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Who in here wants a full, meaningful life?
How does that happen?
What does a human look like when they are fully alive, fully formed?
Spoiler alert, we’re going to say it’s Jesus.
But along the way, our psalm will teach us two practices that will give you an abundant life and form you into the complete person you were created to be.
Praise the LORD, Our Lord
8:1-2 - This is our God: majestic over all creation, glory above the heavens…present in the praise of children
God does not do things the way we would, or the way we would expect Him to do.
On the human level, the most powerful people surround themselves with other powerful people, gifted, intelligent, capable, and rich people.
God seems to delight in surrounding Himself with the helpless, the poor, widows, orphans, immigrants, sinners, and rejects.
When Jesus rode into Jerusalem as the true king of Israel last Sunday, it was the children and His disciples, the poor working class, that sang His praises.
God does not demonstrate His strength through military, political, or religious power.
He shows His strength in praise - praise from the least among us, the weak - who praise Him for the wisdom of salvation by grace.
And when He wanted to demonstrate both His wisdom and His power, He did the most foolish thing imaginable.
Almighty God took on flesh, walked among us as a poor carpenter.
He served the sick and the poor.
And He submitted Himself to be rejected, abused, and crucified by those who were wise and strong and well-connected in the eyes of this world.
And then He overcame death through resurrection.
No one saw it coming.
It wasn’t what we would have done.
But this is the LORD, our Lord.
He creates life in surprising places.
In our psalm today, as David considers God as the almighty creator who also inhabits the praises of babies, He realizes praise is good for His soul.
God’s nature and character are enough to stop all His enemies.
What do we learn?
You were made to praise God, because you were made for God.
As Augustine said, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you."
Maybe you’re the smallest, weakest, least intelligent or talented person on the plant, and you’re surrounded by people who would take advantage of that to gain more power.
God is closer to you than to those that have all the money and power humanity can offer.
Praising the LORD as the God who demonstrates strength through love for the least of us is good for your soul.
It refreshes your heart, but it also restores and re-calibrates your troubled mind.
If you truly know God, then you can learn the second practice.
Learn to Know Yourself in Christ
This comes in two stages.
First of all, we learn that every one of us find our identity only in God.
God is the Creator of all the vast, wild, wonders of our universe.
And out of all the wild, amazing things God created, why would God even think, let alone care for, little old humans?
But the Bible tells us why on the very first page.
No matter who you are, man, woman, boy, girl, tall, short, black, white, your identity is image-bearer of God.
And so David answers his own question, but continues to marvel,
Our identity as image-bearers provides us with our meaning in life.
For reasons all His own, God decided to share with us His rule and reign over creation.
He tells us to take care of it like He would.
But if you turn the next page of the Bible, you’ll see that right there at the beginning, the first human beings rejected their calling.
Their sinful disobedience caused a disconnect between what should be and what is.
Every one of us born into the human race is born with a broken identity.
We just keep breaking things.
We have broken our relationship with God, with others, with creation, and even our relationship with self.
We don’t understand who we truly are because we have not lived fully in the purpose for which we were created.
This is where we meet Jesus, and stage two of our second practice.
Learn to know yourself in Christ by surrendering to be remade in Him.
The writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews picks up from our psalm,
We are not as we should be, so the world is still broken.
But there is hope:
That word, “perfect”, in verse 10 means complete, fully formed, arrived.
Jesus is the only complete human being.
And remember God doesn’t do things the way we would do them.
He wasn’t made complete through a good education, or a well-invested trust fund, or by surrounding Himself with all the right connections to powerful people.
He was made complete through suffering.
He was obedient to God’s calling for Him.
His calling was to suffer and taste death for everyone.
What are some obstacles that keep us from becoming complete humans?
Isn’t fear of death the biggest one?
We spend all kinds of money, time, and energy on every conceivable way to overcome death and avoid suffering.
Diet and exercise plans, education, medicine and technology all offer us the promise of eternal life, and they never pay off.
Our fear of death has enslaved us to natural means that make us more tired than ever, we’re busier, experiencing more anxiety, despair, anger, we’re in more debt, and no one seems to have rest or peace.
Instead of becoming more complete and fully human, we are disconnected and empty.
So in our despair we say, true fulfillment and a meaningful life come from within: express your unique identity.
But the funny thing is that everyone seems to end up looking, talking, and acting exactly the same.
C.S. Lewis addressed this well in “Mere Christianity”.
He explains that there are personalities in God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
“There are no real personalities anywhere else.
Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.
Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ.
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
But there must be a real giving up of the self.
You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak.
Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that.
As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all.
The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether.
Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it.
It will come when you are looking for Him.”
What are you looking for this morning?
Is it a full, meaningful life?
Are you looking to truly know your self?
Look for Jesus Christ.
Unite yourself to Him by faith, abide in Him, and you will come to know yourself.
Come to Him broken and empty, spiritually dead.
He will remake you in His image.
All of us have failed to live fully in that identity in God.
But Jesus is fully human in ways we are not.
His death is a death to the sin that corrupted the image of God in us, and His resurrection is a new life for all who believe in Him.
When we set our minds on Jesus, we realize His life, death, and resurrection started the world over again.
His ministry consisted of calling weak, poor, mistreated, broken, empty human people to become complete in a new way.
Abiding in Him by faith, we receive new, eternal life.
Following Him in faith, He sends us out into the world to re-establish the kingdom of God in the lives of others as we care for them and serve them through loving works of service done in Jesus’ name.
My friend Josh and I were talking about this last week.
You will never be fully alive or have a meaningful life until you join Jesus in His mission to remake the world by loving, serving, and making disciples of others.
I’d like him to share some of his thoughts.
Then we’ll close with communion.
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