Dennis Tuuri

Let us attend to the voice of God as found in his holy scriptures. The sermon text is in Acts 28, the last two verses of the Acts of the Lord Jesus Christ through his church. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Acts 28:30 and 31.

And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, no man forbidding him.

Let us pray. Father, we pray that you would take this holy word, your voice, and may your spirit, Lord God, cause it to come into our ears, that we might understand it; into our minds, we can understand what’s being said here; into our hearts, that we can receive it deep into the center of our being; that we may be transformed and go from glory to glory; that our sanctification might increase as we hear and respond with the grace of the Holy Spirit to your word.

Lord God, illumine these scriptures for understanding and also be with the Sabbath school teachers, Lord God, as they teach the younger ones whose parents desire it, these scriptures, the word of God again in language that is more simple for them to understand and comprehend and thus receive and then be transformed by your voice. Lord God, we ask for your power to be in the context of us now. In Jesus name we ask it.

Amen.

Well, I’m going to chicken out on the way I was going to start this sermon. I was going to sing a song for you, sung by Gary Puckett in the Union Gap years ago. Now you’re wondering which one is it? For those of you who know who Gary Puckett was, the one that had the refrain “Woman, oh woman, have you got cheating on your mind? On your mind.” Remember that song? Some of you do.

Well, let me give you a new way to think of it the next time you hear it.

I want to talk today about these concluding verses in the book of Acts. And I want you to ask yourself, bride of Christ, member of the bride of Christ, individually and corporately, have you got cheating on your mind? I think that our lives are filled with many more thoughts of cheating toward our savior than we would ever think of entertaining relative to our mates.

Well, I think one of the reasons for that is a failure to apprehend what God has accomplished in the Lord Jesus Christ and what our future is.

And so I want to talk today about these last couple of verses. I’ve got four basic areas here for this sermon. The first thing you can just put down a single word if you’re keeping notes: the first thing we want to talk about is God’s word. Word is the first word I want to talk about and how the book of Acts ends rather surprisingly. But remember that it is not the account of the Apostle Paul. It’s not a biography of him.

It’s a biography of the logos, the word. Okay, so word is the first thing I want to stress. Secondly, unforbidden—that’s not “unforgiven” like the movie—it’s unforbidden. That’s the last word of the book of Acts, and it emphasizes that the word will go out now unforbidden, nothing restricting it. Unforbidden is the second word. The third word is hope. I want to tie this to a very short series I’m going to do from First Timothy and how Jesus is described there as our hope. And I think that Acts ends very hopefully for us.

I want to talk about hope. And then the fourth word is Chrysostom, one of the church fathers. And I wanted to—I’ve for months carried around this quote by him. It’s fairly long, but I want to end with that. And Lord willing, if that fits into what we’re doing, we have time to encourage us to think of our trek along our path—a path that frequently is more like chapter 27 than it is like chapter 28. Chapter 27 is all those storms at sea.

And I think that the context of all of this, tying it back to Gary Puckett, is that we have cheating on our mind frequently. What do we—where do we turn now? You come here on the Lord’s day, and I know you’re thinking of the Lord. I know you’re thinking of being built up in his service and praising him and worshiping him. But the rest of the week, when times get tough, cheating comes to us. We want to take sustenance or solace not in the Lord Jesus Christ, but rather in the created order, in our own sensibility, our own rationality, our own lust of the flesh.

You know, when the tough going gets tough, the tough goes shopping. Nothing wrong with shopping, nothing wrong with good food, nothing wrong with rationality. But it is always wrong to see those things isolated from the Lord Jesus Christ.

So I want to drive us back repeatedly to our first love as the basis for our solace in difficult times. And our lives are filled with difficult times. And that’s how all this ties together.

Hopefully, we’ll see that Acts ends so triumphantly. I almost feel a little guilty. Another message has a lot to do with eschatology. The Casmans are here and I think they probably think that’s all I ever preach on. It seems like every time they come here we talk about how hopeful life is. Well, anyway, that’s what God has brought us to in these last two verses.

So let’s begin. And the first word is the word itself.

Acts ends kind of abruptly, you know. I mean, I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve read through it, you get to the end and think, “Oh, it doesn’t seem to be finished.” You know, it doesn’t seem to tie off nicely. And whatever happened to the Apostle Paul? I heard he was killed in Rome and now he’s in Rome and he seems to be in good shape at Rome.

Well, the Apostle Paul, as we understand it, was martyred at Rome, beheaded, which was a quick death by the way, probably because he was a Roman citizen. I don’t know.

Matthew Henry says that Chrysostom—again, this church father I cited earlier, we’ll brief later—thinks that the reason for that was that Paul converted one of Nero’s mistresses. Now Paul, in this time, is in a position where Nero is in his sane reign, so to speak, in Rome. Paul will leave at the end of two years, apparently acquitted of all charges. Maybe the Jews never came and made the prosecution, so he just let him off. We don’t know exactly.

He then went to Spain, spent several more years doing missionary work, went back to Rome eventually, and was there martyred. But we don’t read about that here, and it kind of surprises us. But see, it’s what I said before. This is not the biography of Paul. It’s the biography of the word.

See, and you know, in your life, it’s the same thing. Ultimately, your biography is a biography of the word of God as it has created you, redeemed you, taken care of you, and leads you to your judgment. And you leave an effect on the world in terms of the word. You see what I’m saying? Your life also should not be seen as a biography. This gives us a model.

At the end of your life, you don’t want to look at your accomplishments necessarily. You want to look at the faithfulness of the preaching of the word because that’s the Lord Jesus Christ. The word of God is what is the picture. That’s what history is all about.

Now, we’re not unimportant in that, and Paul wasn’t unimportant, and his life is good to know about, and we have some of that in here. But that’s secondary. You see, that’s cheating on our mind again. If that becomes the focus—Paul instead of Jesus—and so Acts ends in such a way as to prevent us from falling into that error.

Secondly, note here that even in the context of the history of the word here, it still ends sort of, you know, you don’t know what’s going on. It doesn’t really come to a conclusion, you know, the way things conclude at the end of a book. Why? Because the progression of the word in history doesn’t end. See, it’s still going on. How many chapters would Luke have had to have written if he wanted to trace the total history of the word? On and on and on and on and on and on because it’s going on for two thousand years since this time and will go on many more thousand years in all likelihood.

And so the word is what’s being preached. But there is a nice concluding element here because remember that the beginning was—Jesus said, related the question of the restoration of the kingdom to Israel to those who are ruled by God and those who rule for God. The restoration of the kingdom was tied to the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon them, which was tied to his ascension and tied to them then being his witnesses: “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth.”

And we have gone now from the holy city of Jerusalem to what some have referred to as the mistress of the world, Rome, and the word has made its progression in obedience to the instructions and command—and you could say the prophecy—of the Lord Jesus Christ of the prophetic witness of the church to all the world. And now the mistress of the world is converted into the bride of Christ, and from there missionaries will be sent out all over the world. And so there is a real sense of tying things up, but not in the way we normally like to see it.

So the first thing we want to note by this is the way the book concludes—not by referring to the life of Paul, not by referring to the end of the word’s work, but really the beginning of it in the context of that last sphere of activity, the uttermost parts of the earth.

And so that’s a very triumphant sort of note, isn’t it? You know, it’s a very triumphant note that the word has been established, the missionary center has been established at Rome, the mistress has become a part of the bride of Christ, and things go on. And as I said, in terms of our lives, we want to think of it that same way—that our lives should be evaluated in the context of the word and how God has used us to spread the word, the voice of God that changes men and cultures.

To place man at the center of our thinking would be wrong. God places his word at the center. So we want to respond to God’s word, right? Making that our center as well—a focus on the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think that frequently when we do have cheating on our mind, we look to other sources for activities, pleasures, work, whatever it is. It’s because we have an improper focus upon ourselves or other people as opposed to the ultimate focus of the Lord Jesus Christ and his word as it moves through culture.

Secondly, the next point I wanted to talk about here is that the particular ending—that’s the kind of what these last two verses talk about, the specific ending of the book of Acts—is a single word which can be translated: ja Alexander says the most, the best translation would probably be to say unforbidden. It’s a word that’s composed of alpha in the Greek and then the word for forbidding something. And so, in other words, the idea is it’s not forbidden. Unforbidden is the word that’s used here. That sounds a strong triumphant note.

Who could or what would attempt to forbid the preaching of God’s word? Well, we know, if we look at the opposite of this word—the word forbid—a brief summary of that word in the Gospels and in the Epistles tells us that the church frequently is in a position of trying to forbid things that the voice of God means to accomplish.

And so, for instance, in the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly—the account is given that he tells his apostles: “Suffer the little children who come unto me and forbid them not.” And the apostles would come and say, “Well, these guys over here are, you know, talking about you, but we don’t know them. So we’re trying to forbid them from preaching.” Don’t forbid them from preaching the word.

Men, the visible church, the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ can attempt to forbid the preaching of God’s word or forbid the efficacious receiving of people to hear the voice of Jesus—in the case of little children. Or later on, you know, in the book of Acts, the word forbid is used in the context of Peter saying, “Well, these guys that have received the Holy Spirit, how can we forbid them from receiving the water of baptism, reception into the institutional church?” Well, some people try to do that. Man, the church itself can be seen as trying to forbid the preaching of God’s word or the application of God’s word.

And I think that’s partly in mind here because the point is that Paul has just dealt with the Jews. And the end result is the Jews don’t forbid him. They don’t hinder his preaching of the word, okay? And the Jews in the context of this chapter are the visible church. And he’s preaching to the visible church. Remember that many of the people from those eleven synagogues convert, and those synagogues, probably half of them had quite a few believers in them.

So there’s a transformation of the church. God brings the two elements of the church together. We talked about that before. The important thing you to remember is that the visible church is no longer hindering the preaching of God’s word. So the word of God is triumphant over a visible church that would attempt to oppose it. The way Jesus was triumphant over his disciples would attempt to forbid the children, forbid people from preaching, or even forbid people the waters of baptism.

The word is triumphant over the church. The word is also triumphant over the state, because that’s the other thing that’s going on here: he’s saying that all this stuff—yeah, he was in his rented house. He was in prison, so to speak, under arrest for two years, but they didn’t forbid him or attempt to forbid him from preaching the word. And you remember earlier on in Jerusalem, the institutional church, which was also linked to the government of Jerusalem, both tried to hinder the preaching of the word.

Remember, they told Peter, “You can’t preach this stuff.” He said, “Well, I got to obey God rather than men.” Well, here by the end, history moves in the context of the removal of attempts to hinder the word on the part of either church or state.

The last message is the word is unforbidden by man—either man in the church or man in the state—and that’s a note of triumph. The book of Acts ends with great hope that the movement of history as recorded in the book of Acts is the movement of the releasing of shackles and fetters that men attempt to place in front of the word of God. The word of God is powerful. The voice of God is powerful, and it moves out and it affects changes in the world, and the world can’t hold the word back.

And so the book of Acts ends with a tremendous optimistic victory cry: unforbidden. That’s what the word of God is. The scriptures are unforbidden. And while men may attempt to place momentary shackles upon it, it breaks those shackles. And God’s judgment and providence in history is for the release of his word that transforms the whole world.

The floodwaters cannot be held back. The river—the Willamette River comes down, and if it gets high enough and God wants enough rain to happen and snow to happen, it comes over the seawall. It’s unforbidden. And so the word of God is like that water that flows and fills the whole earth.

Remember that the context of this is all these difficulties. Look at what was forbidding or hindering Paul: we had the visible church (we talked about that), we had the state (we talked about that), and we had what seemed to be this terrible storm that we went through in several weeks in Acts 27. But that couldn’t hinder Paul from getting there either, because Jesus said, “You’re going there so you can be my witness.”

All the providential acts of God in history move us from difficulties—Paul had great difficulties to triumph. Maybe not personal triumph, but the triumph of the word through us. Remember, that’s to be our focus: the word, the scriptures, the Lord Jesus Christ, not our own personal lives.

And so God has given us this picture of the apostle Paul and the efficacious word moving through him unforbidden. And out of all the difficulties come great blessing. Out of all the problems we’ve talked about—him being stoned, killed, drowned, whatever it is, arrested, almost traded off to the Jews but on the part of the Romans, who did him a favor—through all of that, God is victorious. And the Apostle Paul goes forth so that the preaching of the word goes out unhindered.

Out of that lion that dies comes forth honey. Remember, honey comes out of that. And so we have great blessing coming on the heels of great adversity.

And that leads me to my third point. This is a natural transition point between this and what I want to do next, which is to talk a few sermons from First Timothy.

In First Timothy 1, Paul says that he’s writing: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God our savior, and the Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope.” Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope. God our savior, Jesus our hope. That’s what Paul says here. He’s an apostle by the commandment of God our savior and Lord Jesus Christ our hope.

The Lord Jesus is the basis for our hope. And that’s what I’m talking about here: the book of Acts ends on an incredibly hopeful note, a note meant to be read and preached in churches for thousands of years to confirm the bride of Jesus Christ that you don’t got to look any place else for hope and solace but in the Lord Jesus Christ who is our hope. And your life should be marked with a tremendous hope for the future based upon the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I’m convinced that to the degree that we understand the hope that’s laid before us, then to that degree we will not have cheating on our mind by looking for other hope, looking for other relief from our difficulties, but only to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now hope can be seen in a couple of different ways. And most of the time when you hear about the hope that’s talked about here in First Timothy 1 and in other places of scripture, they’re talking about the hope of the second coming of the Lord—that history moves to completion and culmination when he returns. That our hope is that after all of these problems in life, we’ll go to heaven and be received into glory.

And I don’t want to say a thing against that today. I want to hold that out as the primary hope that’s set before us for all time: that through all of this, the end—or the beginning of the next, you know, far longer period of time for us—is to be present in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and of his people. I want to, you know, keep that as the absolute bedrock of our hope: that it’s all founded upon the Lord Jesus Christ, his past works, his present accomplishments, and his future receiving us into glory with him and his final return in which all things will be transformed.

That is absolutely the hope that we have, and it’s an important hope for us, because frequently in life our lives can seem to be filled with difficulties. Our lives can be seen to be—sometimes it can appear that our lives are just one darn thing after another, one frustration after another, one disappointment in people after another. You know, that’s the way it can frequently appear.

I mentioned before this movie that we just rented. I saw it when it came out to the theaters and I know some of you have tried to see it and don’t understand why I like it. But it’s called “Vanya on 42nd Street.” It’s an adaptation of Chekhov’s work, the short story “Uncle Vanya.” And Chekhov wrote about sloth. And over and over again in “Uncle Vanya” or “Vanya on 42nd Street,” the word sloth, lazy, bored, tired—all that comes up, just like it does with the kids in this culture, over and over: sloth, lack of heart for a task.

Well, by the end of this movie, the closing scene is Uncle Vanya and his niece. And his niece, by the end of this, she has loved this gardener who has no regard for her really at all, doesn’t really love her at all. And finally, it’s all made manifest. And so that dies—her hope of men, of relationship with this man is cut off.

And Uncle Vanya’s hope that he was supporting somebody—he was supporting a professor who turned up to be a boob. And all his life he worked to support this guy. And then he finds out at the end of it all that this guy’s an idiot and doesn’t really know anything about life. And via, “I’ve labored for, I’ve spent, I’ve wasted my life helping this man who is nothing.” And his hope in this life and in men again—and in autobiographies—is cut off.

But at the end of the movie, the niece talks to Uncle Vanya, and you know, maybe sometimes you feel like them—that you’ve done all this work and the result has been no good—in despair. Listen to what she says. She says, “Uncle,” and understand this is the end of a play that has left them hopeless in terms of earthly fulfillment.

And she says: “Uncle, we’ll live through. And he’s saying, ‘What are we going to do now?’ We’ll live through a long row of days. We’ll live through the endless evenings and we’ll bear up under the trials fate has sent to us. We’ll constantly toil for others now and for the rest of our days. And when we come to die, we’ll die submissively.

Beyond the grave, we will testify that we have suffered, that we’ve wept, that we’ve known bitterness. And God will take pity on us. You and I, uncle, God will take pity on us. And we will live a life of radiant joy and beauty. And we’ll look back on this life of our unhappiness with tenderness, and we’ll smile. And in that new life, we shall rest.

Uncle, I have faith. We shall rest to the songs of the angels in a firmament arrayed in jewels. And we’ll look down. And we’ll see evil, all the evil in the world, and all of our sufferings bathed in a perfect mercy. And our lives grown sweet as a caress.

I know you’ve had no joy in your life, but just wait. Only wait, uncle. We shall rest. We shall rest.”

See, by the end of the play, the niece’s hope and Vanya’s hope are placed in God. Faith that there is a heaven and a hell, and faith that God will receive those that he has called. Faith, ultimately—though he doesn’t use the word—in the Lord Jesus Christ, and hope that all, if our lives are filled with nothing but continual toil and submission to things we don’t like and people that are unfaithful and mess us over every time, the way Jacob’s life was—at the end of our days, our great hope is that all this is seen, that God providentially was bathing all of this in his mercy.

You see, now that has to be at the center of your heart. If our lives are nothing but our conscious adult lives—let’s say you know, fifty years (wipe off the first twenty—we don’t know what we’re doing the first twenty), the last fifty years of our lives (three score and ten)—if every one of those years and days is disappointment, rejection, and suffering, and the result of evil in the world, and then we’re ushered into an infinite amount of time that is filled with that radiance and jeweled beauty of heaven and the angels and the Lord Jesus Christ and the people that we’ve known, made perfect now in him—is that fifty years so bad?

I mean, put it another way. If you live fifty years and let’s say you’re not—let’s not consider the afterlife—and if I told you, you give me half of those fifty years (twenty-five years), and you’re going to live like a rat. But the next twenty-five years, your last twenty-five years, you’re going to live like a king. You’d say, “Okay, I’ll take that deal.” Because you know that your last twenty-five years, as it probably exists, will not be like a king.

See, what if I gave you five, ten years of difficulty and forty years of blessing? That’s a better deal. How about two years of difficulty and forty-eight years of blessing? That’s a great deal. Now, it sounds real good, doesn’t it? I mean, if I could do that right now, you’d be real happy. But that’s exactly what God has done for us. He’s given us this little brief, fleeting moment of time and said that the rest of our existence is blessedness, radiance, and a radiance that even goes back to that little existence and understands it all from the mind of God and from his providence, from his love for us.

Oh, that’s great. If you keep that at the center of your being, I don’t know what you’re going to go through this week, but you’re going to be a happy person. You’re going to be a hopeful person.

You see, hope is settled in the future on the resurrection and our resurrection with the Lord Jesus Christ. But you know what? It is an even better story than that. And I don’t know if Chekhov was Eastern Orthodox or not. Maybe he was. But I think if this reflects what he thinks is the normal state of man, he’s wrong, because our fifty years are not filled with that.

Most of us have a wife who loves us or a husband who loves us. We have children. We have maybe a friend or two. You know, you’ve got things that have you—got to go watch the sunset. You know, you can do all kinds of things. You can, in our country, tremendous commercial wealth, all kinds of neat things. You can taste neat things today. I’m sure you will.

So that little time compared to eternity isn’t all bad either. And what I’m trying to say is that the book of Acts takes that hope of the Lord Jesus Christ and brings it right into history. That the difficulties aren’t just resolved in the last day for us, but they’re resolved in time as well.

Now, sometimes, you know, it can be kind of a long time. Sometimes it’s a shorter time. But history moves in the context not just of the eternal state but of the contemporary state of blessing.

Now that’s important to know, because it again interprets the despair, the difficulties, the problems you go through. I don’t know about you. I had a very interesting week. I don’t know how God works in your life. I know the pattern that he works in my life with. I’ve figured it out: when I preach on stuff, usually he’ll have me live through that stuff the week before. Okay? That’s how it works with me.

And most of my week this last week was not particularly joyous, but it ended a lot better than it began. And problems that I thought were going to blow up into some of the biggest problems in my life in the middle of the week became like nothing by the end of the week.

You see, our lives move through difficulties. We move through those storms on the sea. We move through the opposition of the visible church. We move through the opposition of the state to an unhindered position in our living out the word of God and the voice of God upon us. You see, that’s our flow. And you got to remember that because troubles are going to happen again and again.

Some of us were at Greg’s dad’s funeral, Pete Skipper’s funeral, this last week. And you should have, you know, maybe Greg can make it available to us what he wrote to be read at the funeral. To think the wondrous fact that fifteen years of prayer, Greg, for his father, were answered in the last year or two. That is a wondrous thing—to wait for that kind of hope to be fulfilled.

But it wasn’t—it wasn’t—you see, it’s not beyond the grave. It was still fulfilled this side of the grave. Hope is present in the context of our lives. And difficulties may take a long time for God to answer our prayers and to bring what we hoped for all along. But it comes. It comes.

And Greg’s little message started out saying, you know, “Why did my dad have to suffer those difficulties, the pain of cancer, the wasting away of his body?” But you see, what God was doing with his dad through all those difficulties was bringing him to a place of transformation so he could move out and love other people instead of just himself, which is where most of us are—he may be a little more self-consciously for a lot of those years.

You see, God uses all those difficulties. It isn’t even as if we’re bearing up in the difficulties and just kind of patiently waiting it through till they’re over, then we get back to our blessings. Those difficulties are God’s means of bringing us into blessing fruition.

You see, as people—I saw a phrase up on the wall at Hillsboro High yesterday when I was with my two boys. They were taking hitting lessons there, kind of a hitting, you know, I don’t know what you call it, or whatever. We were in this gymnasium. There was a weight room there, and there was a phrase up on the wall, and the phrase I thought was really intrigued by it. The phrase said: “The weaker the body, the more it commands us; the stronger it is, the more it obeys.”

See, the weaker the body, the more it commands us. Our bodies are weak. We got to kind of attend to our bodies. Our bodies are strong. They’re under our submission. Now, they’re in submission to us. Apostle Paul said, “I buff up my body.” Apostle Paul said, “When I’m weak, then I’m strong.”

And God weakens us to strengthen us in him. You see, that’s what he’s doing. Now, that phrase was by Rousseau, actually. I mean, it’s not a Christian phrase. But Rousseau saw a principle that is right most of the time. Although probably in the context of that weight room, those guys get their bodies in real good shape, they’re probably even more obeying their bodies than if they had completely weak bodies, because the body can become idolatrous. That’s what we tend to do all the time.

But anyway, the point is that as a principle of life for the Christian, you know, the weaker the body, the more it commands us; the stronger it is, the more it obeys. And it becomes strengthened. And this is where the application: it becomes strengthened in that weight room through diligent exercise, through making it hurt. And God strengthens us as his people to proclaim his word through difficult times, through making us hurt, things we wouldn’t want to do, disciplines that he places upon us—diabetes, cancer, difficulties.

He causes us to then come under those things and to grow stronger in our inner man because of those very difficulties.

So Uncle Vanya is good. Hope is off in the future. But hope is present as well.

Let me give you another example of the hope of God being realized this last week. We’re in this Oregon Alliance of Reformed Churches. And you know, it looked for a while (we’ll get into all the circumstances) but it looked like it was over in the last month. For the last two years, we mostly been organizing still. You see, think what’s going to—why we keep organizing?

And when we finally got organized, then it almost looked like, you know, one of the churches may not—one of the pastors might not be around anymore, might be out of state. Whole thing might fall apart. So we got to the place after two years of just about the death of this thing, and then we had a meeting this week, and it didn’t die, and the man stayed in the state.

And in fact, we decided to do three things at this meeting. We’re going to have a youth or a teen retreat camping trip January 4th and 5th down by the three churches—those kids who want to go. We’ve been talking for two years. One of the main reasons we’re doing this is to get our kids together (not very many of us who want to support each other, get to know each other). We did that. We planned the event.

We decided to run the proposal by them of them putting their imprimatur, so to speak, on the Geneva conference. So it isn’t sponsored by one church but it represents more of a reformational witness in the whole state, and they like that idea, and we move toward that. They’re going to help us plan and fulfill the Geneva conferences from now on. That’s a great thing.

And then we also decided that—and we were talking about the floods of the last few weeks—we decided to put out communications both as individual churches and as the alliance to other churches and to civil rulers about how to interpret the events of the flood we’ve just gone through and talking about the judgments of God. You see, so it’s a picture again of suffering through difficulties and then God in his providence unforbidding the word and it begins to affect work in terms of the communities of the reformation churches in the state and their proclamation of the word as well. You see, and that’s the way lives are. That’s the way what happens.

Look, if you will, at Psalm 29. Turn to Psalm 29. Reverend Grahing from the church in Salem preached on this text, I believe, last week after the floods were over. Psalm 29.

Notice that Psalm begins in verse one: “Give unto the Lord, oh ye mighty”—you rulers of the earth, in other words, the mighty ones in the land, the kings, the governors, the presidents, the city commissioners, the mighty ones—”represent God’s might. Give unto the Lord, oh ye mighty. Give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory. Do unto his name. Worship the Lord the beauty of holiness.”

A call to worship God given to the civil magistrates, or you could also say the rulers in the church. And then we read in the next few verses of the power of God’s voice that will affect the rulers, giving God glory.

Read verse three: “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters. It was upon the waters in Portland and in Salem and in Silverton, the floodwaters that went up. The God of glory thunders. The Lord is upon many waters, thunder and lightning and rain coming down, and the Lord is in them. His voice is going out through them.

“The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. Yeah, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.”

I’m sad that when those trees started falling around my house, this verse didn’t come to mind. I didn’t tell my kids, “The voice of God is breaking the trees.” Do you see what he’s doing? He’s blowing, and he’s blowing mightily, to remind us of his might and strength, that we might join our rulers in giving him worship and glory.

“He makes them also to skip like a calf, Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn.”

You can see earthquakes being played out there.

“The voice of the Lord divides the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord makes the calves to hind, or the hinds to calf rather, and discovers the forest. And in his temple doth everyone speak of his glory.

“The Lord siteth upon the flood. Yay, the Lord siteth king forever.”

The purpose of God’s judgments in the earth, his voice, the prophetic voice, the church that ushers those judgments in, his providential acts and meteorological events, is judgment so that the rulers might worship and praise him. There is hope in the middle of flood more than there is hope in normal days because God is bringing his judgments to bear in a mighty way and he’s getting men’s attention.

And look at the purpose of this in the last verse, verse 11: “The Lord will give strength unto his people. The Lord will bless his people with peace.”

You don’t have peace, church. You don’t have God’s order in our land today, but you will. And you will through those very manifestations of judgment that we all observed here in our very area.

I don’t know if it’s true yet. I’m waiting for the details, but one of the elders from one of the churches said that there were nine counties that voted for Ron Wyden, and those are the nine that flooded, and the other ones didn’t. And that on the day of the worst flooding was the day that Ron Wyden was being sworn into office by Mark Hatfield, a professing believer. I think he used to be a conservative Baptist. And he was being sworn into office with a Jewish Bible, a denial of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I know that Gordon Smith’s in the Mormon cult. But to see that this senator from Oregon—you understand, who’s God addresses in Psalm 29—goes a mighty one of the earth—and does a practical and visible denial of the Lord Jesus Christ as he’s sworn into office, and God blows a specific stream of water right at the counties that supported him and elected him to office?

I don’t believe that’s coincidence. I believe God wants us to see these correlations. And he wants us to tell people that he’s blowing, he’s raining, he’s thundering, he’s flooding things so that the mighty ones might acknowledge him and that his people might be established and then have peace and his order in the land.

Apostle Paul went through difficulties in the middle of the ocean and he stayed the course because he knew Psalm 29. He knew that this was happening for the establishment of God’s people and the unhindering of the voice of God as it goes out into the culture.

The Canons of Dort talk about the assurance of salvation in article 12. And it says, you know, one of the great things about election, the five points of Calvinism, is the assurance of salvation. And how do they assure ourselves of our salvation, our election by God? We do it by observing in themselves the spiritual joy and holy pleasure, the infallible fruits of election, pointed out in the word of God, such as a true faith in Christ, filial fear, a godly sorrow for sin, a hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

God brings us difficulties, shows us that we hunger and thirst for his peace and order, which we don’t have—hunger and thirst that we might be filled up in recognizing our own spiritual poverty. Gives us a reverential fear, reverence, and also a fear of his chastisement, to us through difficulties, to assure us of our very salvation and election, to bring us to a position of that ultimate hope based upon the present-day manifestations of hope as well.

Later on, the Canons of Dort talk about the doctrine of reprobation—that God has also elected some to reprobation—the election to reprobation. And it says that believers shouldn’t be upset by this. It says that those who have not yet strongly felt and nevertheless make use of the means which God has appointed for working these graces in us ought not to be alarmed at the mention of reprobation, nor to think themselves among the reprobate, but diligently to persevere in the use of means and with an ardent desire devoutly and humbly to wait for a season of richer grace.

What’s it talking about? It’s saying, well, maybe you think you’re not a Christian. You’re not doing too good. You feel dry. You don’t see a lot of manifestations of some of these attributes of the Christian that you’re supposed to have. You want to see them, but you don’t. They’re saying, “Hey, God doesn’t extinguish the flax that’s smoldering, the withering, the smoldering wick, right?” They’re saying that what you have to do in the middle of cancer in your life or in the middle of judgments that may flood your home or in the middle of alienation from people that you think completely shake your confidence—in the middle of whatever judgments you may be going through, in the middle of the judgments that fill our homes sometimes as we see each other not acting much like Christians—in the middle of those times that cause us to doubt, the scriptures say, “Hey, don’t doubt your salvation. You want better days. Make use of the secondary means that God gives us until he supplies a season of richer grace.”

And the clear teaching is he does just that.

All of our lives are not like Vanya. Our lives are marked by sections like Vanya’s life—difficulties and trials—but then periods of refreshment, times of richer grace from God, hope now as well as eternally.

Now the point of all this is: don’t despair and don’t have cheating on your mind. If you don’t know, if you don’t really believe the hope of the future world to come, and if you don’t really believe—observing and understand the hope of the present manifestations of God’s blessing in our lives today as we come through difficult times holding to his word and waiting for the richer seasons of grace—if you don’t know there’s a richer season of grace coming, you’re probably going to move away from the secondary means. You’re going to have cheating on your mind. You’re going to try to find another way around the pain you feel.

But God says the only way through the pain to blessing is to continue to make use of the secondary means: faithfulness to do the right thing, even though the right thing get you slapped around terribly sometimes. God says persevere because there’s that great hope out there.

You know, if—as I said, I thought about this last night in my bed—man, if our lives are filled with miserable things for fifty years and then ruin eternity, praise God’s holy name. And then to think that our lives are filled with beautiful days of Sabbath rest in this country—nothing prohibits the going forth of the word of God. The civil magistrate doesn’t say don’t do that. The institutional church doesn’t say you can’t do that. The only thing that keeps us from doing it is our fear, our lack of acknowledgment that God’s blessings are contemporary as well as eternal.

You see? And then think about the wondrous days that we can have of Sabbath rest like we’re having today. And that even that little period of time in which our lives are marked by trials and tribulations have continual days like this—days of getting together, contemplating the word of God. I don’t know, maybe you know, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but my heart is filled with a tremendous gratitude to God for what he has accomplished.

That even the difficult days, which are really so few in comparison to eternity and actually so few in comparison to our lives now, the wonderful joy that he’s given us in families and relationships in the church, and to think that even those little spots of darkness in our lives are really part of the means where God makes us weaken ourselves and causes us to focus on him—then to have more joy. Everything’s joy to us. Everything is love from God.

And the book of Acts ends by wanting us to focus upon that hope, upon that joy, and upon the joy that the word of God is unhindered in the affairs of men. It goes out, breaks seawalls, breaks hearts, breaks things apart so that joy might fill the land.

Let’s pray for that.

Father, forgive us, Lord God, that we so often have cheating in our minds. So often we try to solace ourselves through things which are not of you and of your word and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Cause us, Father, to know the eternal hope that waits before us of Jesus Christ. And cause us to know and to believe your word. Give us your spirit to strengthen our hearts in the knowledge that even in this life, we have much hope and things do become resolved in good ways for the advancement of your kingdom.

Help us, Father, then to see that even those dark moments are bathed in your grace and mercy and are manifestations of strength to us in the Lord Jesus, breaking us down that we might come to more joy in him. Lord God, help us not to abandon your secondary means of your word and your church, doing the right thing.

Help us, Father, in difficult times, which some of us are going through even now, to persevere in the secondary means, waiting and praying for a season of richer grace from you. And we thank you, Lord God, that we can pray that confidently, whether it be at the end of our lives or whether, as is usually the case, frequently throughout our lives, those rich seasons of your grace.

Help us, Father, this day to continue to worship you, to praise you from our hearts. And may we on our beds this evening at the end of the day say God is very, very good. Praise his holy name. In Jesus name we ask it.

Amen.