The Sun and Shield: God’s Blessings for the Upright
God is both a sun and a shield to those who walk uprightly, bestowing favour and honour. He withholds no good thing from His faithful followers. The Old Testament, far from being obsolete, provides valuable instruction on how to navigate life according to God’s design. By meditating on God’s Word and learning His statutes, we gain wisdom more precious than gold or silver. Though we may face afflictions, these often serve to draw us closer to God and deepen our understanding of His ways. Ultimately, the Lord calls us to trust Him completely, resting in the assurance of His goodness and guidance.
Automatically Generated Transcript
[00:00:00] The burden of this morning’s message has to do with the fact that as Christians we operate with and under the instruction of the entire scriptures. Although we know there is an Old Testament and there’s a New Testament and there are some drastic changes brought about by the move from the old to the new, the biggest of which, of course, is the identification of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and his mission on Earth and certainly in the centre of what the Bible is on about, what the Gospel is trying to bring to us, is in that first advent of Christ coming into the world that the New Testament discloses and teaches of. But that doesn’t mean that the Old Testament isn’t also a part of our scripture and a part of how God leads us and teaches us and how we relate to him. The people of the Old Testament are beautiful examples of what it is to be someone seeking
[00:01:06] to walk with God. And although the understanding of the coming Messiah was only partial, was revealed by prophets and they just had a relationship with Father God or with God not necessarily knowing what we now know of how he is the Father in a sense. His Fatherhood is in the Old Testament but I’m just saying that the Trinitarian understanding of Father, Son and Holy Spirit needs the New Testament to bring into sharp focus. But the Old Testament is part of our scriptures and we must not lose sight of the facts that much of our walking with God should be done by reflecting on how he speaks to us through the Old Testament. Now this passage here in the book of Psalms is interesting because of what it’s saying
[00:02:01] here. Because what it is saying is that God is about in his blessing of us not just bringing us to be his people in the case of the Jews in the Old Testament. Not just teaching us the gospel of how we can know the forgiveness of sins as the New Testament makes so clear with a promise, not only do we get forgiven, but we get the gift of the Holy Spirit, that’s a New Testament development of clarity. Here we have in the Old Testament God speaking, but it brings to light the fact that the blessings we receive him walking with him, are more than just getting right with him and being his person and eventually being looked after at eternity. For the Lord God is a son and a shield. These are metaphors of how God relates to his
[00:02:52] world and particularly for us, he is a son and a shield. The Lord bestows favour and honour?” And through the Old Testament there’s much teaching as to how God is rather sensitive as to who he lets, to be the ones who are recognized as authorities. He’s the one who decides who is bestowed favour and honour. No good thing! Now this is a very inclusive idea, not only the blessings of walking with God, not only forgiveness, not only the help of the angels, whatever you may associate with a person who is close to God, but it says no good thing. And there are some things in life which all of us need, long for, all those good things. Now I need to let you know something about the little word good as it’s found in the Old Testament. Sometimes in apologetic circles you get people talking
[00:03:56] about good and evil, but actually the word good is not the opposite of evil, where it’s first used in the Old Testament it’s got the meaning of suitable for human life. That’s what makes it good. And when God did the various creation steps, it is said that it was good, but it’s talking about the fact that it made it suitable for human habitation and for our needs. And when it says no good thing, does he withhold? It’s not just talking about a non-evil thing, no non-evil thing, it’s talking about something that would be helpful something that humanity longs for. I know that all of you sitting here this morning there have been things, times in your life where you’ve had longings, and there’s been something that you know your developmental stage brought you to need, and you were needy and it was
[00:04:55] a good thing that you long for. This passage is making a promise from heaven, No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly. Now, it’s not a flat-out statement that he is going to give to every single person good things no matter what. In a sense, he does that through his creation. He does that by his nature of giving good things, but there are some differentials between how people experience, because it has a little qualifier from those who walk uprightly, those who listen to God’s ideas and God’s standards and seek to fall in line with them. That’s a qualification. And in many cases we do not necessarily receive all the good things that we might have had had we
[00:05:50] walked more uprightly and that’s a general statement. It’s not entering into the question of how do you get right with God and we’re used to hearing the gospel. It’s not through your works you’re saved but through His grace that’s true. But that doesn’t undo the fact that God likes people to walk up rightly. And when you walk up rightly, He will bless you with honour, favour and honour and no good thing will He withhold. I’ve met lots of people who tell the story of how they didn’t seem to always get what they needed but in some cases as it was because they didn’t walk up rightly, yet there still is the case that God sometimes allows, in our particular case he sometimes allows something to happen that’s not because of our wrongdoing, and there are some things that we don’t understand, but yet in all of
[00:06:48] that God is wanting not to withhold a good thing from your life. O Lord of Hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in you. And there is the kernel of what this passage is saying, that you can be a person who walks with God, and not only that you obey Him, this is not just a call to obedience, but it’s a call to faith. And faith is something essential throughout all the Old Testament, just as it is the New, as that which is appropriate for us to be close to God and to receive of His best. In fact, the falling out of the human race in it’s beginning, which has affected the lot us, and we’ve all fallen without a belief, that falling out was a falter in faith, a disbelief that God had their best for them.
[00:07:45] Blessed is He, blessed is the one who trusts in you. And so integral all the way through the Old Testament are examples of people who had to learn sometimes the hard way to trust in God. Obedience and trust are both aspects of how God wants us to walk with him and that’s in the Old Testament. Now I wanted to chase this down because it promises some very beautiful things and the first one is mentioned there is about God being a son and a shield. So I began to chase down at one stage, not just recently but I’ve been on this chase for a while. But this sermon is something I’ve been getting together because of this promise about God
[00:08:37] being a son and a shield. And what does exactly that mean? I don’t know whether you like the Sun. I’m one who has to be careful of going down the beach. I don’t get frazzled. I did have as a child a moment of getting sunstroke, and the doctor, well I was found by my family unconscious on the beach having been in the Sun all day. And so the Sun, in its own brightness and its own powerfulness, also requires of itself that there be a shield and God says that he’s both the son and the shield. I’m going to bring out other meanings of the word shield and how that applies but God is one who by his son and this is like a metaphor the scriptures use of his character. He provides that which you could never
[00:09:31] really do without. Without the son we would all be absolutely frozen up I guess. We would be people you need, son, in your life. And when you think of this as a metaphor of God, it’s explaining how without God, without the warmth of his relationship coming down on you, you things just don’t work out. But he is a son. It’s interesting to turn to some of the passages about God and how they speak. And so I’ll take us through just a few here this morning. I’ve got too many to do them all but we’ll see how we go. But he’s a son and a shield and we’ll look at chapter 91 and how God is speaking. Chapter 91 and verses 1 and following. And he’s talking about God being the son. But he dwells in the shelter. Let me just read it. He who dwells, the person who dwells, in the
[00:10:41] shelter of the Most High will abide under the Shadow of the Almighty. Now not only do we need the warmth of God to shine on us but we also need the shelter. And it’s in this respect that he’s also the shield. And people like me who got But unconscious lying on the beach because of sunstroke were ignorant of the fact that the sun, our physical sun, can be very fierce. And similarly with the holiness and the grander and the power of God, when you seek to walk with Him, there can be times when the prophet cries out and says, oh Lord, I’m a man undone. Or one says I’m a sinful, suddenly recognises, that in their sinfulness they, they’re not being something very compatible with the holiness of God. And when his, as a metaphor pictures that He is the one who has all the power and He’s
[00:11:48] the one that makes the growth and he’s the one who brings about life in every respect on the earth, there’s nothing in this world, no animal, that can do without the effect of the sun and the energy that comes and the blessing that comes and the food that grows and the things that come about in our lives, God is the Son who gives them to you. But He is so powerful that if He were to come to you at all, if His splendor is Jesus explained to His disciples, if they were to be in God’s presence no one sees God but won’t die. because of cruelty by God, but the pure essence of his power as the Son also needs him to shelter us. And so in Psalm 91, he who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I love this little verse. It’s not a little verse. But God has a shadow spot that you can be safe from being scorched up. Think
[00:12:58] about that. And as he deals with us sometimes we go through times of being finding life difficult and sometimes we have scars from the issues of life. God knows how to include you in a nice shadow, in the shadow of the Almighty. And the Old Testament, one of the chief features it has is this encouragement to learn to walk with God, this encouragement to find in him, as the next verse says, I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. And because he’s both the Son and the shield, you trust in him and know that he knows what you need. I’m so thankful for the previous weekend that Michelle and I had the opportunity to go down to Sydney and to fellowship with a group of people who’d been at our church in Ryde, as I’ve explained in some of the
[00:14:02] E-Connected etc. that I got the wrong idea about what the whole weekend was. I thought it was a back-to-Ride day, when all the people from Ryde across the years would come and have, you know, like schools do and I don’t like those events, I have to be honest. Because it makes me remember all of my mistakes and if they had a back to my high school, I don’t know that I’d go because I was the one who had the most detentions and I had teachers who got really cranky at me for being cheeky and anyway so sometimes going back to places is not something and I was fearful not fearful trembling but fearful wondering whether I would like this weekend I just went to last weekend but it wasn’t the return to the church they didn’t hold the church it was a group of people who’d been there in
[00:14:57] our years 37 to 32 years ago and this group of people that were now older of course were once the young people the young adults and Michelle and I had discipled most of them and taught them how to get close to God and they became a fellowship an unknown to me they’ve continued as a fellowship ever since and this was a group of friends who across the years have been together to some degree varying amounts of different people. They really welcomed us back to the fellowship. They asked me to speak and to give a talk. It was a highlight of my year, if you want to know, to see what God had done. It was fascinating. There were young people who were like, you know, we taught them the basics of the gospel. And one bloke has got his PhD, he’s taught in China, and he’s now working from the college
[00:16:01] down there, the Moreland College. Goodness me, what has happened in between? But they were thankful for having learned about God and walking with him. And it was a great delight to us at that occasion to see what the Lord had done. My refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust, and the essence of what the Old Testament both teaches us about and makes in its very material opportunity for us to learn to do, is to help you to walk with God. And if you get biographies of people that God has used in various ways around the world and across history, you’ll find that they’ll keep talking about this book and how they silt themselves and read so many chapters a day or whatever. It’s not something you can do without a cost to your time allocation,
[00:16:59] but there’s something about the Word of God that makes you strong and helps you achieve this refuge and fortress, my God in whom I trust. For he’ll deliver you from the snare of the fowler when there’s something set up to capture people and harm them, and you could ignorantly step into the, if you’re going through the bush, it might be a big bear trap on your legs and really do harm. And there can be snare of a fowler speaking metaphorically of circles of influence where unwittingly you can find yourself moved into and have your life ruined by the morality and by the habits and by the ideas. I think universities are both a beautiful, wonderful place to help you grow in your mind, but they’ve also got some snares put there by the fowler.
[00:18:06] I’ll let you work out what they are. Well, this is the sign I’m stalking. This is the Old Testament telling us about God being a son and also his being a shield. And so let’s go to Genesis 1 and see how this idea of the sun being set up, Genesis 1 and verses 14, we’ll choose from between 14 and 18. Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens. Now, you know in the scriptures, the term heaven can be where the birds fly. It can be where the stars shine. It can be the seat of the throne of God. And so the people back then just thought, looking up.
[00:18:56] You’re looking up into the heavens, but depending on how far you go, what you arrived at, they didn’t have a very accurate understanding. But they call that all the heavens, and the expanse of the heavens really means the skies or perhaps, the universe beyond the skies. The expanse of the heavens, and God said, let there be lights to separate the day from the night. And this aspect of the existence of the Sun is purposeful in God’s mind for our benefit, to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons
[00:19:36] and for days and years. There are times in the Old Testament where it calls on us to be sensible about the times or the years, To recognise that we only have a limited time. To recognise to seek God when we’re young before the evil times come, one spot says. And so we have the sun and the moon, to set up there to be seasons. And to set up for there to be years. And it’s a fact you know that if you seek God when you’re young, you give to him the opportunity to bless you across the lifetime, but if you’re a person that runs away from God and keeps scouting away from his call, but then you give in
[00:20:23] when you’re an old person, you’re only giving in just a little bit of your days. And you won’t have much to show for him as you might have had if you had surrendered to him and recognized that there are times and seasons and and times and the Bible calls on us that we should come to the Lord while it is yet day. What’s this business of the Old Testament talking about? The day and the night or maybe a future day, which will be the day when God wipes it all out or God finishes it all up and the Bible calls on us to have a wisdom to recognize that we’re in a time span that is not gonna go forever, that we have opportunity in our young years is why young people, we need to get to them while they’re young they might find what it is to walk with God and set up godly
[00:21:18] habits that will take them through all their years. Well for signs and for cheeses and God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night as the Sun and the Moon. And when you look at the word rule, what it was actually saying? It’s saying that there is some leadership to be had in the day wise people discover at and don’t stay out all night. There’s something about the gentle light of the night that you need to adjust your living style to. God made these two towers the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. Then he had it in, and the stars. And I’ve been puzzling a bit over this,
[00:22:11] having read this passage a number of times. But what gave me a little bit of understanding was reading the story about Napoleon. You might wonder where I’m going with this illustration, but there was a time when the men on the boat, Napoleon’s ship, traveling the major oceans, were having an argument about whether God existed or not. As the argument continued heatedly, they were overheard by Napoleon, who couldn’t resist striding into the discussion and pointed to the man who didn’t believe in God and pointed to the stars and says, Who then made the constellations? That’s Napoleon.
[00:22:54] For he discovered in the fact of the stars and the thought of what’s up there in the heavens, something that brought to him the question mark, who made all that? There’s a creator. And that teaches us something about what God did with the stars. I’ll tell you for Napoleon, it gave him a context of how to understand he needed the creation not just to help him be a God believer but to help him understand a little bit of the distance between God and us. And the stars, you know, in that world that he was a part of were very necessary for navigation. And there’s something that God has done in how he’s created the world. And remember we’re using this as a metaphor as well as a literal fact.
[00:23:51] Is a metaphor that God has made things that we should be instructed and there’s navigation in his mind that’s necessary for us to come through him and what he’s done. That’s true of the Christian life, and the Christian life is not just one where you believe Believe in God, and then you live your life out in reverence to his existence, and that’s that. No, but this God that does exist wants to help us to navigate through the various decisions. He wants to help us not make the wrong ones. And the stars are there for a purpose. They speak to us about the eternality of God. They speak to us about the infinitude of his creation.
[00:24:37] They somehow do something to you. If you spend your time watching those Jolly Stars, it makes you very humble when you realize how little you are down here, you’ll pick on Earth. There’s something about God and his person that this metaphor of His creation brings to us, that He’s in the business, not only of setting things up for us to understand, but He’s setting them up for us to be navigated. Lead
[00:25:09] That little word rule is getting to me as well And God made the two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesson light to rule the night And there is a wisdom about living in the day Those things that you don’t have to do at night and the rivers around There’s navigation as to how your living lifestyle should be and there’s help for you to discover the pathway that God has for you. I believe it’s a part of being a person who walks with God that you seek to find where he wants you particularly to decide to go and that’s not easy and you can make mistakes and sometimes he gives you a guidance and you know to do what to do and other times he doesn’t seem to say anything. I’ve had some very big famous people say to me that God
[00:26:01] sometimes leads them and other times he goes quiet. You don’t know what to do, you just have to trust he’s there and a part of what it is to believe in God is not only that you have this strong conviction that he’s real and he’s leading you and he’s helping you and you can talk about how he stepped in and gave you the way to go. There’s other times when you God can choose to be quiet and you just learn to trust he’ll get you there and that’s what a part of this whole scene is saying to us about God and how He’s made it and how He rules. And our spiritual life is one where we should learn how to seek His will. As hard as that is and how subjective may be your decisions about it, and you can get it wrong when it’s experimental, and some of the stories of the Old Testament like that
[00:26:54] beautiful story of Abraham’s servant who goes to find a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac, and he goes and when he’s going, he’s got a set of camels and he’s praying for God to go and show him where to go. And when at last he meets up with and she finds the girl to come, what was her name? Rebecca or Rachel? Rebecca. Good. Good, got to get those stories right. And last one, Rebecca comes out and answers the test he put, let the one that’s the right girl come and offers water my camels.
[00:27:31] And she runs out and does it and he watches to see what whether it would come about, and then when he has to report back to her family and to say what’s happened, he uses this little word, he says I being in the way, he’s talking about the camel ride. The Lord led me to a whole lot of people who were relatives of Abraham, who were of the right understandings and a girl who came and watered the camels, I being in the way. The Lord led me. You will never get to be led of God
[00:28:06] if you don’t get in the way. To be a person who understands that this business that the Old Testament presents to us as to what it is to be a Christian to walk with God and find his way and there are some people who get too fussy about every little detail when you should just leave it to God he’ll bully you in the right way. And there are other people who think it’s all up to them and their decisions, there’s foolish people. Your God wants to navigate you and he wants you to seek his will and he wants you to be experimental, like Abraham’s servant was and when he got on these camels, the road. I being in the way the
[00:28:50] Lord led me.” I want to say there’s many times that I’ve found myself in the difficult scenes where I didn’t know what was right or wrong or whether I’d been frustrated becoming a preacher in the baptist set of churches was one I got kicked out because I told them I wasn’t a pastor I was an evangelist and And they kicked me out because they said, we only deal with pastors. They were wanting to ensure their understanding of it. But God knew what He’s doing and so I went overseas. Ended up going in Dallas and Wheaton and then the Wheaton people sent me home
[00:29:30] to be with Leighton Ford and he is having a reach out here in Brisbane and I got chosen to be the person who is looking after that side of things, dealing with the people of the denominational heads. And in there, talking to the man who was in charge of Baptists on behalf of the Leighton Ford group, and pointing out to him that Leighton Ford’s advertising that they were going to use, said the Reverend Leighton Ford. And I said the fellow who was a superintendent, I said to him, he got ordained as an evangelist.
[00:30:04] Why can’t you do that for me? I turned around and walked out. And God used all of that scene. I being in the way, I was actually kicked out of the way by those committees, but I being following his navigation, following where he led me, he brought me back to achieve his purposes. That’s why I’m here today. That’s a part of how I’m here today to be preaching to you is because God is bigger. He’s bigger than little human committees, and he’s bigger than human opinion, and he’s bigger than all the frustrating circumstances that you might have to work with.
[00:30:50] He’s able to bring about his purpose and he’s in charge of the heavens. in charge of every star up there that burns out. He’s in charge of the whole movement of the things here on earth and do you think he’s got any troubles or he’s got difficulty in looking after you, you little thing? You’re nothing of any worry to God, he can lead you. But what he wants you to do is to seek his leading and to believe in his leading even though there’s our subjectivity involved and sometimes you get it wrong. And God gets you, I love the story of the man who was with his family heading overseas to be a missionary. But World War II started out and the ship took a different journey and he never got to that place. God can bring about a World War III, oh I hope he doesn’t have to,
[00:31:53] but he can use whatever circumstance there is and in the middle of something that might be catastrophic for the world he has his way with all sorts of people. John Riddley was an Australian man who was in World Wars I and II I think and all of that catastrophe, what brought him to realise that his calling in life was to tell people about Jesus, he became an evangelist and when he demobbed, he had a wonderful ministry in Australia beyond earlier than my time. But my brother got named Peter Ridley Gibson because Dad wanted to have an evangelist for a son and so Peter got the name Ridley in the middle, that’s my older brother, but God has his way. He is big enough and if you want something out of the whole metaphor of the lights of the heavens of God being a son and a
[00:32:56] shield, it is that he is big enough to deal with leading you. I knew this would happen and I kept going. I’ve got another lot to say so I’ll begin on something else about God being a shield, this idea of God being a shield is because the fierceness of his son needs also a shield, but it’s also because in other respects God knows that the fierceness of the spiritual warfare that is called to us, to walk in with him, puts us in dangerous territory and when become a Christian, don’t think that that means everything becomes easy sailing, just the opposite. If you follow Jesus, you might end up in a boat where there’s a big storm in Lake Galilee like the disciples did, but they had to learn that there’s no safest place than being in the boat that Jesus is asleep in. So they cry out in terror, Lord save us, but he stands up and stills
[00:34:09] the storm. He’s in your boat. When you become a Christian, that’s what becoming a Christian is, is to welcome Jesus as the saviour of your soul. It is to accept his gift of eternal life that he died on the cross that you should be forgiven and have. It is to let him and his person as represented by his Spirit come in and be the one who leads you from inside out. That’s what it is to be a Christian and a part of what you need is that he’s going to lead you to do with things that are the battlegrounds that are going on between good and evil. I shouldn’t have said of good by right and wrong is a better way to say between how we understand the goodness of God and the evil of the evil one. So there is a need to be a shield.
[00:35:08] But that word shield, how does God do the shielding? Sometimes the shielding is that God has to help us recover from our own battles fights. There are times when we suffer an injury because we were involved in something bigger than we really realized and God needs to repair us and sometimes the things that get us wounded is our own stupid mistakes and doing the wrong things. Let’s turn to Psalm 119 and verses 67 to 72 and here it says before I was afflicted, before I had problems I’d gone Australia, I went astray. But now I keep your word. So the net outcome of this person reporting a bit of a failure of going astray and some afflictions that he got in going
[00:36:22] astray but after it’s all over he says I keep your word. Sometimes God needs to let us go through difficulties in order to chastise us back into the right track but now I keep your word. You are good and you do good. The goodness of God and how he provides for our needs leads him to do lots of things that are good. Teach me your statutes, in other words that I may learn to do good. So the insolence mere me with lies but with my whole heart I keep your precepts. I keep to your ideas of what should be done. Their heart is unfeeling like fat but I delight in your law. It is good for me that I was afflicted that I might learn your statutes and sometimes the fruit of things going wrong and sometimes the mistakes that we make drive us to get deeper at God’s way of doing things.
[00:37:39] They are His statutes. It is not just laws in the sense of if you break this you are going to get a big punishment. Small statutes is instructions as to how it is done. I delight in your law. The law isn’t only to show whether we’re sinners, it does that. It’s one of the chief purposes of the law, but the law is to show us which way to go. The law is to show us what God wants. There’s something very good about the law, and then the Old Testament as a Christian, we can grow, as we take on board, God teaching us the way he is reflected in the law and the way he wants us to be. and when we don’t manage to do it properly and get afflicted then we end up learning better his statutes. The law of your mouth is better to me than a thousands of golden silver pieces. There is tremendous blessing nothing to do with
[00:38:40] putting with you on a performance treadmill to earn your salvation. That’s the wrong way to take the law, and the Old Testament people made that mistake take off, but the law is really good, because it teaches you what works in God’s world. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. The person who spends their time on meditating in this book and going through it and learning some of those Old Testament Psalms, that person is getting richer and richer and richer in their personhood and in their ability to walk in this world made by God that his law gives good description of what will make it work. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. Let’s not leave aside the Old Testament
[00:39:36] because it’s filled with wisdom. Don’t you know that it talks about the wisdom in the Old Testament and the more you find out what makes this world tick and what makes God that he is and how he likes it and the more you conform to all of his statutes. This is not about getting legalistic, this is not about getting to be a person that’s holier than others. This is not about anything other than finding out how God made his world and how he’s given his statutes and we could We’d understand them as how to have the instruction book as to make a Christian and any life work properly, but especially a Christian month, the Old Testament is a major place to go to.
[00:40:22] The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. I’ve got a whole stack of quotes I wanted to bring to you. I think I’ve made my point, I won’t do any more. But the Lord wants to bless you, and His blessing isn’t only the forgiveness of sins and the fruit of the Gospel, if you’ve got the Gospel, you’ve got what God offers. Listen, you’ve only got a sum of it. God has a lot of things in that first verse,
[00:40:56] we’ll put that up again to finish on Psalm 84, 11-12. Psalm 84, 11, 12, for the Lord God is a son and a shield. Lord bestows favour and honour. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly. God wants to satisfy your longings. I know there are sometimes things happen to people and they have a suffering like the mother that can’t have a baby or like the person that loses the use of their legs in a wheelchair or like a family where the kids go off the track and end up in jail. I don’t know. There can be all sorts of things that we wouldn’t want to happen like haven’t got a ready explanation but I just know that God’s willingness, his wantingness is that no good thing will he withhold from those who walk uprightly and he’s got a lot of good things
[00:42:03] just to pour in your life they’re not just only salvation, they’re good things that if you walk with him… Blessed is the one who trusts in you. It is that faith that brings about the outcome of resting the God who has your best interests in his heart. Learn to trust him. Walk with him. That’s what he’s wanting you to do. Let’s have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we do thank you for being the sun and the shield. Lord, there’s all sorts of applications of that. I haven’t had time to do, but Lord, I thank you for the truth that’s here before us. That you’re calling us to walk with you and to trust in you. And rest in the goodness of your nature that you want to give us every good thing. Everything that works for the proper living of humanity as you designed it. Good in the sense of of that way the
[00:43:09] Hebrew word means. Oh Father, help us to trust you and increase our faith that we might learn what it is to be those who display the goodness of the Son and the shield of our God. In Jesus name we pray.