know that. Forget your people. Let there be a little bit of tension or maybe a lot of tension as you stand with Jesus Christ. Forget your father's house. You remember in our call to confession this morning, it talked about how we've become rich and we've become wealthy and we have no need of anything. I'm sure every one of us could list all the needs that we have, all the things that we're without. So does that warning apply to us? I think it applies to us. We have become rich and we have become wealthy and we live as though we don't need anything. We've gathered to ourselves all of the wealth of the world. It's gotten to the point where in the church, if someone is poor and mismanages their money, that our assumption is they just must not be Christians. Because Christians don't do that. They don't make mistakes with money. They don't go into debt. They don't do dumb things.

I'm not advocating for going into debt, you understand. Don't learn the lesson I'm not saying. But we tend to look at money and we're just like, well, you just need to be smart like I am and get wealthy. However wealth is defined in our lives. We've gathered to ourselves all of this stuff in this world. But what does the Bible say about all the stuff we can gain in this world? What did Job say? You can't take it with you. Naked I've come into this world and naked I'm going to leave. You can't take it with you. And so it's possible. And maybe even commendable to live in this world without loving and accumulating all of the things of this world and living as though we're entitled to those things and those ought to be our priority because we're Christians. Forget your father's house. Forget the things of this world. Do you realize that those things that we gather and surround ourselves with actually displace other things? What do the people of the world...

What do unbelievers displace in our lives? They displace the people of God. It shouldn't be that Christians would be closer and have more in common with unbelievers than they would with their church family. It ought not to be that way. That they would be more open and more joyful and more themselves when they're apart from their church family. What do the things of the world displace in our lives? I don't know. In my house, soccer is one of the things that our kids love and we love. One of the things that sports displaces in our lives is family dinners. And so we limit the sports as much as we can. Because being with one another and spending time together, we believe to be an important thing. Does it cause any conflict? Yes, it does. It causes conflict between my kids and me. It causes conflict between me and us and our kids' coaches. And that's a silly little example. Okay?

But what does your wealth displace? I was talking to a guy this last week, and I was actually fearful. I should have said something to him, and I didn't. I was over at his house, and we were talking, and I said, how was church? It was last Sunday. I said, how was church? He says, I didn't go. I was sick. And he had a cold. And in his church, to be fair, there are a lot of old people, and he didn't want to get them. He didn't want to get the old people with compromised health sick. And he says, oh, I didn't go. I wasn't feeling well. I said, okay.

And I said, oh, man, you work with old people. You work in a retirement home, an assisted living place. And I said, are you going to go to work tomorrow? Are you not feeling like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm going to go to work. No problem. And I had the thought that some of you just had, which is like, so you didn't go to church and worship God, but you're certainly going to work tomorrow. Has work ever displaced the worship of God? Sunday school? Men's and women's group? Small groups? There actually is a tradeoff. We need to be aware of it. Forget your people and your father's house. As we turn away, one of the things that this psalm says that's really sweet is that as we turn away from those things, he says, then you will be beautiful to the king. Then he will adore your beauty, depending on which translation we use. This one says, then the king will desire your beauty. But as you forget the world and forget the things of the world,

You become more beautiful. The church becomes more beautiful to her groom. It says, then the daughter of Tyre will come with a gift and men of wealth will seek your favor. Here's the thing. I think we've got it just completely backwards. We think that the way to make the church attractive is to take away the distinctives that separate it from the world. Years ago, when the megachurch movement was getting up and going, the way that... Bill Hybels up in Chicago, they had a business approach to it. And he said, what we're going to do is we're going to go to the people and we're just going to ask them, like, what would it take to get you to come to church? And the answer was, and I'm painting with a broad brush here, but the answer was generally stop acting like the church. Become a place that's entertaining. Become a place that's helpful. Become a place that has lost the distinctives, the yes and the no of scripture and will come. And so they said, well, that's what we'll do. And so light shows and smoke machines.

TED Talks, masquerading as sermons, became what was offered. The church became more beautiful and more attractive to an unbeliever, but less attractive to God. And here this psalm tells us that the daughter of Tyre, which is just the people of the unbelievers, they will come with a gift. They will come and they will see. Do you remember Solomon when he ruled and he reigned, when he became king? Do you remember what he prayed for? Do you remember that he prayed for a double measure of wisdom? What happened? What was the effect of Solomon's wisdom in the world? Well, it was the effect that the queen of Ethiopia, the queen of Sheba, the queen of the south, she's referred to in all of these ways in the Old Testament, that she hears about his wisdom and she says, I'm going to come and I'm going to see if he's really all that he's told to be. And she came and she saw. And what was her response? They didn't tell me the half of it.

The wisdom, the glory of this king and his kingdom was attractive, even to unbelievers, even to ones who were far off, even to ones who came, they came with gifts, she came with gifts. As the church becomes more beautiful to God, that's what will cause the world to notice that there's something different and beautiful and worthwhile. As we try to just put our light under a bushel and fit in, what's there to see? What's there to hear? But as Jesus adorns his bride, as we seek after righteousness, we do actually become more beautiful and more noticeable to the world. And the world's attracted to it and wants to know. The psalm describes the bride as being glorious in her chamber. Her gown is embroidered with gold. In colorful garments, she's led to the king. And her virgin companions are brought before them for the king.

They're led with joy and gladness, and they enter the palace of the king. This wedding between Jesus and his bride is marked by joy. Now, every wedding is marked with joy, isn't it? Has every wedding you've gone to been marked by joy? Not mine, not me, no. As a pastor, I get to see not just the part that we show everybody, but the stuff that goes into the part that we show everybody. And weddings are often not marked with joy. They're marked with... bitterness and manipulation and frustration and anger, often between the bride and her mother. There can be a lot of tension between them. In some ways, funerals are nicer than weddings because at least at funerals, we're all honest about what's going on. If we'll call it a funeral and just say we're here to grieve the death of a loved one. But at weddings, there's a show of joy, but the substance is often lacking. The purity is lacking. The anticipation.

of the wedding night is lacking. The hopefulness about a life together is missing. But not in this wedding. In this wedding, there's glory and there's joy. The groom is full of joy. The queen is glorious and beautiful, and her attendants are full of joy as well. This is something that we should want. You who are young and aren't married yet, this is something you should want to be true of your wedding, to the extent that it's possible. To those of us who are married, we can look back and say, It was true in this way, but not in the other. There were these tensions or these conflicts or these hardships or these impurities. Whatever we have experienced in our own lives, whatever our weddings have been like or whatever our weddings will be, we ought to look forward to the wedding of Jesus to the bride, his bride, the church, with joy. When I was talking about this sermon with Vanessa, one of the things she said is the way this wedding is described is uncomfortable to many women.

The purity and the joy and the freeness is often colored by their own experience and their own apprehensions, their own fears about their own lives and their own weddings and their own futures. She said, you know, women often don't like to think about this kind of thing because it's just uncomfortable. It stirs up sad thoughts, bad memories. And what I want to say to you women and to you husbands as you have to talk to your wives about this afterwards is, This is the way it should be. And this is a wedding that we have to look forward to. And this is the way that it will be in the future. It's telling us the truth. It's not telling us a lie. And we shouldn't let our experiences or our fears darken the glory that's to come. You really shouldn't. You men who are not married, you want to get married? If you want a wedding that looks like this and a bride that comes this radiant and is full of this joy, you have to be pure now.

You have to be. Psalm ends by saying that the sons will succeed their fathers, that they will be made princes throughout the land. What we do as Christians is take what we've received and give it to and reproduce it in other people. Some of you guys, I'm guessing as I look out, probably most of you came from Christian families. Not all of you did. I didn't. But our obligation, wherever we've come from, whether we've got parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who love Jesus, or whether we're the first ones in our family to do it, our expectation and our desire should be that our sons and our grandsons will carry on in this train, that they will become Christians and hopefully better Christians than we are. You know, I'm not old, but I'm not young. And I think, okay, as my sons get older and as they mature, I think, you know what? I hope they make it further than I did toward godliness. They certainly started before I did.

And I hope their grandson, my grandsons, make it even further than them. And so when you're in the humdrum of life and you're figuring out what to do and what to prioritize and how to live, you should keep in mind that there's a succession and a generational thing that gets passed down, faith in Jesus. Some of us who are a little older might think, you know, I got started late and haven't passed down as much as I'd like to. We see our sins in our kids and think, man, if I had been a little bit better of a husband or a father or a wife or a mother, my kids wouldn't be struggling with this. It's never too late for us to begin to pass down new things, godly things and good things. And I will also say that we shouldn't only pass those things down to the people who sleep under our roof or who have our last name. We ought to pass those things down to one another.

The older men of the church, the older women of the church ought to be investing in the younger men and the younger women of the church. And if you think, oh, I'm young, I'm only 25. I'm like, guess what? If you're 25 in this church, you're in the older half. Don't act and think for one second that there aren't people that you should be ministering to and loving and handing down the faith of Jesus. Whether that's in Sunday school or the Awana program or in your small group settings or just out in the lobby. Something we ought to be handing down. to those who come after us. This is how our sons will succeed our fathers, will stand on our shoulders. It's never too late to begin this work. This is a promise that God has made to us. And we should trust him with our children and our grandchildren to bringing them to faith and overcoming their failures and sins. And we should do it with those outside of our home as well. This is something we should look forward to, guys.

This really is something we should look forward to. And you won't have time to look forward to it or energy to pay attention to it if your life is so busy. And I'm talking to myself as much as any of you. I get so busy, I just don't have any time to sit and think and go, wow, this is what's in the future. But we really should, as Christians, order our lives in such a way that we do take time to read a psalm like this and go, amazing. What's to come? Whatever the burdens and the hardships, whatever the trials and the difficulties you have now, I get them. They're real. But they're not so big that they should displace Jesus' love for the church and his preparation of that meeting. We should look forward to it. We should anticipate it. And we should think of it especially when life's hard. That's the time to think about it. Let's pray.