Please turn with me in the Word of God to Psalm 4. Psalm 4 is our scripture reading for this morning. Let us hear God's own Word. Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress. Be merciful to me and hear my prayer. How long, O men, will you turn my glory into shame? How long will you love delusions and seek false gods? Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. The Lord will hear when I call to him. In your anger do not sin. When you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord. Many are asking, who can show us any good? Let the light of your face shine upon us, O Lord. You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound. I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. So far the reading of God's word. It is sometimes a practice among us on special occasions to choose a special verse of Scripture. Sometimes at a profession of faith or at a wedding, there will be a particular verse of Scripture indicated as a kind of life verse for someone who is making profession of faith or a wedding text to go with a new married couple in their new life together. That's a kind of nice custom. It's not required by Scripture. I sometimes wonder if we run a little risk of binding ourselves too narrowly to one verse. But I'm going to try that this morning anyway. I would like to suggest that maybe we can take a text for the new year of 2005. And that it is a text that can direct us, inspire us, encourage us, at least for this afternoon. and be a verse to perhaps have in our minds to encourage us as we live for the Lord in this year. And the verse I have in mind is Psalm 4, verse 3, the first part. Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. This verse begins with an appeal to us that we should know something. And it's an important thing for us to know because there are many in this world, sadly, who do not know it. We live in a world, as verse 2 indicates, where there are many who love delusions and seek false gods. And this verse then calls upon us to know, to acknowledge, to embrace that unique relationship that exists between our covenant God. Know that the Lord, the covenant God of His people, has set apart the godly for Himself. This is a verse that stresses our having been set apart by God. It is God who is the actor here. This is a verse about God's grace, about His provision, about His mercy for us as His people. Know that the Lord has set apart you, if you are among the godly, for Himself. That should be a great encouragement to all of us in a new year. That should help guide and direct us in our living for the new year. We are the godly. That's an interesting word in this text. It's related to that word often translated God's loving kindness or His covenant faithfulness. It's a word that has its roots in the idea of loyalty. God in His covenant is loyal to us and we are envisioned here in this verse as those who are loyal to God, who are faithful to God. And so this verse comes to us with this powerful declaration. Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for Himself. Now it seems to me this is a particularly important emphasis in our time because for a variety of reasons, there seems to be a great stress being put upon focusing on our common humanity amongst all people. and minimizing differences amongst peoples. I was struck in hearing at least a little bit of Queen Elizabeth's Christmas Day message to her subjects when she said, Above all religion and culture, we must pursue tolerance. Now, it is certainly true that we as Christians must pursue tolerance. It's an important virtue. But we must not elevate tolerance above true religion. And the true religion of our faith says that there are some who are godly whom God has set apart for Himself and there are some who are wicked who follow lies and false gods. And we might wish that that were not so, but it is so. It is the wish of our heart that there should be love and toleration for all people, it is also the wish of our heart that all people might come to know Jesus Christ as Savior. And it is the fact of Scripture repeated over and over again that we live in a world where not everyone honors God. And so this verse calls to us to remember one of the most fundamental truths of the world in which we live, That the Lord, in His grace and in His mercy, has set apart the godly for Himself. And that means that we need to be a people set apart. And this psalm helps us to see what that means. What does it mean to be set apart for God? The tragedy is that we as Christians seem to live, particularly in America, in a situation where there is tremendous pressure upon us not to be a people set apart, but rather we are pressured to be a people that will look pretty much like everybody else. We increasingly see surveys where Christians, apparently devout Christians, are interviewed and surveyed and their attitudes about so many things are just like the world's attitudes. too many of our values, too many of our practices are just like the world. We see that even in the worship of many Christians whose worship services increasingly seem to look like football rallies or theater entertainments. Then something's set apart for the meeting of God with His people. And so I thought it would be good for us at the beginning of this year. Not to talk about what other people are doing, but to talk about what is in our hearts. What is the characteristic of our lives? Are we a people set apart? Do you know this morning that you are set apart by the Lord for Him? Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for Himself. And what does it mean to be set apart as the godly? Well, in the first place, this psalm helps us to see we are set apart in God's righteousness. We are set apart in God's righteousness. The NIV translation of Psalm 4 has some problems with it. Not that the translation is wrong, but it doesn't always bring out some of the crucial things in the text. For example, in verse 1, we really ought to read, Answer me when I call to you, O God of my righteousness. this statement is not so much talking about God who is righteous in himself although of course that's true but this is talking about God who provides righteousness for his people our God is our righteousness our God is the one who provides righteousness for us and this theme of the righteousness of God is important in this psalm because it recurs in another place in verse 5 where we read in the NIV offer right sacrifices but we really should read sacrifice sacrifices of righteousness. And this linking of verses 1 and 5 reminds us that God is the God who provides the sacrifice of righteousness that makes our righteousness possible. God is the God who provides the sacrifice of His own righteous Son who is our righteousness. And so when we think about ourselves as set apart, we need to think of ourselves as set apart in Jesus Christ's righteousness. That's who we are. That's our characteristic as a people. That's our essential definition. We are those set apart in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. You know those familiar words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 3. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. Jesus Christ is our righteousness. He is our sacrifice. He is our substitute. He is our hope. He is our set-apartness by God's grace. We've just gone through the Christmas season where we sometimes hear the phrase, He's the reason for the season. Well, He's the reason for the year. He's the reason for our lives. It's not just for a season that He's the reason. But He is the focus, the center, the heart of who we are and what we are meant to be. We are set apart in Him. And because God is our righteousness, because He has provided in Jesus Christ, in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all that we need, we are called then to worship Him. Verses 1 and 5 are connected in that way. The God who is our righteousness is the God whom we must worship. And that's one of the most important and fundamental activities of our lives. That we should desire to be with God, to know Him, to fellowship with Him, to meet with Him. Both in the private meditations of our heart, this psalm will speak about lying down on our beds and searching our hearts. But also in our official gatherings as the people of old did in the temple. It's the importance of meeting with God. It's the privilege of meeting with Him twice on the Lord's Day. And that meeting has a great seriousness to it. Again, one of the things that troubles me is that far and wide, the attitude seems to be spread in the American society that worship needs to be fun. It needs to be exciting. It needs to be upbeat. And that doesn't seem to be the message of Scripture. The message of Scripture seems to be that meeting with God is a serious business. God is a holy God. We are a sinful people. He at great cost has provided a son to save us. He's given his own son over to death for us. And that's serious. Now, it doesn't mean it has to be grim. My wife says I tend to be too grim a preacher. That's no doubt true. We don't have to be grim in our worship. But seriousness must pervade it because we meet with a serious God. Have you ever noticed how few jokes there are in the Bible? It's not that God is opposed to humor. It's not that we are not encouraged as human beings to be humorous in appropriate places. But the fundamental truths of life are serious and our fundamental connection with God is a serious business. And so when we're called to praise, we're called to praise seriously. One of the things that has impressed me and maybe wearied some of you since I've been studying the Psalms a lot of late and that means you've had to listen to lots of lessons and sermons on Psalms. One of the things that has impressed me is how carefully crafted the Psalms are. How carefully composed and put together. There is nothing sloppy. There is nothing quick. There is nothing shallow about the Psalter. Our praise has to be serious because God has given us the gift of minds and speech and words that we're to sanctify to Him and to His glory. Our praise has to be serious. Our prayer has to be serious. There's a wonderful discussion of prayer or meditation on prayer here in Psalm 4. In the first verse, there's an appeal that God would hear our prayers. Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress. Be merciful to me and hear my prayer. There's a serious appeal to God by David who's in distress, and he says, hear me, Lord, hear me. And there's a wonderful promise about prayer in this text. The second half of verse 3. The Lord will hear when I call to him. When God makes us such a wonderful promise, it points to the seriousness of the activity of prayer. If God says, I will hear you, my people, when you pray, then our prayers better be serious. that's why we have devoted a serious part of the service to prayer. And I suspect for many of us, that part of the service is the most difficult part of the service. We fold our hands, we close our eyes, and we try to pay attention. But the mind so easily wanders. It's hard not to just kind of let the minister drone on and have our minds drift off to other things. But when we know that God is hearing us when we pray, we can see the seriousness of it, the importance of it, the value of investing the time and energy to try to all pray together as the people with the minister. Now, maybe I can tell a little amusing story since we're being serious. And I do remember the difficulty of praying was illustrated to me one warm Sunday night when Reverend Howard's Isle was praying at some length in the pastoral prayer. And my daughter, who was quite young at that time, had taken as much as she could take and about two-thirds of the way through the prayer said in a rather loud voice, Amen. And there were a number of people around us who I could hear trying to muffle a little bit of laughter because she had said what many of them were thinking. And it points to how difficult it is to really enter into that prayer, but it's important. When we pray for people in Sri Lanka and Thailand, do we really think the Lord hears or that those prayers make a difference? Or is this just something nice and sentimental that we do? No, we believe that when we cry out in distress, Yes, the Lord hears because He's promised to hear. And that has to be a serious part of our worship. It has to be a serious preaching, a serious opening of the Word. The Lord has been so gracious to give us such a full and complete and marvelous revelation of Himself. And we must be serious in looking into that Word and loving that Word and treasuring it. The Lord sets us apart in his righteousness. And in the righteousness that we have in Jesus Christ, we are called to worship him. But secondly, the Lord sets us apart in his refuge, we can say. And that theme is developed in two verses in this psalm. And it's, again, one of the places where the translation is a little difficult. The same word is used in verse 5, trust in the Lord, and at the end of verse 8, make me dwell in safety. Now, in English, it's hard to bring out how these themes are related. The best I can do is to say that because the Lord gives us a reliable safety, He calls us to rely upon Him. He is our refuge. He is our protection. He is the reliable one who makes us dwell in safety. That's the promise here. We are set apart in the refuge that God provides for us, in the safety that God provides for us. Refuge is one of those words that's repeated over and over again in the early Psalms as a celebration of God our protector. You may think of that well-known first verse of Psalm 46. God is our refuge and our strength. A very present help in time of trouble. God is our refuge in trouble, in distress. God is our refuge when we face enemies, as David did in this psalm. Verse 2, How long, O men, will you turn my glory into shame? is David's statement. He's the Lord's anointed. He's been set apart by God to be king, and yet he's being attacked by his enemies. And he says to those who are his enemies, how long will you turn the glory of the Lord's anointed into shame? How long will you love delusions and seek false gods? Again, we live in a world, we know, where the Lord's anointed. Jesus Christ is defamed and derided and disregarded. And yet he is our protection. He is our hope. He is our refuge. We are called to rest in Him. But it's not just, I think, external enemies that God gives us a refuge from. But in verse 6, we find the statement, Many are asking, who can show us any good? It's not just external enemies, but even in the community of faith, there is a doubt that arises. Is there a God who will show us good? Who can show us good? In a world where out of nowhere a wave can arise and kill 150,000 people, who will show us good? Many are asking. Many are asking. And where is their refuge from the enemies and from doubt? Where is their protection? It's in God. Verse 6 goes on to say, Let the light of your face shine upon us, O Lord. Who will show us any good? God will show us good. God will show us good when he turns his face upon us. Here's an echo of that blessing that Aaron was to lay upon the people of Israel regularly. May the Lord turn his face to us and be gracious to us and give us his peace. Reverend Howard Zell always told every new seminarian that when he says a benediction, keep your fingers together because you're laying the benediction, you're laying the peace, you're laying the blessing upon the people. God's minister's hands speak to us of the face of God turned upon us and the light of His countenance illumining us and protecting us. And the protection that our God gives to us is not the protection that guarantees long life and good health. It's not the protection that guarantees no tsunami will come and wipe our lives away. The protection that God gives to us is the promise that sin will not destroy us, that the devil has no final hold upon us, that eternal life awaits us. That's the refuge we have in God. That's the promise of the light of His countenance and the peace of His grace upon us. And that's why because God is a refuge, a reliable refuge, we are called to rely upon Him. Trust in the Lord. Second half of verse 5. Rely upon the Lord. Depend upon the Lord. The Lord who is a refuge for you is reliable, is dependable. You can stake your souls upon Him. He will not let you down. He will not abandon you. He will preserve you in Jesus Christ. That's the promise for the godly. The Lord has set you apart. The Lord has set you apart in his righteousness and in his refuge. And thirdly, he set you apart in his rest. Twice the verb to lie down is mentioned in our text here. In verse 4, when you are on your beds or when you are on the places on which you lie down. And then in verse 8, I will lie down and sleep in peace. Lie down here is a sign of peace, of rest. The God who has given you righteousness and has given you a refuge also gives you rest. Lie down in Him, and in that rest you will find peace. Verse 8 in Hebrew really begins with the words, In peace, in the peace that God provides, I will lie down. I will rest. I will find my delight, my blessedness in God. It is in God that I will find that rest and peace of soul that is the delight of the righteous. It's not a peace and a delight that perhaps we enjoy at every moment. David had his distress. But even in that distress, he can say, I delight in God because He provides rest for my soul. And in response to that rest that God provides, we are called upon by this text to ponder, to think, to reflect. Verse 4 says, search your hearts and be silent. It really is ponder in your hearts, reflect in your hearts about the nature of your God. Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. You need time to know that, to grow in that truth. We are a people who have become in America so busy. We have all these labor-saving devices and less and less time. We try to do too much and there's too little time to pause, to reflect, to consider the God who has set us apart for himself. As a church historian, I look back on the history of American Christianity and one of the most striking things that one can see is that 70, 75 years ago, Almost all Protestants in America believe that Sunday was the Lord's Day and the Christian Sabbath. Almost all Protestants believe that Sunday was set apart by God for the sake of his people to worship him and to rest in him. And now 75 years later, hardly anybody amongst Christians believes that anymore. We, as Reformed people who still believe in the Sabbath, are an increasingly small minority, it seems, on that point. And yet, I believe it remains a bulwark and crucial foundation of our life and of our faith. We need time for God, and God has given us a time for Himself. And we have to ask ourselves whether we treasure the Sabbath as the day of the Lord, as a day for the Lord, as a day in which we as God's people can fellowship with Him. It's not given to us as a burden. It's not given to us to deprive us of things that the world in such abundance has. It's not a day given where we're deprived of the latest silly football game. It's a day given to nurture and prosper our souls. I suspect that 75 years ago, most Christians in America knew the Bible a lot better than Christians know the Bible today. I bet that 75, well, I don't bet, but I would imagine that 75 years ago, most Reformed Christians knew their catechism better than we know it today. And why is that? Because they took time to be with the Lord. They took time to rest in His righteousness and in His refuge. They took time to ponder in their hearts and in their worship the mercies of the Lord. The Lord has set apart the godly for Himself. And this is His work. This is His mercy. This is His grace to us. He is our righteousness. He is our refuge. He is our rest. And in this coming year, will we live out of His righteousness and live out of His refuge and live out of His rest to be a people set apart whose lives are transformed by His grace? My hope and prayer is that as this year goes by, we will from time to time think of this verse, Psalm 4, verse 3. know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself and that you will know yourself to be set apart by his grace for him and that you'll live your life out of faith in him and that you'll live your life for him because his desire, his delight, his work in Jesus Christ is that you would be his, that he would live with you and you with him and that this would be the delight of your heart. May God grant that each of us in this coming year might more and more know and experience and live that the Lord in Jesus Christ has set apart the godly for himself. Amen. Let us pray. Lord, how rich and how encouraging is your word and how precious is the promise that in Jesus Christ we your people have been set apart for you how we do thank you that beyond anything we could do almost beyond anything we could hope you are our righteousness and you are our refuge and you are our rest and we pray that out of that great saving work that you have done in Jesus Christ. We might be a people who worships and trusts and ponders how great a God we have and how marvelous it is to live in you and for you. So bless us in this year to come that we might be a people set apart for you. Hear us, for we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.