Episode 1528: Steadfast Love

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1,528 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:08] John Latta: I'm John Latta. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to live a life awake to the reality of love is key.

[00:00:27] One way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this the Inspired Stewardship podcast with my friend Scott Maderer,

[00:00:45] Scott Maderer: to say you're sorry for being misunderstood, for being stubborn, for letting the clog continue to build. And then when relationships are restored, you can shout for joy and you can laugh again, and you can breathe deeply at the [00:01:00] steadfast love and grace that surrounds you. And surrounds us all. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:01:11] If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the inspired Stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself. Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:39] In today's spiritual foundation episode, I talk about Psalm 32. I share how we are called to bring our own blockages to God no matter how big or how small. I also talk about how it's a choice to live in joy instead of pain. Psalm 32 says, happy are those whose transgression is [00:02:00] forgiven. Whose sin is covered, happy are those to whom the Lord imputes, no inequity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

[00:02:08] While I kept silent, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long for day and night. Your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Salah. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my inequity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin sah.

[00:02:33] Therefore, let all who are faithful offer prayers to you at a time of distress. The rush of mighty water shall not reach them. You are a hiding place for me. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with glad cries of deliverance, Salah. I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon you.

[00:02:55] Do not be like a horse or a mule without understanding whose temper must [00:03:00] be curved with bit and bridle. Elsa will not stay near you. Many are the torments of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice oh righteous and shout for joy. All you upright in heart.

[00:03:19] I don't know about you, but have you ever had those moments where you're called to do something and it's something that you have no expertise in, you have no skill in, maybe there's a problem at work or a problem with the plumbing in your house and you don't know how to fix it, so you just are called over to look at it, and you show up and you look at it and you go, yep, that's gonna be a problem.

[00:03:42] But you can't really do anything about it. You simply acknowledge that it's an issue that there the drain is backing up. There's water on the floor, and yes, that's a problem. So you close off the room and you [00:04:00] call for help from somebody who could work on it. But in the meantime, you close the doors, you block the door, you keep people from using it.

[00:04:10] It doesn't fix anything. You just go, you look, it doesn't really help. It doesn't do much good. And all you really learn out of the trip is that backed up drains spilling over cause a problem and make a mess. But what we can do is just close the door, right? We can hide it. That's a good response. Or at least it's a common one.

[00:04:32] Close the door, you go visit your neighbors. They show you around. But. Go past that door. Don't open that door. Don't look in there. It's a mess. And we're used to that because we've got our own messes, our own closed doors as well. There's clogged plumbing and closed doors. This isn't really about plumbing and it's not really about literal doors, it's metaphor, right?

[00:04:58] A figure of speech where [00:05:00] we apply one thing to another thing and it's not literally applicable. Think about it. We all need a junk drawer or junk room, and sometimes even a junk house. Some of us pay good money to take our junk to a storage place, and we pay every month to keep it in that storage place.

[00:05:17] Out of sight and out of mind. Everyone gets like that. We all have our own messes of different sizes, different shapes, different types, and those closed doors are often hiding. Sin that we haven't truly brought to God. The pipes are clogged in our relationship with God. You'll notice when I was reading Psalm turn 32, there were several times where I said Salah, and that is something that is in a lot of the Psalms.

[00:05:50] And the truth is nobody actually really knows what it means. People have decided different meanings for it, but the. The scholars will tell you we're really not [00:06:00] sure what it means. It could have been a word of praise, it could have been a musical interlude or indicating a time to do something different, a change in key and other people believe it's indicating a time of pause a time to take a breath.

[00:06:18] And if you had to pick, I like that one. I like this idea of having a pause as we're reading scripture, a place to allow the spirit to come into our reading. For us to sit back and remember that even in reading scripture, it's not a one-way street. It's a dialogue. It's an opening to relationship. It's not just about what we think or what we hear.

[00:06:44] It's also about what God is saying, and the only way to hear that is to listen, to breathe, to pause. Let the Lord speak to you. And this isn't about speaking to you to tell other people [00:07:00] what to do. This is about breath for you to clean out your own pipes, for you to open your own doors. It's about letting the spirit grow.

[00:07:08] Blow through your closed doors, Sah. Let God in. It might be a moment there where the psalmist says that remembering to breathe before asking for God's spirit to blow through in those moments, there's a weight of brokenness while you keep silent. Think about that for a minute. How long do we actually keep silent?

[00:07:33] How much do we hate silence in our life, in our words? I actually use that a lot whenever I'm teaching and coaching where I'll go silent for a while just to let someone else begin to talk. Because the truth is if you're silent, people will fill the space with more words. Yeah, there's clogs and there's clutter, and we just keep silent and pretend that it isn't that bad.

[00:07:57] We pretend that silence, that sin [00:08:00] doesn't drive a wedge between us and others. It doesn't drive a wedge between us. And God, and we hide from that moment because we're too embarrassed to admit that clutter and sin is there in our own life. It's easier to point at other people. It's easier to talk about what they're doing wrong instead of paying attention to what we do.

[00:08:23] But yet here it, the Psalm also says, happier. Those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, happier, those to whom the Lord imputes, no inequity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Think about it. It's not doing a metaphor. It says transgression, sin, inequity, deceit, four different words for sin.

[00:08:45] There's not a lot of wiggle room there. It's saying anything that gets in the way of letting the breath of God through your life needs to be removed. Everything that you are doing needs to be [00:09:00] cleaned out. Happiness cannot be found outside of the relationship with God. Therefore, if you think you have nothing to confess, nothing to pray for, nothing that you can't handle on your own.

[00:09:14] Then you are actually doing that sin yourself. You have the sin of pride. You're looking at yourself as more powerful and more worthy than God, and you are living in a desert, dry as bone. Instead, we have to breathe. We have to open the door. We have to acknowledge our sin and not hide our inequity. We have to confess our transgressions.

[00:09:40] Again, multiple words for sin over and over. Four words in voice, verse two and four in verse five. It's about handing over everything in our life, everything in our head, in our heart, and in our mouth. Oftentimes though, I hear folks say, it's not that [00:10:00] bad. My, my sin is so small, I don't need to bother God with that.

[00:10:04] When I commit a real sin, a really bad one, one like that person over there is doing, then I'll go to God. I don't wanna waste God's time on trivialities. I've known plenty of people that are sinning worse than me. But see, God says it's not about the degree of the ACT Committee it's not about the degree of the act committed, it's about the clog itself.

[00:10:32] Even a small clog is still a clog, and we can live with a small clog. That blockage doesn't really affect our life. That, that hidden junk drawer doesn't create a mess. It won't ever slow you down or hinder you very much, but it does, and it knocks us to our knees. Blood and breath cannot come through, and we dry up and turn into that [00:11:00] desert that, that desert of the soul.

[00:11:05] Jesus was asked for the overreaching law above all others, what is most important? And he gives two answers. Love God, love your neighbor. And they're woven together because the relationships that connect us to God are the same relationships. That connect us to each other, and if a claw gets in the way between us, then it gets in the way between us and God, because if I am sinning before God, I'm not able to love you the way I need to.

[00:11:37] If I'm paying more attention to what you've done than what I've done, I'm not able to love you the way I need to. And that's why towards the end of the psalm, there's a call to community at large. See the Psalm first addresses to God. Then all it takes in that is to be able to [00:12:00] find that shady place and let the waters come in to pray a faithful prayer of release and confession, and reconciliation, and hope, a prayer of healing.

[00:12:15] Broken relationships and hurt feelings and misunderstandings. That is what brings us to community. So the Psalmist turns to community and says, don't wait. Don't wait for someone else to make the first step. Don't wait for someone else to make the first gesture. No, open your own heart up. You've always got a choice.

[00:12:39] You've always got a moment to turn back like the prodigal son and the story, you've always got a chance to come back because that is what grace is. That's what grace means, that grace surrounds you even when you believe you don't deserve it. [00:13:00] Any anything that you believe that is so bad. That it can't be forgiven by God is the very things that grace is meant to forgive.

[00:13:12] We can live in our own certainty, our own pride, our own self-centered fixation, or we can turn and live in joy to repent, to turn back and be supported in steadfast love, even when we don't believe it will be there. You can choose to live in joy, happy. Are those joy filled? Are those, that's the invitation to heal the breach, to clear the clog, to open the door to say, I'm sorry.

[00:13:49] Even when you aren't sure you're wrong to say you're sorry for being misunderstood, for being stubborn, for letting the clog continue to build. And then when [00:14:00] relationships are restored, you can shout for joy and you can laugh again, and you can breathe deeply at the steadfast love and grace that surrounds you and surrounds us all.

[00:14:14] Thanks for listening.

[00:14:20] Thanks so much for listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor. Go over to facebook.com/inspired stewardship.

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