Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

again the sermon text for this week. So I will read it again. You can follow along in the responsive reading. I mentioned last week or two weeks ago that my friend Jack Phelps who pastors the CRC church up in Anchorage, Alaska sent me a commentary on Psalms a couple of months ago with an analysis of the strophes or verses and the meter and structure. And this sevenfold structure wasn’t clearly laid out in my last handout, but this one shows you at least his understanding.

It’s a complex thing to figure out the meters and the verses of the Psalms, but it’s a wonderful undertaking that many men are applying themselves to this day. And as I mentioned two weeks ago, it breaks out into six similar verses. And then the seventh is the culmination. And we can think of that—the author didn’t point this out, but I think that the allusions to creation are kind of evident if we look at it that way.

And I’ve also underlined the portions of the text that kind of work right through apart from the strophic analysis but the actual psalm. There’s a series of seven things I’ve underlined in reference to the seven days of creation. So in any event you can follow along with that or just listen or follow along in your own scriptures and I’ll read Psalm 19, our sermon text again this Lord’s day. By the way I might say too that Jack’s son, one of his sons Fred, is staying with us this weekend.

So he’ll fly out tomorrow afternoon or evening, but he’s with us this afternoon and Monday as well. Fred, one of Jack’s sons. Okay, please stand for the reading of God’s word.

**Psalm 19**

To the chief musician, a psalm of David. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tabernacle for the sun which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and rejoices like a strong man to run its race. Its rising is from one end of heaven and its circuit to the other end and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover, by them your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward.

Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and I shall be innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word and for the wonderful benefit it is to us. Forgive us, Lord God, for being ignorant of it and not attending to it the way that we should. Bless us as we consider it now by your Holy Spirit. May your spirit illumine this text to our understanding. Help us, Lord God, to rejoice in this psalm and to learn the lessons of the sixth section of it so that we can move into that seventh section of rest and acceptability. We thank you for our Lord’s Day service today and for the preaching of the word. May it be effective for transforming us through the power of the Holy Spirit, ministering Jesus to us. In his name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

The Westminster Confession of Faith in discussing the perseverance of the saints says this. Nevertheless, they—that is the saints, those who will persevere, those saints—may through the temptations of Satan and of the world the prevalency of corruption remaining in them and the neglect of the means of their preservation fall into grievous sins and for a time continue therein. Neglecting the means of their preservation is what it refers to.

Again, the Belgic Confession or the Canons of Dort themselves in Article 14 given a heading not by them but by the church later. The heading is “God’s Use of Means in Perseverance.” And we read this: “Just as it has pleased God to begin this work of grace in us by the proclamation of the gospel, so he preserves, continues and completes his work by the hearing and teaching of the gospel, by meditation on it, by its exhortations, threats and promises, and also by the use of the sacraments.”

The secondary standards of the church and the reformed churches developed several hundred years ago talk about the means of our perseverance, or better, the means of our preservation. True saints are not “once saved always saved” in the sense that it doesn’t make any difference how they live their lives. True saints will persevere in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. Their lives will be marked by that perseverance. But that will be evidence that what’s happening is God is preserving them. So ultimately it’s the sovereignty of God that preserves his people.

Remember he chose us. We sang Romans 8—nothing can work against us because God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. He set his love upon us and then he decided to take certain people who in their sinful state are just like everybody else. And God in his sovereignty elected some to salvation. And then he sent forth the preaching of his Son rather to make atonement for the sins of those people, those that he would elect based on his love, setting his love upon us in all eternity. Not because we’re lovable but because he wants to make us lovable.

And then so Jesus came and effected atonement for his people and then the Holy Spirit working through the word effectually calls those that are elect to him and then that spirit again and the Lord God will preserve us—preserve true saints. So it’s not “once saved always saved.” It sort of is but really that’s a perversion of it. We live in a modern evangelical world that thinks that way. The whole modern kind of popular idea of being born again—that when somebody’s converted, they’re born again and now they’re going to go to heaven and even if they live the rest of their lives in complete rebellion against Jesus Christ, if they prayed the prayer, these people are saved.

This isn’t true. It’s true from one sense that if you really are saved, you will always be saved. And it’s true that if the Lord God has brought you to the new creation that he says that we are like in the spirit, surely you’ll also persevere. But it’s not “once saved always saved” no matter what you do and it’s not “you’re born again and therefore you’re going to heaven no matter what you do.” God says that true saints will persevere and that’s because God is preserving them. So it’s an important doctrine for us and these Westminster Confession and the Canons of Dort recognize that there are means that God uses to preserve us or from the other side of it that we apply ourselves to persevere in the faith.

And I want to continue today where I began two weeks ago in Psalm 19 looking at some of those means of our preservation.

Now I should mention here at the top of your outlines I have a couple of quotations from the Canons of Dort relative to the parable of the sower of the seeds that Elder Wilson spoke on last week. And that sermon, as he preached it, I thought, well, you know, much of this really could be categorized as again some of the means that God uses to preserve his people and that we use to persevere in the faith—avoiding the entanglements of improper value systems of the world, avoiding you know listening to people so we don’t become stony, et cetera. So these are means of preservation. But I also thought about the Canons’ citation of this parable and I wanted to just make mention of it to you and not spend any time on it but just so you’ll know.

In Article 3 and 4, heads of doctrine 3 and 4—so remember that’s total depravity and irresistible grace, the means that God uses to save his people. Article 9 says this: “The fact that many who are called through the ministry of the gospel do not come and are not brought to conversion must not be blamed on the gospel, nor on Christ who is offered through the gospel, nor on God who calls them through the gospel and even bestows various gifts on them. But on the people themselves who are called. Some in self-assurance do not even entertain the word of life. Others do entertain it but do not take it to heart. And for that reason, after the fleeting joy of temporary faith, they relax. Others choke the seed of the word with the thorns of life’s cares and with the pleasures of the world and bring forth no fruit. This our Savior teaches in the parable of the sower.”

So here the Canons of Dort specifically reference the parable of the sower and the seed that Elder Wilson spoke on last week and they make the same kind of application. You know, the fault’s not in the gospel, the fault is in the people themselves who don’t care about it or don’t have any sustaining influence or attention to it or are choked out by various temptations. And the Canons here cite temporary faith. So there is faith, there is some living of these plants as it were. They spring up, they have life, they’re temporary faith, but they don’t persevere and so they’re not part of the elect community of God. They’re not really saints.

Again, in section five, or head the fifth head of doctrine on the perseverance of the saints in the rejection of errors, number seven, which is on your handout on your outlines today, we read this: “They reject the errors of those who teach that the faith of those who believe only temporarily does not differ from justifying and saving faith except in duration alone.”

So they’re saying that the Armenians said, “Well, the only difference between those that have temporary faith and those that persevere in the faith is duration.” And they, the Canons reject this. They say, “For Christ himself in Matthew 13 and Luke 8, parable of the sower, clearly defines these further differences between temporary and true believers. He says that the former receive the seed on rocky ground and the latter receive it in good ground or a good heart. The former have no root and the latter are firmly rooted. The former have no fruit but the latter produce fruit in varying measure with steadfastness or perseverance.”

They’re saying the difference is not just length. There’s a different qualitative difference between the faith that’s temporary and the faith that is eternal or produces fruit. Now they don’t get into the nature of that and the nature of that is a lot to do with the modern-day controversies over whether someone who is baptized and brought into the church—we could say they exercise temporary faith. God waters dry soil and they exercise temporary faith. They live, they grow up in the context of the church. Let’s say, and for a season they exercise faith in Christ and then they fall away. And following the warnings in Hebrews or not following them they fall away and demonstrate that they were never part of the elect community of God in the decretal sense that God determined from all of eternity what’s the nature of their relationship to God.

And if we think of the parable I think that we have to say that there is some life. There is, as the Canons say, temporary faith. There’s some faith. There’s life because, after all, in not all of them but in a couple of these instances, living plants come up from the seed. The word is put into certain people’s hearts, living plants grow. There’s some life and yet that life is not the same sort of life that we have. So there’s differences but there is something going on there that is known by God and not known by us.

Let me also make sure—as we leave this, just wanted to touch on these things and give you the citations from the Canons that reference that parable. It fit so well in the providence of God that was the next of Chris’s sermons and it was right in the context of perseverance and the Canons cite that.

But let me remind us also that there is a difference in how the gospel is received by these different types of soil. What makes the difference? Can a leopard change its spots? Can rocky soil make itself into good soil? Can hardpan make itself into good soil? Can soil that has a bunch of weeds in it make itself into turf? And the answer is obvious. No.

The difference in the soils is ultimately the difference of the sovereign God. In Adam’s fall, we’re all hardpan. And as Chris prayed in his prayer last week at the end of the sermon, you know, God with his people plows us up, waters us, does the weeding around us sometimes many times. And so we produce fruit. So we all begin as lousy soil, but the Lord God works in time to soften our hearts and then that soil is a good heart.

So it’s the sovereignty of God that makes the difference. The soils can’t decide what they’re going to do.

Secondly, the difference is only known by fruit. We look at two plants, a couple of these plants, and they look the same at first. They spring up. And so you see people in the church who make profession of faith and get baptized and are there for a season. But the evidence of election is fruitfulness. Fruitfulness. And that’s how we can tell where the true life of the gospel is making itself evident.

Our Savior said some have fruit 30, 60, 100fold. What’s the fruit by the way? What is the fruit?

In Psalm 19 speaking of the wonders of the law, it says moreover by them thy servant is warned. We are called to be the servant of God. Adam was not placed on the world just to have relationship and communion with God or with his wife. He was God’s servant. For what end? What purpose? To beautify the world, to make it a more beautiful place.

You men, when you leave today, what fruit will you bear this week? And if all we think in terms of fruit is the sort of churchy stuff that we all talk about all the time, and particularly as pastors who are always thinking about it—well, maybe you didn’t have any fruit last week. But the truth is you did have fruit. You made paper. You made computer programs. You fixed cars. The wives changed diapers. They fed people. That’s fruit. Because that’s it—in fact, it’s it’s. I want to be careful. I think that in the overall scheme of things that’s more important fruit because Adam was placed here to transform the world, to beautify it.

And so as you men and women, boys and girls, go about doing your task this week, as you bear fruit for him by changing the world and transforming it and making it more beautiful, this is the goal. That’s why we evangelize. That’s why we seek out the means of God’s preservation. That’s why we pray. That’s why we read the Bible. That’s why we look for the fruit of the spirit, of course, and the character qualities that the Spirit’s indwelling in us creates. But the end result of all of that is fruitfulness in labor.

So we’re the servant of God. All right?

So it’s important to see that and it’s important to see that’s the true indicator. That’s what you can see in men’s lives whether they’re part of the elect community of God or not—not just profession of course, not just you know an initial belief in Christ but an ongoing demonstration of fruit in their lives where they glorify God in what they do and they bring back a little element of that work of theirs into the offering of the church to show God, “We saved the world this week up in Spokane.”

Vos Nixon’s assistant Jason Farley said that the theme of their church is “We cut the world up and put it on God’s altar.” Fire. See, there’s a very true sense of that. That’s what God does to us. The word of God is sharp, more powerful than a two-edged sword. It cuts us apart, puts us on the altar, and God transforms us and makes us whole again—cuts and then it brings us back together. And that’s what we do to the world. We consecrate it to God. All right.

So, just so you’ll know, the Canons do reference the parable of the sower of the seeds. And the parable of the sower of the seeds as Elder Wilson preached on last week is an excellent way to think about the implications of the means of perseverance. And he spoke on those quite well last week.

And I want to return to Psalm 19 and talk very briefly about the means of perseverance. And some of this is overlap and some of this is new. And again the sevenfold structure. Let me just make a point about that before we start with the specific rest of the outline.

The glory of God, “Let there be light.” The Shekinah glory of God shone at the beginning of the creation week. The firmament was created on the second day. The earth was drawn out of the water on the third day—that’s the third underlined term in verse four. The sun of course is then created on the fourth day. Sun and moon. I heard last night a C-SPAN article by the fellow who wrote Darwin’s Black Box that if we didn’t have the moon we couldn’t have life on earth. I never knew that before.

So the sun and moon, but here the sun represents both of them. The sun is created on the fourth day of course and so we have that next in the sequence. And then I’ve got the commandment of the Lord is pure underlined as the fifth element. Why? Well the fifth element, the fifth day of creation is always the tough one to sort of get in a sequence of seven. It’s the teeming things but the fifth day is the first day that God issues a command to the created order. So commandments or giving commands is frequently in this fifth aspect of a seven-day pattern. God commanded the teeming things to multiply.

So commandments lines up with the fifth day. And then of course the servant of God, Adam, is created and sins and falls on the sixth day. But because of the sanctifying work of God, we can be acceptable in his sight on the seventh day.

And the payout of that structure is to remember that as we talk about small sins this week and gross sins next week in Psalm 51, to remember that sixth day stuff and it’s real and we have to deal with it. But to remember that the seventh day—that’s what God will, you know, that is the evidence to you that God is moving you along. He is preserving you. You get to the place and in fact you’re there. And you continue to mature in the acceptability not just of your works but your actual speech, the most difficult thing to control, and even more than that the thoughts of your heart become acceptable in the sight of God.

And so you know the gospel is the good news. You know, yeah, we talk about how great sins and misery are but the second thing is how God has redeemed us from all our sins and misery. We move to the seventh day and that produces thankfulness.

So the message today is God finds you acceptable in Christ here on the Lord’s day, the day of worship, the Christian Sabbath. But having said that, our response should be like David’s was to try to root out sin in our lives to apply ourselves to the means of God’s preservation of us or our perseverance.

What are they?

**First, the law of God.**

Mentioned this last week: “By them thy servant is warned.” So here’s what we are. We’re servants of God. We’re warned by the law. Reading the Bible. I mentioned this last week, ventured again this week. Did you, or two weeks ago, did you take that admonition to heart?

The Bible is the source of one of the primary—I mean secondary—means that God uses to preserve us. John 17:17, Jesus said, “Sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth.” If you seek sanctification, and if you don’t, you’re no Christian. If you do not seek sanctification, you are no Christian. But if you seek sanctification, you must find it in the word of God.

So to attempt sanctification just from hearing the sermon occasionally and not thinking about the Bible, this isn’t going to cut it.

Psalm 119:24, “Your testimonies are my delight and my counselors.” How do we get counsel in terms of removing the sin in our lives and moving toward maturation and holiness and commitment? We get it through the word of God, the testimonies of God.

Verse 11 of Psalm 119: “Your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you.” An exposure and a knowledge of God’s word within us will prevent us from engaging in increasing sinfulness.

Matthew 4:4. The temptation—Jesus answers the devil and he said, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

Now, I know you ate every day last week, but you know, the Bible says sweeter than honey. What’s going to sustain you is the word of God. And I would suggest that daily Bible reading is a wonderful thing to do. I can’t say it’s a law, but regular reading of the Bible is part of the secondary means that God uses to preserve you and that you use to persevere in the faith.

Long time ago, a deacon in a conservative Baptist church said, “Well, seven days without reading your Bible makes one weak”—weak in the sense of not strong. That’s right.

Reading your Bible—2 Timothy 3:15. Paul reminds Timothy, “From childhood you have known the holy scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

You know the colonists in America? If you didn’t teach your child to read they would find you. They’d find you again and then if you still didn’t they’d take the child away. This was a theocratic republic and in the theocratic republic that formed the original colonial government of America they would take your children away if you didn’t teach them to read. You know why? Because they said a knowledge of the Bible is necessary to avoid the temptations of Satan. If you don’t teach your children to read, and if we don’t read, then we won’t be able to do what Jesus did, which is to avoid the temptation of Satan by means of the word of God.

So reading the Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture given by inspiration of God is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.”

If we want to move ahead in our Christian faith, you have to read the Bible.

I would ask you, are you reading the Bible on a regular basis?

One of the things that would warm my heart this week is if some of you people that are not reading your Bibles regularly sent me an email and said, “Pastor Tuuri, I’m committing. I’m going to have a time where I read the Bible. I’m going to have a plan.”

And here’s the last thing you need. If you’re going to read your Bibles regularly, you need accountability because you’re going to stop doing it. The problem isn’t that some people stop and some don’t. The problem is some people stop and stay stopped and other people stop and start up again. All Christians fall off their horses. The question is, will you get back up? Will you persevere?

I probably should have used a different word than pastime. I probably should have used pastime. Pastimes, prayer and accountability. That’s great. People get together at our church, small groups, doing different kinds of things, engaging in pastime, recreation events, whatever it is. That’s great. That’s a wonderful thing. Why not use that group of people that you’re involved in a pastime with to help hold you accountable for reading your Bible?

Make it somebody—your roommate, parents, kids, whatever it is. But you see, what we’re trying to do is encourage people when they get together to see it: Yes, you’re primarily there to engage in a pastime, play cards, whatever it is. But if you’re never talking to each other and encouraging each other in the faith of Jesus Christ, Nice. It’s you’re just passing time and you’re not using your time wisely.

I don’t want to make it into a Bible study for you, but I’m just saying why not use that to pray briefly for each other and to encourage each other in accountability to read your Bible?

If you don’t make a plan, if you don’t make special time and if you don’t build an accountability, you will not read your Bibles and you will have ignored one of the means of God’s preservation of you. And when you then fall off the cliff, that’s why—that’s covenantal language—that God says that’s why: because you didn’t read your Bible. You neglected the means.

So the Sabbath, you know, we make fun of the old sabbatical laws that they had again in colonial America and all that stuff. And but I’ll tell you what they did do. The positive thing that the old style of Sabbathkeeping did was people read their Bibles in the afternoon or evening as a family or individually. They didn’t just rely on the preached word. They’d go home and think about their Bibles that day. One day out of seven at least, they were reading, doing some study and meditation on their Bibles. That’s a great thing to do.

Wind down your Sabbath day today with a reading of the Bible. Make that your regular reading time. Reading of the Bible is absolutely essential. It’s part of the secondary means that God uses. But he says that “by them your servant is warned.”

The application of God’s word—the reading must lead to application. And the psalmist delights in the fact that he is warned not just by the statutes but by the judgments of God. He’s warned.

There used to be a day not so long ago when Christian nations would execute people. They’d put them to death for capital crimes. Deuteronomy 17 says that’s what you’re supposed to do. If somebody is contumacious, they reject the authority of Christ through the judge or the minister. Ultimately, if they reject the authority of the civil government, that’s contumacy and they’re executed. And Deuteronomy 17 says “to that all the people will see and fear and no longer sin.”

In that way, it is important that the judgments of God are made manifest in a public setting so that we’re warned not just by some abstract view of what God will do maybe, but having it evidenced in the context of our lives. That’s why corporal punishment, church discipline, discipline in the workplace, all this stuff is important because it’s the application of the judgments of God.

All law, no penalty? No law, some penalty attached to it, law, fear. “By them thy servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward.”

So you got to apply the Bible. Deuteronomy 4 says if we apply the Bible in civil government, it’ll be an evangelistic tool to the nations.

So reading the Bible and applying it in your life. But I want to focus on this: Make a commitment to regularly read your scriptures. Quite easy to do, not tough.

**Secondly, proper introspection.**

David said, you know, that the law of the Lord is great. It’s perfect, converting the soul and making wise the simple, rejoicing the heart. And what we’re looking at now is verse 11: “Moreover, by them your servant is warned and keeping them there’s great reward.”

And now verse 12: “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.”

So the point is that the Bible will be useful to us as a secondary means of perseverance as we think about our lives in reference to what we read. And I made this point last week about the Sabbath and reverencing your parents and there’s any of a number of things that can happen here.

But the point is, you know, the Greeks say “know yourself.” And the Bible says you can’t, you can’t know yourself. What you have to do is take the word of God and use it to analyze particular actions or sins you may be involved in.

You see, so a proper introspection is part of God’s secondary means to keep us from sin.

We have secret sins. Do you have secret sins? I do. I know I do. I know there’s some stuff I do that’s wrong. Not in a habitual way, but I know I sin. And usually when we sin as Christians, it’s secret, right? There are sins you do at work that are secret from your church friends and your family. Men, you know I’m right here. You know that occasionally, most of you will engage in sinful actions at work and you know that if your kids or your parents or your pastors saw you doing that or saying that thing, you wouldn’t, you’d be embarrassed.

But it’s secret because it’s in a secular workplace and you’re actually being encouraged to sin in that way. That’s a secret sin—kind of public in a way. It’s at your workplace, but it’s secret, you know, from the eyes of those who love you and want to help encourage you away from sinfulness.

There are secret sins, far more of them, in the home.

C.S. Lewis—I’ve mentioned this over and over again. A great article in “God in the Dock” talked about the pastor in the lunch. And you know, we talk about the Christian family, what a great thing it is. And then you all go home and you think, “Gosh, I’m just horrible. All these other families are doing great. They show up at church and everybody’s clean. They got good clothes on. They’re smiling, you know. And boy, I hear all over and over again how great the Christian family is. And yet I go home and my family’s horrible. We yell at each other and we scream.”

C.S. said that’s the result. You know, we think we can be ourselves at home and which means we can sin in our homes because nobody sees—it’s secret to just our family. He says that, you know, wives and husbands talk to each other and parents talk to their kids and kids to their parents sometimes. And if we said that kind of stuff out on the street to somebody, they’d hit us right in the nose. Not going to put up with it.

So, secret sins—you know that you engage in secret sins in your family, that you don’t want me to know about. I know that I do that. I know that my language is not always what it should be. And when you’re over, you don’t ever hear me doing the stuff that my family hears me doing. You know, this is true of you too. I know I’m not the only one here. And I don’t know if it’s language or whatever it is. But, you know, just so you’ll know, if you got sin in your family, join the crowd, brother. Don’t think that you’re some kind of oddity.

Lewis said correctly, that’s where a lot of sin happens—right there. But it’s secret sin. And David wants to be cleansed of it. Not saying put up with it. I’m saying acknowledge it. Recognize that these means of preservation are intended to cleanse us from secret sins.

There are secret sins in the home that only you and somebody else in the home know about that are secret from most of the family. Wives and husbands have secret sins with each other. Siblings may combine together in a lie against the parents. Secret sins. Is secret from the church, secret from the world, but even secret from other family members. And you know you do that. And you also know that there are secret sins that are just yours. Just yours. Nobody’s home. You engage in sinful behavior. Even if they’re home, you can think what you want to think.

Bob Dylan said, “If my thoughts could be seen, they’d put my head in a guillotine.” Well, that’s probably true of a lot of us. We have a hard time controlling our tongues, even worse time controlling our thoughts. And we engage in secret sins.

Now, I want you to think about yourself. I want you to think: What am I doing at work that I shouldn’t be doing? What am I doing in my family that I shouldn’t be doing? What am I doing with my wife or my brother and sister that I shouldn’t be doing? That’s secret sin. And what am I doing on my own?

I don’t remember the quote. Somebody said, “The true test of character is what you do when you’re alone.” Is that really shows what you believe. There’s some truth to that. There’s also some error. The Bible wants us in community because he knows prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. And God wonderfully puts us in community and matures us as a result of that. Our actions change. And when you change your actions, your life changes. Start to think differently, start to think of yourself differently. So that’s good.

But still, do not put up with secret sin in your private life. It’s just you. Name them in your soul today. Write them down. Maybe commit to desire cleansing from secret sins. That’s all good. That’s part of God’s means of preserving you. But it’s not what this psalm’s talking about.

It’s application. But what it’s talking about are the secret sins that are secret to ourselves—even not secret things that we’re doing that nobody else sees. Stuff that we’re doing and we don’t see. You know, God is gracious and takes you, matures you, and you recognize the older you get, “Man, I’ve sinned a ton in my life.”

Paul said, “I was the chief of sinners.” One reason he said that because he was an old guy. When you get old, you recognize your sins more. God’s shown them to you.

So, we have sins going on that we cannot see. Self-deceit is the great enemy to Christian perseverance. And the Bible here in the Psalms, David says that word of God, reading the Bible regularly is intended not just so I can say I read it and chart it, mark off on the chart. The reason why we need to read it regularly is to let it do an X-ray of us. Let it do an evaluation of who we are.

Every three months I got to go get my blood checked ’cause I can’t see what’s going on, right? Well, every day you should or almost every day you should be doing a spirit check with the word of God—read among other things—to do and have an analysis of what your sin is like today and which sins God will be cleansing you from.

So, proper introspection—to look at ourselves honestly. And here in the preaching of God’s word today may the Lord God grant you a knowledge of sins that you want to put off and seek cleansing from.

**Third, meditation.**

Psalm 119:97: “Oh I love your laws by meditation all the day.” That’s part of the introspection. That’s one reason for meditation. Other reasons as well. But it’s not just reading. It’s kind of meditating, chewing on it like a cow chews its cud and regurgitates it, thinking it over.

Psalm 119:15: “I’ll meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways.”

Remember, Leithart taught us, you want to pray effectively, you got to know the ways of God. Well, how are you going to find the ways of God? This verse, verse 15 of Psalm 119 says, you know God’s ways, God’s ways by meditating on his word. So, meditation on the word will keep us from—keep us analyzing our sinfulness but it will also show to us the ways of God so we can pray effectively.

Verse 23 of 119: “Princes also sit and speak against me but your servant meditates on your statutes.”

Meditation is a defense of the Christian against attacks from others. That’s what this psalm says. They plot against you. What do you do? Do you plot against them? No, you meditate in the word of God. Seems counterintuitive, but that’s what the psalmist encourages us to do.

Verse 99: “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.”

So meditation gives us an understanding that can go beyond our years. We can be wiser than the old ones by meditating on the word of God.

You know, so meditation is one of those Christian disciplines—or reading God’s word but then thinking about it. Read a verse a day this week at the beginning of the day and then just sort of let it roll around in your head all week. Think about it. Maybe do a little study, but think about all the words in it. Try to paraphrase it in your own words. Meditate on it. Try to think of connections back to other parts of the Bible.

One thing I meditated on all week was 30, 60, and 100. What’s with that? Why does Jesus describe the numerical value of the fruit as 30, 60, 100fold? You don’t care. But to me, I sort of care about it. It struck my fancy. The spirit of God. So, think about that. Meditate on that this week, Dennis. And I found a bit of an answer.

Now, I don’t know. I found a connection. There’s one other verse in the Bible that has 30, 60, and 100 in it. And it’s sort of interesting to think about that in terms of fruitfulness because there’s a relationship to plants and seed and all that stuff. I won’t tell you where it is. You find it. I would tell you, but I told my Sunday school class, the young people today, I wouldn’t tell them, so I can’t tell them here either.

Meditation—important part of the means of God to preserve us from our sins, to get us knowledge of God’s ways and of course in relationship to that we see how our ways are not his ways and God uses the spirit uses that meditation producing a knowledge of God to make us wise in putting away our ways and conforming ourselves to his ways.

**So, meditation.**

**Fourth, study.**

In Ezra 7:10: “Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel.”

Ezra studied the Bible so he could teach it. You say, “Well, pastor, that’s fine for you.” And you’re right. Mostly, mostly that’s right. God gives us particular people. You guys study programming or auto mechanics or paper production or whatever it is, coffee brewing, you know, and you know it a lot better than me. And my job is to study the Bible. Okay, that’s good. But, you know, I still brew some coffee and I still work a little on our cars.

And you should study the Bible some because Hebrews says chapter 5:12. And he’s writing to all—He’s not talking. It’s not a pastoral sermon. It’s a sermon to everybody. It’s a sermon to you. He says, “By this time, you ought to be teachers. You, by this time, all you adults out there here at RCC, you ought to be teachers.” He says, “But you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food.”

So, you’re supposed to study the word because you’re supposed to be all teachers—little ‘t’, we could say. And pastors are teachers, big ‘T’. But still, We’re all to be teachers of the word. We have to study it.

If you’re going to meditate, you know, successfully, you got to know a little bit about what it says. That’s why Kings Academy, three years of Hebrew coming up for these kids. And I sort of balked at it. I like the idea. It’s a cool jazzy idea for worship model of education. And that’s our classical period. The Old Testament, and our classical language is in Latin—it’s Hebrew and all that stuff.

I kind of balked at it, but you know what it’s going to do? At least it’ll give all those kids the ability to use Hebrew study tools really well. And with some of them, it’ll allow them to read their Bibles in Hebrew eventually. Same thing’s true of Greek. We’re talking about Elder S. teaching the class, teaching people the Greek alphabet well enough to know how to use the Greek helmet. You need to know how to do that a little bit. Otherwise, you just sort of—some of these translations are not good. We need to study.

R.C. Sproul’s coming to town. We’re getting some flyers. Hopefully, you can pass them out to other people. Here’s what Sproul says about the study of the word of God. He says, “Here, then is the real problem of our negligence of studying God’s word. We fail in our duty to study God’s word not so much because it’s difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring. You know, folks, it just isn’t. It’s exciting every time I study it. But rather,” he said, “it’s because it’s work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we’re lazy. Studying the Bible involves a little bit of work and we’re lazy.”

Says admit it—that’s why you don’t study your Bible at least some of you some of the time. Ah, we just want to goof off. We want pastimes. We don’t want to redeem the time. We want pastimes.

So, God says, “Study the word.” It’s part of the means of preserving you and your persevering in the faith.

**Fifth, prayer.**

David says, you know, “Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins.” Those are prayer requests. He’s praying to God in this psalm that God would do these things for him. So he doesn’t just read the word and meditate on the word and study the word. He prays to God that the word, the spirit, would use the word to affect his sanctification.

So prayer—he prays that he’d be cleansed from secret sins. And as I said last week, this involves more than a ritual cleansing. This is a pouring out, getting rid of them is the idea. Cleansing in the sense of getting them out of your system. You know, you have a fever to boil out the toxins and God cleanses you from sin.

And that’s what he prays for. Not just that he would see it and know it, he wants to be cleansed of it. He wants to get rid of it. So, when you name that secret sin earlier—whether it’s at work or the family or with some member of the family or in private or whatever it is or just the ones that God will reveal to you that you don’t know yet—the idea is to you’re seeking those things out to cleanse them to get them out of your life definitively.

And secondly, he prays for preservation from life-dominating high-handed sin. So he prays, “Keep back your servant also. Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins, high-handed sins, big sins.” Okay, we’re going to talk about next week like what David did with Bathsheba and Uriah, adultery and murder, that kind of sin.

Keep me back from big sins. Don’t let them have dominion over me. Keep me away from the temptation maybe or if I have temptation, preserve me by the Holy Spirit. But keep me back from those big sins. Then I shall be blameless and I shall be innocent of a lot of sin.

And the idea is there’s a connection here. If you engage, if you don’t cleanse the little sins and you find out about them, okay, you know what they are, then you build up antibodies. You build up a resistance, you know, like that, you know, malaria that resists bacteria or antibiotics. Now, you build up a resistance to the word slowly over time and you begin to sin more and more and your sins get a little more obvious and you don’t care if they’re all that secret anymore and then pretty soon you’re doing big sins.

And the Bible says that sin can exercise a dominion over you. And that’s what he’s talking about here. Don’t let me do these big sins. Don’t let them have dominion over me. We’re supposed to have dominion over the world and in the power of the spirit over ourselves. But sin—God will turn you over to the taskmaster of sin if necessary. And when you let small sins go by in your life, the danger they are worse than, you know, al-Qaeda, okay? They’re worse than, you know, whatever else problems in our life.

The things that’ll most attack you and take you out potentially cause your perseverance to come to an end and cast you into hell. That’s the way the Bible speaks. That’s the way I should speak.

What happens is a failure to deal with small sins. And as a result of insensitivity to small sins, an engagement in presumptuous sins, and a life-dominating pattern. Then where you can’t break out of sin anymore. You have the power in the Holy Spirit to get rid of most of it. Right now, you let it go. You stop doing what’s right and pretty soon you can’t break out. And we see we talk about life addictions and all this stuff is life-dominating. We talk about sexual addiction. It’s not sexual addiction. It’s a life-dominating sin. They really are in dominion to that sin because they have it. He formed a long pattern of insensitivity, failure to cleanse, too long cohabitating with that which will kill you and take you to hell.

That’s what sin wants to do in the context of what this psalm’s talking about. It wants to have dominion over you, take you out, make you be its servant rather than God’s servant.

I can talk this way because the Bible does. Sin is kind of personified here. It has dominion over you. So, we need to pray. We need to pray that God keep us from the little ones and as a result keep us from big ones that’ll be life-dominating to us if we don’t do that.

Like I said, diabetes. You know, that it’s this important. I have a silent disease. And so I got these diabetic—I know this is going to be kind of gross you out a little bit, but I don’t care. I have these diabetic socks and they’re like white inside and black outside. Two socks sewn together. And the sewing together means they don’t get—don’t get blisters. Never get blisters. And I thought, why don’t they make the inside black, too? Because the white sort of shows at the top.

Well, the reason they’re white is because diabetics can’t feel their feet when they get advanced in the thing. And they don’t know that they got a wound. They’re supposed to look at those white socks every night and say, “My gosh, got a little blood going on here.” Sorry if it grosses you out. But see, that’s real important for a diabetic because the problem is if you don’t notice a wound when it’s starting to happen, it can get gangrene and then that’s the end of that, or that’s the end of that foot or that’s the end of that leg—it’s gone.

Well, that’s the way it is here. If you do not attend to the God’s word and his spirit and making use of prayer and these means, then the little things start to build up. You’re not even aware of them. And pretty soon, you know, you got a foot that needs to be amputated. And the Lord God will do that graciously. He’ll cut out some big part of your life. He’ll do major surgery. The train will run you right over. May not kill you, may not send you off to hell yet or at all. But you know, it’s no fun.

I, I know God loves me. I know I’m getting a new body, but I don’t, I like my legs. I like my toes, right? You like the things around you. Don’t tempt God to do major surgery on you through a failure to apply yourself to the means of perseverance in the faith.

**Sixth, humility.**

So we got the word, reading the word, introspection, thinking about ourselves. We’re meditating on the word. We’re studying the word. We’re praying to God. And what undergirds all of this is the humility that David shows. David doesn’t say, “Well, I know I’m not going to sin big. Now he says, “Boy, you know, if it’s not for God,” see, David knew that in order to persevere in the faith he had to be humble as Clint would say, “A man has to know his limitations.” That’s humility. And David knew that he was prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. And so he knew he had to pray to God to keep him from doing that stuff. Okay?

So humility. Why don’t we read our Bibles or study or meditate or pray or think about our sins? Because we’re prideful. And when you’re prideful, you know, boy, it’s just such a—that’s the, you know, the way the church, medieval church talked about pride is the foundation of all the other deadly sins, a pridefulness.

So, humility is required.

Then I shall be blameless. I may be positionally blameless, but I want more than that. I want to be blameless. And I know I’m not now, God. I’m humbled before you, and I know that I need your work, your Holy Spirit, in order to accomplish these things. Humility.

**Seventh, community.**

So, you know, I sort of day six is sin and all that stuff. And so, humility is I put in the sixth slot of this outline, right? And then the seventh slot is we get together on the Sabbath, the Lord’s day, and we get together and we need each other.

You know, it’s interesting reading the Bible—you can’t find a lot of references for that. You can find a series of things in the gospel where Jesus says, “Well, haven’t you read?” But he’s always talking to Pharisees. He’s not talking to average disciples because not everybody read that. And when Timothy says that he learned the Bible when he was young, well, he didn’t learn to read when he was one probably. He learned it because, you know, his caretaker read it to him. And so to hear the Bible—you see this over and over again—that we’re—”your servant is warned by hearing the word,” not by reading it.

I’ve stressed reading. It’s very important, particularly nowadays. We’re literate. Everybody can read the Bible. But it’s also important to recognize that we need each other. We can’t know our sins. But you know what? Your wife’s pretty good at knowing your sins. You know, the really horrible thing is you’re an adult. Kids are pretty good at knowing your sins. Even the ones you don’t know. Pastors probably know some sins you’re not quite aware of or not well enough.

Your friends, listen to the rebukes of other people. You don’t want you know to have life-dominating horrendous sins in your life and part of the means that God gives us is community.

And then finally, the means of perseverance is the preservation of God—of us. God himself is the eighth mean, kind of outside of time. He is the one who preserves us. We apply ourselves to the perseverance that’s required of us, but ultimately, undergirding the whole thing, we know we can’t change from good soil to bad or bad soil to good soil. We can’t do it. Got no power to do it. Only the one that makes the soil can accomplish that bit of alchemy, right?

And so God himself is the one who must preserve us. If God doesn’t preserve us, we know we will sin. And so our reliance upon God—these are God’s means.

God is omniscient. All your secret sins, the ones you do at work or in your home or with just your spouse or sibling or just by yourself and even the ones you don’t know. God knows every one of them. He knows your heart. He’s well aware of all the problems you’ve got in your life. He knows everything.

Isaiah 29:15: “Woe to those who seek deep to hide their counsel far from the Lord and their works are in the dark. They say, ‘Who sees us and who knows us?’ Surely you have things turned around. Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? For shall the thing made say to him who made it, ‘He did not make me’? Or shall the thing formed say of him who formed it, ‘He has no understanding’?”

Ridiculous. The illusion, the delusion we have that God somehow doesn’t know what’s going on. He sees every bit of it.

Proverbs 5:21: “The ways of men are before the eyes of the Lord and he perceives all their paths.”

Hebrews 4:13: “There is no creature hidden from his sight. All things are naked and open to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. The word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword.”

God sees. God knows your secret sins. Don’t fail to take that into account. The knowledge that God is omniscient. He knows all things. He knows your thoughts. He knows everything. The thought that God is omniscient is not some abstract piece of doctrine. The idea is that God knows those sins that you kind of cover up and engage in. God knows them. God wants you to understand that he will judge them. He will hold you accountable for them.

God knows. But praise God that God loves! Because God’s knowledge of your secret sins is not for you, Christian. It’s not for you a thing of condemnation. It is a thing of tremendous hope.

I praise God that I’ve rejected the stupid counsel of the Greeks to “know myself,” that I can’t know myself because I know the Lord God does know me. And his knowledge of me can be frightening when I’m trying to sin in secret. But even there, his knowledge of me is love. And I know that the end result of his judgments upon me, even if he cuts off a leg at some point in time, is my preservation because I know he loves me.

He spoke my name, Dennis Tuuri, at my baptism. Loves me. Moved me into his kingdom. His knowledge, his omniscience means that we can trust that we will persevere because God will preserve us. He’ll take away these. He’ll make manifest the secret sins in his time as we apply to his means. But he’ll do that. He’ll mature us. He’ll make us into better people.

I shall be acceptable in the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth. Can you believe that these things are more acceptable to the Lord today than they were a year ago or ten years ago because he is faithful and because he knows my problems and brings the proper cures and solutions and sanctification to those very problems?

Yeah. The sixth day is about sin and horribleness of that sin. But the seventh day is about the acceptability.

The omniscience of God is a cause for fear, but it is primarily a cause of great comfort and hope. We lose hope thinking our sins—we’re so tired of our sins—over and over and over and I’m trying to do something about it. We lose hope. But Christian, today if you’re on the edge of losing hope, take great hope. The Father loves you.

We’re going to celebrate the death of Jesus Christ for you here in a couple of minutes. He loves you. It’s gospel that you hear today. Have hope.

The omniscient God. Yeah. You feel bad that you’ve sinned so badly. You feel ashamed. You want to run away to the nether parts of the garden. But God will call you to himself through Christ. And he’ll assure you today. I hope I pray by the Holy Spirit that his knowledge of your sin is toward your correction, for your well-being, so that you don’t become subject to the dominion of sin. He’ll free you. He’s cut the bonds asunder. He’s loving and he’s omnipotent. He can do it.

And again, this is a fearful thing to us. He can cast body and soul into hell. But his omnipotence and power for you, Christian, is directed in his love and omniscience of you to preserving you through the application of these means that he talks about. He is saving. After all, the Lord God is the means of our perseverance. He preserves his people and in that preservation we take great joy and delight.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your love of us. Thank you for your knowledge. Thank you for your power. Thank you. You’re a God who saves, who redeems his people. Help us, Father, in response to that wonderful message of love and hope and gospel to commit ourselves afresh to these basic Christian disciplines that are part of the means whereby we are preserved and we persevere in the faith.

Thank you, Father, that the Westminster Confession warns us that great sin happens when we neglect our proper means, the proper means of our preservation. Help us, Lord God, this week, today, to make commitments to put off secret sin, to commit ourselves afresh to a knowledge of your scriptures and a communication with you in regular ways of prayer. Turn our pastimes, Lord God, into areas where small amounts of accountability and prayer happen as well and encouragement.

Bless us, Lord God, today. May we be an encouragement to each other in the faith of our Savior and in the application of these secondary means and preserve us by them. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.