Welcome to CROWD Church! In this weeks talk Dan Rogers explores Psalm 131 and looks at its meaning through the lens of our modern societies angst and anxieties. Dan challenges us all to reject pride and haughtiness and instead recognise our personal limitations.

1. Cultivate Humility to Reduce Pride: King David's statement, "My heart is not lifted up," underscores the need to avoid pride and maintain humility. Pride leads to self-isolation, poor decision-making, and strained relationships. By rejecting pride, we open ourselves to outside input, wisdom, and the Spirit of God, fostering better connections and decisions.
2. Avoid Haughtiness to Embrace Respect: David's declaration, "My eyes are not raised too high," warns against looking down on others. Haughtiness, or seeing oneself as superior, damages relationships and devalues others. Embracing humility and respect aligns with God's view of all people as His image-bearers, promoting a more compassionate and understanding approach to others.
3. Recognize and Respect Personal Limitations: David's third point, "I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me," highlights the importance of recognizing our limitations. Instead of being overwhelmed by issues beyond our control, we should focus on the responsibilities God gives us, trust in His sovereignty, and engage in prayer. This approach fosters peace and contentment, allowing us to contribute meaningfully within our capacity.

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Dan Rogers | Psalm 131

To help us, we're going to take a look, um, at one of the ancient poems in the Hebrew Bible, which is Psalm 131. So, first of all, let's just read it together from a translation which is called the English Standard Version. It says this. 25 verses. Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high, I do not occupy myself with things too great and too wonderful for me.

It's helpfully accurate. However, it's not perfect. Accuracy doesn't always connect with us sort of on an emotional level straight away, so I thought we'd read another version as well, a paraphrased version, um, called The Message, which borrows some more modern words and ideas to better convey its sort of overall meaning.

So here we go with that in The Message version, same five verses but just phrased a different way. God, I'm not trying to rule the roost. I don't want to be king of the mountain. I haven't meddled where I have no business or fantasized grandiose plans. I've kept my feet on the ground. I've cultivated a quiet heart.

He wrote the psalm for Hebrews who were making their way Up a mountain, up into a city which is found in the mountains, Jerusalem, you'll have heard of it, and they were going on a pilgrimage to worship God. And like so many of David's psalms, it was both personal to him and instructive to them on their journey, and it's instructive to us on our sort of life journeys now.

A different version, the new international version, uh, translation calls it proud, which is a word we're more familiar with. Now, despite being a king, David says that his heart isn't lifted up. It's not proud. He's not like that. But in our culture, you often get the feeling that pride is something we just need.

It's something to celebrate. It's a good thing. So what's going on? What's what? Is pride helpful, necessary? Um, or is it unhelpful and undesirable? To help us with this, I've tried to come up with a few things I think a proud, uh, the inclined person might say, someone with a heart lifted up might say these things.

Um, and what's wrong with it? Well, I want to imagine that pride is like a balloon of self on your insights, and as that balloon of self gets more inflated, it's like there's less space for anything else or anyone else. So you get the phrase full of self. Yeah, that's how a pride person is. So other people, new ideas and the spirit of God just get crowded out.

We lack, we're under resourced. No one on their own is that I'm sorry to say, well, I'm not that sorry to say, but that is the truth. No one who thinks they're the all sufficient one is actually the efficient, all sufficient one. They're not that good. So we lack what we need, therefore, to understand others, to relate well, to see things clearly, to anticipate issues, and to make good decisions.

It squashes and stifles thinking. It, it causes decisions to become foolish, short sighted, um, poorly developed. Pride causes pain. Maybe that's why God, who personifies love, um, and truth, He's got such a problem with pride. I don't know if you knew that, but if you go, flick forward. To the New Testament, from the Psalms, you get to the book eventually of James, it's a letter, um, to the churches, of the New Testament churches, and in chapter four, verse six, James tells us that God opposes the crowd.

Are there limitations? What do you think? I've got a question for you. Here it goes and um, uh, you might want to think of Tony Stark as you, as you consider this question is, when has pride led to pain? Or when in your experience, maybe, has pride led to pain and was it avoidable? When has pride led to pain and was it avoidable?

Have a think about that.

I'm not sure that entirely helps. I mean, we don't really use the word haughty much these days unless you're maybe you're an English teacher or a poet, um, but I've got some synonyms I found on online on thesaurus. com for the word haughty, right, because it's just a useful summary word. So here's some synonyms for it.

Haughty is otherwise called contemptuous, disdainful, hoity toity, scornful, stuck up, superior, uppity. There were more but those are the best ones. So haughtiness is basically based on a comparison with other people. It's in fact the tendency to view ourselves as better than others, so we're looking down on them.

The other things on the list, like lying and murdering, um, came later on, okay? And maybe that's because doing things like lying to and murdering people is easier if you've already downgraded them and your mind is less important than you, less valuable, Human, maybe. If they're less human, we can treat them in a less humane way.

We are reflections of God. In Christian songs, there's often a line that says, there's no one like you, Lord, which is obviously true in many ways. Physically, it's not. Physically, there's about seven or eight billion people who literally Look like him, made in his image. If you had a picture of God and he had a picture of us, we'd be small, small versions of that, you know, with a shrunken down, you know, limited in many ways, but a little bit like him.

There's a similarity. We're made in his image. So that has implications, right? So implications on how we view other people. Do we have haughty eyes? Do we look down on them? Okay, let's think about that. Are we vaguely disapproving of any particular groups of people? Ever done that? Ever looked down on any groups?

It's like an inverted kind of snobbery. Thing is, if we're happy enough to be like that about anyone or towards anyone, then I think David would diagnose us with having haughty eyes. We may not be that far off harming those people, if we're like that, given the right circumstances, but that's usually in more passive ways, such as through avoidance or neglect, you know, cancelling people.

So here's a second question to have a think about, take your time, maybe have a chat about it with some friends if you're watching this with anyone else. The question is this, when has haughtiness caused harm and was that fair?

So what could possibly be too great or too marvellous for, you know, a king? If you know a little bit about King David's life story, if you read, um, the history in the Old Testament, 1 and 2 Samuel, there were a few events which demonstrate his approach to life in this way quite clearly. There's a few things which he chose not to do.

So even as king, he chose not to take vengeance on, uh, the family who had persecuted him. Or the person who's, the person, his persecutor's family, he didn't take vengeance on his persecutor even when he got the chance to, it was King Saul, and he didn't take it out on King Saul's family, in fact he chose to be gracious to them, so he limited himself even as king.

So even as a king, he discerned what was beyond him, what was outside of his remit, and he didn't occupy himself with those two great things. He declined to get involved in them. He refused to fix or react to them. Jesus, later on, was pretty similar to this. Listen to some of his words in the New Testament.

And similar to that, in John chapter 15, he says, the son can do only what he sees the father doing. So he admits his dependence. He is not someone of ultimate initiative. He's not a self defined being, self determining. He, he, he works in collaboration with the father. That's he does what the father does. He doesn't do his own thing.

That's what he's saying there. Even as the king of kings, which is clearly how Jesus sees himself and did see himself, Jesus in his life on earth was mindful of his remit. He didn't occupy himself with things which would have distracted him from what he had to do and which only he could do in the time that only he had to do them in.

We sort of, it's sort of praiseworthy to go Hulk on people in our attempts to fix things which are wrong. Um, but often those things we're trying to fix, we don't have any influence over. Things which are international and complicated and economic and outside of our intelligence, let alone our influence.

But why do we make these Social media posts, comments. Why do we get into arguments with people about it? Why do we try and enforce our worldview on other people? Does it make us feel powerful, um, or do we just feel obliged to? Because so many people tell us that that's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to campaign against injustice and get very angry about everything.

And it's actually healthy for us to engage and carry those responsibilities, but not Everything. So what we learn from David is that it's okay for us, um, to not get involved in every issue which people are concerned about. It's not always our gig. We can say no. What we can do, and I would say we should do, is pray.

That's much more effective often as well. Here's a third question. Have a think about this in the light of these things. What things are not your concern, but or and what things are your concern. Identify, differentiate, have a think about that. Maybe chat about that with someone else.

This is the turning point in the psalm. It uses an illustration which we all understand. Weaning. It's when babies come off their mother's milk and go onto solids, right? It's the way David describes how he gradually stopped behaving in proud, vain, presumptuous ways. He was like a weaning child, present continuous tense I think it is, and then he was like a weaned child, which is past tense.

So he's been on this process which he had to work out over time, which was ongoing at one point, and then it was done. So, it wasn't immediate, it wasn't magic, he didn't click his fingers and God didn't deliver him out of pride overnight, he had to work on it, he had to sort of wean himself off it. And the emphasis here in the psalm is interesting because it's the only line in the psalm that's repeated.

So babies wean themselves off mother's milk and get on to solids and we wean ourselves off pride, vanity and presumption onto the stuff which we should be feeding on. We'll get on to that. What, what do we wean off and on to? But the point for now is it's quite hard to wean yourself off some stuff, but it is necessary.

Don't believe me? Well, Who wants to marry a 25 year old who hasn't been weaned yet, male or female?

What's the solid food? Now this gets interesting because in our culture people will go, oh look, well we need to get into yoga and mindfulness, meditation, reflection, gratitude. There's all sorts of people give you all sorts of advice about things you should do. We should exercise, we should diet, we should, we should look after our families and Work on our careers and maybe have a side hustle and get our houses looking good and do some volunteering and, you know, um, et cetera, et cetera.

The only specific instruction in this psalm comes at the end, and none of those things I just said are explicitly mentioned, even though they're not out, they're not forbidden, they're just not mentioned, they're fine in their rightful place. But here's the thing, here's what David did tell his people to do.

Here's some closing thoughts. I think hoping in the Lord here is a summary. All that's previously been said in the psalm. Secondly, I think it's the opposite of those things which David says he weaned himself off. So, it's the opposite of pride, humility. It's the opposite of a heart lifted up, it's a heart bowed down.

The God Man, Jesus, the Lord of the Universe is hoping in a person who has a brain, who has words that he says and makes decisions, and to whom we are accountable. We hope in him, we trust in him, we don't trust in an idea. And lastly, it's not a one time, one off activity or project, which you do when you're, when you're needy and you don't do when you've got it all figured out.

It's an everlasting way of life, as it says, from this time forth and forever more. Thank you. You don't wean yourself off it, you do it for all eternity, it's a good thing, okay. So last question then, in the light of what we've covered, have a think in the chat if you can about this question, what does it mean for all of us today to hope in the Lord?

What happens if we don't, if we're just in the here and now, and only in the here and now? Does that help or does that hinder us in any way? So, I hope as you meditate on this psalm, and you think it through, you think through these questions, uh, they'll help you, and I hope it'll help you to wean yourself off some stuff which is ungodly, unhelpful, and gonna drag you down, and that you will develop this sort of calm, quiet soul.