Our scripture lesson this evening is taken from Psalm 22, Psalm 22. We're not going to read the entire psalm, it's a psalm that's familiar to most of us. It is a psalm quoted several times while Christ was being crucified, both by Christ and by his enemies. It begins, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Those were the words of Jesus as he hung on Calvary. Verse 8, the Pharisees took up the words of his enemies saying, he trusts in the Lord. Let him deliver him. Let him rescue him for he delights in him. And verse 16 and 17, we read, They have pierced my hands and feet. I can count all of my bones. They stare and they gloat over me. They divide my garments among them. And for my clothing they cast lots. This is a psalm, a prophecy of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And it goes all the way down to verse, we're going to start in verse 20, where this is the end of the crucifixion. Jesus says, Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog. Save me from the mouth of the lion. You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen. Now we have a change in the psalm, and this will be our text. For the crucified Messiah is no longer dead or being crucified. He is now victorious. He has risen. And we read verses 22 to the end. I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation. I will praise you, Jesus says to his father. Then he says to his brothers, you who fear the Lord, praise him. All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel. For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, And he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard when he cried to him. From you comes my praise in the great congregation. My vows I will perform before those who fear him. The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied. Those who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever. All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord. And all the families of the nations shall worship before you. For kingship belongs to the Lord. and he rules over the nation. All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship. Before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, even the one who could not keep himself alive. Posterity shall serve him. It shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation. They shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn that he has done it. Since my wife and I came to California, it was necessary to visit the favorite restaurant of our children, In-N-Out Burger, and even though we had to make a short line, it was true to its name, In-N-Out, it went fairly relatively fast, and I like In-N-Out Burgers. And you know, that sort of practical pragmatism is good in business, in restaurants, in burger restaurants. But in our country, and not only in America, but abroad, many have turned religion into a pragmatic practice as well. And that means that just as I want the burger restaurant or whatever other pragmatic thing for me, we turn religion into something for me. So just as if I don't like the restaurant, I go to another one. If I don't like the church, I go to some other church. Pragmatism in religion creates instability. It creates competition between churches as if we're vying for different clientele. It promotes a short-range vision for ministry and mission. Religion is perceived as an activity that should meet my emotional, practical, religious needs. It converts religion into a selfish practice. We want the heavens to declare our glory and the firmament, the work of our hands. Well, there's three fundamental problems with religion as pragmatism. First of all, it is dangerous because it ignores our true problem. Coincidentally, Dr. Fesco this morning quoted Isaiah 6. I had already prepared my message before today, so I'm going to quote Isaiah 6 as I was going to quote it also. Isaiah says what our true problem is in 6 verse 5. Woe to me, I am ruined, for I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips, and mine eyes have seen the king. You see, that's our problem. We are sinners, and there is a righteous God in heaven, and pragmatism doesn't talk about that. Secondly, we ignore the solution to our problem, the grandeur and the magnitude of Christ's sacrifice. That's not what pragmatism talks about. It talks about what we should do. And thirdly, pragmatic religion ignores the true goal of the work of Christ. And we're going to talk about these things today. Now, as I mentioned, I believe this is a Messianic psalm. I don't believe that this was fulfilled even partially in David. Many times, Messianic psalms are partially fulfilled in David and consummated in Christ. But this is so clearly a psalm of the crucifixion. it is very difficult to imagine this being fulfilled in any sort of way in David. And so I take it as a prophecy, a direct prophecy of Christ's crucifixion. Now, I do have three points tonight, but we'll try to be timely. First of all, Christ celebrates his victory. Verse 22, Jesus says, I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation. I will praise you. Where does Jesus celebrate his victory? He celebrates it in the midst of the congregation. Boys and girls, you remember what happened in the Garden of Eden, right? When Adam and Eve rebelled against their creator, they were expelled from God's presence and a seraphim, an angel, was placed with a flaming sword so they couldn't return. That is the consequences of sin. We are banished from God's presence. We are prohibited from serving Him. Serving God is not a burden. Serving God is what we were created to be. This is the most human thing we can do. Of course, sin and the devil and our own selfishness turns it into a burden. We were banished from God's presence, prohibited from serving Him, Not allowed to serve Him. But when Christ accomplishes His work, He presents Himself to us and He calls His people. The first thing Jesus does after sealing redemption is to call His brothers. He says, I will tell of your name to my brothers. In John chapter 20, I can't help but think that the Apostle John is thinking about Psalm 22. For he recounts that when Jesus revealed himself to Mary in the garden, Mary wants to hold on to him, and Jesus says, Don't hold on to me. And then do you know, do you remember what he says? Do you remember his very words? He says, Now remember those disciples just a couple days before had betrayed Jesus? They had abandoned Jesus. Now they were shut inside the upper room, trembling with fear. How does Jesus call them? He tells Mary, go to my brothers. Go to my brothers and tell them, I am returning to my father and to your father. I am returning to my God and your God. That's the wondrous fruit of the victory of Jesus Christ. And that same night, Jesus appeared to his disciples and he blessed them. And we read in chapter 20 of John, verse 20, the disciples, when they saw the Lord, they rejoiced. They rejoiced at seeing him. Our praise to God begins when we are together in Christ's presence. And it continues through the week. Let us remember, this is not the weekend. This is the first day of the week. What we do the rest of the week stems, flows out of what we do here in the presence of Jesus Christ. What does Jesus do when he appears to his brethren? The pragmatic gospel says he would give seven secrets for prosperous living or three tips to be satisfied with yourselves. Well, that's not what Jesus says. Note what Jesus says in verse 22. Look carefully. What does Jesus do when he presents himself in the worship service as the leader of his people? I will tell of your name, he's speaking to God. I will declare your name to my brothers. This word that Psalm 22 uses to declare God's name means to recount. It means to talk about. It can even mean to exalt the name of the Father, of God. the victorious Christ gathers His people together to talk about God, to talk about God's greatness, to talk about God's mercy, to talk about His love. Sinners, exiled from God's presence, are brought near to God through Christ in order to hear sweet words of God's favor. Wow! If this doesn't move our hearts, dear friend, maybe we've forgotten how great the gospel is. Maybe we've forgotten the depth of our sin and the greatness of God's grace. That would be something that's very sad. Having declared God's name to His people in mercy, Christ now calls His people to the prime goal of their lives. Verse 23, You who fear the Lord, praise Him. All you offspring of Jacob, glorify Him and stand in awe of Him, all you offspring of Israel. We are called now by Christ to the goal of our lives to praise, glorify, and fear the Lord. These are the qualities of a sinner saved by grace. This is the description of every servant of the Lord. Now, no preacher can make this call on his own authority. No one has that right. No sinner may call another sinner to glorify God. The only foundation of this call is Jesus Christ. And his work. And we must be very clear. You see, none of us come here with some sort of natural right to be here. We talk about rights so much. Everyone has rights. And it's got to be, you know, you hear some of these cases on the news and it's just gotten to be an absurd extreme what people think they have rights to. Oh, we have rights all right. We have rights. Before God we have rights. You know what our right is? We have a right to be cast into hell. You know, when we think about it, I don't know how many people we have here tonight, a couple hundred. How many sins are represented in this body tonight? Let's just take one week, from last Sunday to today. Active sins. Let's not talk about our native corruption. Original sin. Let's talk about the real sins we committed in thought, word, and deed. The things we should have done and didn't and the things we did do and shouldn't have. How many minutes in a day? How many hours in a week? I don't know. How many sins would be represented? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? The miracle right now is that fire doesn't fall from heaven and consume us because that's what we deserve. That's the right we have before God, the only one, the only natural right. The miracle is that we're still here and we can talk about grace. We can talk about God's grace and we can talk about the blood of Jesus Christ that covers us through faith in Him. That's the miracle. And only those who have received the fear of God in their hearts are called to praise and glorify God. Did you notice that in verse 23? You who fear the Lord, praise Him. If we don't have the fear of God in our hearts, there's only one thing that God calls you to do, to bow down before Him in repentance and faith, to receive Jesus Christ in your heart as Lord and Savior. And once that fear of the Lord is placed in your heart through God's Word, by His Spirit, then the God-fearers are called to glorify and to praise the Lord. The fear of the Lord is mentioned twice, verse 23 and 25. To fear the Lord is a common phrase throughout the Old Testament, throughout the entire Bible. It refers to fearing, it refers to faith in God and that desire to obey God and to please Him. You see, salvation from sin produces a heart that fears the Lord because that is the work that Christ does in his people. Our salvation is a personal salvation. It is a salvation that joins us in communion to a person, to God. God knew his elect before the beginning of the world. Jesus Christ comes into the world to die for his brethren. He knows every sheep by name. He lays down his life for each one. And when God's spirit regenerates our heart, he transforms our heart into a heart of flesh and not of stone. And the goal is so that we might fear the Lord. Hearts transformed in this way now desire to fulfill the greatest privilege possible. You who fear the Lord, praise him. You who fear the Lord, glorify him. This is the great privilege that we have that is restored to us in Jesus Christ. And when all those excuses and pretexts well up within us, we should recognize them for what they are, the work of the devil. Plain and simple. In summary, the fruit of Christ's sacrifice is to transform lost sinners into servants of God. And this psalm declares to us the great privilege And it reminds us of the great cost, Christ's own sacrifice. Now, Jesus lays out for us in broad terms what it means to be a servant of the Lord. Verse 25, from you comes my praise in the great congregation. My vows I will perform before those who fear him. In the first place, true servants of God are called together in worship. Worship is an end in itself. I've read some books, even books on missions, that talk about the church as if it were an end. Pragmatism in religion, of course, talks about the church as an end. Excuse me, as a means to an end. The end is our own self-satisfaction. The church is a means. We go to church to get seven steps for prosperous living, and the end is my happiness in business or in the home or whatever. And other even more serious works say that the church will disappear in the future state and the church for now is a means to an end, a means to save the lost, etc. Well, that is not true. Worship is an end in itself. What we are doing right now is good. What we are doing right now is a foretaste of heaven. We will worship in some way throughout eternity. Adam and Eve were worshipers of God, and they were banished from God's presence, but in Christ Jesus, he takes us once again. Let us never see the day of the Lord and the day of worship as some sort of, oh, well, we've got to go fulfill our duty, I guess. This is a glorious end in itself, what we do, and God is pleased with his people when we present ourselves. So let us remember, Jesus says, from you comes my praise in the great congregation. Now Jesus says, from God comes his praise. Now this is very important because Christ gives us the praise that he received from the Father. This is a principle that we as Reformed Christians hold very dearly. We don't believe that we come to do whatever we want. Religion isn't a works religion. We don't invent things to give to God. And we have a very clear principle right here in this psalm that our praise is given to us from Christ who received it from the Father. What Jesus does as He leads our worship is give to us the praise that He received from the Father. And it is in the assembly. Israel is called the assembly or the congregation from the very first days of Israel. The term for Israel is people of God or congregation of the Lord. And Jesus says he will pay his vows before us. The covenant God transforms us. As we are in the presence of Christ, he transforms us into the image of Christ who was what? The covenant keeper. Jesus can say, I will pay my vows. He did that. He did that before his father. And you know, as we think about our own society today and our culture, and not just in the United States, it's endemic to the nations of today. We are far from being covenant keepers, aren't we? Let's not talk about the world. We could talk about all the promise breakers around us. Let's talk about Christians. You know, at baptism, parents make a vow. They make a promise that they will raise and nurture their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Now, I'm going to ask all the parents here a question, but I don't want to see any hands. Confession's good for the soul, but I won't ask you to do that. Especially, like, younger kids, well, we could even talk about teenagers, but junior high, high school. I assume they have telephones, like my 12-year-old granddaughter. Does your child know more about his or her programs and things on the phone than they do the scriptures? You could do your own test. Well, I hope that you can all say, no, my child, I'm confident they know the scriptures much better than the things on their phone. I hope that's the case. We made a promise when we baptized our children. At Profession of Faith, we make a promise. We promise before God to trust Him, to obey Him, and to serve in the church, in His kingdom. At the Lord's Supper, in essence, we make a vow. We proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again. We honor the new covenant in his blood. In marriage, we make a vow. Husbands promise to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. Wives to respect and submit and love their husbands as the church does to Christ. Every Sunday, we repeat the Apostles' Creed. It's a species of vow. It's a confession. We say, I believe in God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. I believe in the church, the communion of saints. We say we believe that. Does your pastor ever have to remind anyone that you say every Sunday you believe in the communion of the saints? The servant of the Lord is remade in Christ's image as one who glorifies God by keeping his or her vows. Jesus Christ promised to obey the Father and He fulfilled the Father's will. For whom? Not for Himself. He was fulfilling the Father's will in glory. But He became flesh for us and He fulfilled the Father's will in order to transform covenant breakers into covenant keepers in every aspect of our life. And so if you are a servant of the Lord, your entire week is connected to what happens here together because here in the presence of Christ in the presence of the Father through the Holy Spirit We are renewed by God's mercy and grace. And we are renewed into covenant keepers. Now finally, this psalm ends with a marvelous emphasis on the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham that all the families on the earth would be blessed through his seed. And there are, I don't know if you noticed, there are two foci, two focuses to this, internal and external. And we read of the covenant promise to children in verses 30 and 31. Posterity shall serve him. It shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation. They shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn that he has done it. God, on the basis of Christ's sacrifice, on the basis of Christ declaring God's name to us. This will produce what God promised to Abraham, that he would be a God to him and to his seed after him. People of God, we have a wonderful covenant promise that we must not let go. And it's not something magical. This covenant promise is fulfilled exactly in the way that Jesus says. He comes and he declares. We may not expect that prosperity will serve him without declaring what Christ declares, the name of the Father and Jesus Christ to our children. We have an internal mission, if you will. There is a promise, God will do this, and he will do this through declaring the Father's name to our children. But secondly, verse 27, that outward focus of the mission that God said to Abraham as well, that all the nations and families of the world would be blessed through him. Verse 27, all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. This is the outward focus. You see there, I love this psalm. It talks about the foundation of our salvation in Christ, His crucifixion is described in detail so we understand the cost of our salvation. And then we see the victorious Christ declaring the Father's name to us. And then we see the fulfillment of God's promises of old now fulfilled through Christ, through His church, by the declaring of God's name, the preaching of the world. And so we hear a challenge tonight. We hear a challenge to accept this, to embrace this and to fulfill it. A challenge to fulfill our duty to our children and a challenge to fulfill our duty to the families of the world. Do we divide missions? Well, let me rephrase that. I think we divide missions. We separate missions from other things in the church. Right here we find it all woven together. The promise of God to posterity and the promise of God to the families of the world. There's no separation that God makes. And yet I think sometimes we have Christian education, Christian schooling and missions. Well, that's a line item on the budget in the Greens maybe in Costa Rica. Well, the Lord doesn't allow us to categorize missions. We are God's mission in this world and it happens in different ways. We're not all missionaries, of course, in the sense of being a missionary. But we are God's mission in this world. There's an internal aspect and there's an external aspect. I want to ask the church, the elders and your leaders, are you challenging this church with God's mission in all of their daily lives? All of us to proclaim and declare Jesus Christ. How about calling young men and women to think about serving the cause of the gospel in special ways? How about calling preachers to the gospel? If there's anyone this evening that the Lord has called specifically to declare his word in an official capacity as a preacher, as an evangelist, as a missionary, heed God's call, please. The fields continue white unto harvest, but the laborers continue to be too few. It was Harvey Kahn, professor at Westminster in Philadelphia. He is now with the Lord in glory. It was Harvey Kahn who said, the church is the only institution that God created. The church, the family, and the state. And of those institutions, the church is the only institution that exists for non-members. Now, we don't only exist for non-members. We exist for members. But we also exist for non-members, for those who have not yet been called. Let us not forget it. This grand project called the church is granted the marvelous privilege to pass on the gospel message to our own families, to our own children, to those not yet born. And we are simultaneously granted the marvelous privilege to be co-laborers with our precious Savior, calling sinners to be reconciled with God through the one and only mediator, Jesus Christ. Servants of the living God, you who fear the Lord, praise Him and glorify Him. To Him be all the glory. Amen. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we praise you, we thank you, we glorify you tonight as fearers of your name. Lord, we stand in awe of your marvelous salvation in Jesus Christ, sovereign salvation, salvation by grace, through the only work and person of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Thank you. And today we have now heard his word. How he declares your great name in the assembly. How he declares your mercy and your goodness and your love and your purposes. We've heard that word, Lord. And so, Father, grant that each of us this evening might embrace by faith and with hearts humbled before you, O Lord, we might hear that word to our children, families, to those yet unborn, and outside these walls tonight, to the families, the nations of this world. Father, we ask that you will be glorified. In the name of Jesus, amen.