Psalm 103:1-6,19

 I am so glad to be back here this morning. I have to tell you that I enjoyed the last two weeks. I went to see this orphanage project in Honduras with Frank Veloza from the Spanish congregation and it was a terrific experience to be there. And then going on again to Guatemala to pass Grade D in Spanish. Permíta queme acabe de decir que hablé en el español todo el día para los últimos 10 días. Mi velocidad es todavía lenta pero llego a allí.

 But my thoughts have strayed often back to home and the desire to be in these opening days of the new year with you. I am so proud of this church. In my absence, the church has collected over $4,000 in special offerings for tsunami relief.

 And as we are started on this new year, I brought a scripture that I worked on in Guatemala. This is becoming one of my few favorite passages of the Bible. Its so good that I can’t believe I missed it before. Its all about the good times that God desires and promises for us. We miss a lot of those good times because the hard moments capture our minds.

 John Maxwell has written a new book called ‘Thinking for a Change’. He says that many of us are like the guy who went to a fortuneteller. She looked at his palm and said, I see many things. She says, ‘Until you are 45 years old, you will be poor and unhappy. The guy says, what happens then? And the fortuneteller tells him, at that point you’ll get used to it.

 There is a world out there where God promises us that God is working for us and planning good things. We are going to see this phenomenal scripture this morning that says even in the hard moments, expect that happy day. But Maxwell says that a lot of us don’t believe the promises. A lot of people here this morning statistically are going to hear the passage and quietly turn off. You wouldn’t tell me that but you aren’t going to believe what you hear.

 Maxwell says that is what most people do because to change our thinking and expect and work for God’s promises to come true requires work. So we are watching for that happy day, but many of us have closed the blinds of our soul so that we can’t even see. Opening up the blinds is like letting light in after you’ve been sleeping. John Maxwell tried to learn golf but he couldn’t hit anything so he took a lesson. The golf pro told him that he held the club like he was playing baseball. Then he showed him the approved way to hold the club and Maxwell hated it. He said that it felt unnatural.

 So as we look at 2005, we are going to look out on some promises of God for our lives. The light will be harsh and bright if our eyes aren’t used to the light of faith. The colors may appear too brilliant. But I want you to try hard to open the blinds fully as the Psalmist describes our happy day. I hope there’s dancing in this service. God bless you.

 I am a relatively sound sleeper as long as the conditions are right. If you go with me to Cambodia, you find that I get the group on the plane, put in ear plugs, take a pill, put on an eye mask, and close down. The eye mask is essential. For me, daylight wrecks my sleep.

 The first way to have a happy day is to get our eyes open. Get the shades off. Get the blinds open. The Psalmist says of the Lord, Forget not all God’s benefits. In other words, the Lord has given us some happy days. More happy days are promised. Don’t lose sight of that. Don’t forget. Forget not. The only reason to say that is that we forget God’s benefits or worse, we tragically don’t believe they are there.

 The human being after the first rebellions against God is set up to remember failure instead of success. When people talk with me, I frequently see what they can do and they are so focused on how it isn’t possible. I think you’ve had that experience with a friend. You appreciate them. You can see their potential and they keep moaning.

 Unhappily, the only one in the world who can decide to forget or remember God’s benefits is you. I can’t do it for you. The scriptures can’t. Your family can’t. We all live fragile lives. Further down in Psalm 103 it says that we are like grass, so vulnerable to the elements that we cannot control.

 If you decide to believe that there are happy days, you have to consciously cultivate that thought. John Maxwell says that he tries to have one good thought each day. Why not take your biggest problem and tell God right now, Lord, I am going to try to believe that there are happy days out there and I am praying for one creative thought each day that will bless and rescue me. You see, we spend so much of our waking time worrying about the problem and so little time using our two greatest resources, our faith that God will do something and our brain to think about possible answers. Sin has trained us to not look out at the possibility of a happy day. Forget not God’s benefits.

 This next promise is so good it shouldn’t be in the Bible. I can’t believe it. God will satisfy your desires with good things. This is one of those promises to hold tight in our heart. I can’t explain how its going to happen. And I know that given your circumstances, it seems ridiculous that God would have written this. This verse doesn’t promise that we won’t have some hard times. Lewis Smedes was a professor and he was interviewed when he was 80 years old. He talks about his mother’s ability to trust in happy days. “My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died. My mother, well, she was an immigrant girl, only thirty years old, all alone in a strange country, not an uncle or an aunt or a distant cousin on the whole continent. Talk about lonely. She spoke very broken English, had no job skills, no welfare checks for young widows in those days. So there was nothing for her to do but go to work scrubbing people's floors to put some meat and potatoes on our table.

Tough life! These days I wonder how in the world she did it. I can tell you this though, when we were kids we never heard a single word of complaint from her about how hard her life had been, not a word. She had a deep faith that somehow God had a soft spot in his heart for widows with little children. So in spite of everything, she was grateful and her gratitude made her a happy woman.”

 The Psalm doesn’t keep the hard moments from us but says that our desires will be answered with good things. It promises that if you hold out those desires to God that you feel most strongly, God will answer with good things. Don’t settle for less.

 And lastly, happy days come from the certainty that God will win. Our world is in desperate days. Our nation is going in the wrong direction on God’s most basic directions. We are using war as a way of getting things done when we could have used peace. And we are losing. And we are abandoning commitments to the elderly through Social Security. On this weekend that remembers the work of Martin Luther King, I found this quotation,

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

 People are organizing a protest against the war by not spending any money this Thursday, the day of inauguration. And sometimes you may wonder if it makes any difference to try to apply our faith in God to society. Maybe our faith is only good for our small windows and small happy days.

 The Psalmist goes for the big happy day. The Lord rules over all in verse 19 because his throne is in the heavens. God’s work is going to win on earth. We are on the side of the winner. If our nation or Saddam Hussein or any nation thinks that they can defeat justice, kill or torture without accountability, forget the widow and orphan, God says come fight with me. By the way, your weapons will have to reach up here to heaven to fight me. Isn’t that an incredible verse. Even a nuclear weapon only sets off a little blast on earth. There is no way that anyone even dreams of fighting on God’s terms.

 So live for justice. Ignore all the news on television that tries to justify what we have done. Keep calling the president and other nations to treat every human life as sacred. God the ruler from heaven will have it no other way. Hold out for the big happy day.

 In verse 22, Bless the Lord, O my soul. In other words, I consciously believe that God will make me lie down in green pastures. He will lead me beside still waters. And in ways we can’t yet see, God is determined to make the world follow God’s values. I commend my soul to God. The blinds are open. I believe. I pledge myself for eternity.