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A folding map only works if you already know where you are. Enough wrong turns, and you’re stuck staring at it with no idea how to find yourself—let alone get back on course. Psalm 89 asks what God’s promises do for those of us who aren’t the Hannahs and Davids, who look at the map and go the wrong way.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the illustration of being lost with a paper map—not knowing where you are, making wrong turns, unable to find yourself on the map. How does this illustration help you understand your own spiritual struggles? When have you felt spiritually “lost” in a way that made God’s promises seem distant or inaccessible?
The sermon emphasizes that God’s faithfulness isn’t reserved for “Hannahs” and “Davids”—people who seem to get it right—but extends to those of us who “go the wrong way and wander all the time.” What does it mean practically to receive God’s grace when you feel like you’ve disqualified yourself or gone too far off course?
John Calvin’s insight in the sermon is that the psalmist catalogs Israel’s sins comprehensively so we’ll recognize ourselves in them. Why do you think it’s important to see our own failures reflected in biblical accounts of unfaithfulness, rather than viewing those stories as being about “other people” or “worse sinners”?
The pastor contrasts Amazon’s claimed reliability with God’s faithfulness, noting that human systems eventually fail but God never “backtracks” on His promises. How does understanding God’s unwavering faithfulness change the way you respond when circumstances feel chaotic or when His promises seem unfulfilled in your lifetime?
If God’s faithfulness toward us is unconditional and unshakeable, how should that truth reshape the way we extend grace and forgiveness to others who have failed or hurt us?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, we are in a series looking at the better map that God has for us. Last week, Pastor Brandon took us to the beginning of 1 Samuel, looking at how Hannah trusted in God. In the way that God worked through Hannah’s life, it set up the whole foundation for the Davidic kingdom, which is the line of the Messiah, which takes us to Jesus. And you think about that, God laying out these different pieces. There’s that very distant, hard-to-access promise, in a sense, of a prophet that would come that Moses gave, we looked at two weeks ago. But now here is this promise to someone that is tangible, right? Here’s a child, and this child is going to play a part in this mission. You can just see how it all comes together to set up for the establishment of the kingdom.
But you think about that. Okay, so Hannah’s faithful. God works through Hannah. You end up with this incredible leader who then oversees the establishment of the monarchy. God’s working through him, of course, and has the joy of anointing the Messiah. That’s what Messiah means, anointed one. You think about this whole incredible thing, and one thing stops me in that. I’m not Hannah. I’m not half of Hannah. I think about it, and when we look at Hannah, or for that matter, if we look later on to, say, King David, right? He’s anointed by Samuel and becomes the first in the eternal line, and you think about that.
Samuel is an incredible man of God who has so many opportunities to show God’s faithfulness. David, for all his failings, is still this incredible man chosen by God to do this incredible thing and has so much faith, even as he has sinned as well. How do we really connect with them? How do we fit in when we struggle to do day-to-day what’s right? Sure, I can say, well, David messed up. He did some pretty awful things, but there are an awful lot of times where David has more faith than I ever have.
Sort of like, series being about maps, I talked a few weeks ago about a very simple map, but I want us to think for a moment, does anyone still have one of the big old paper folding maps for the state of Missouri in your car, or if you’re in a different state, for your state? Yeah, so a few do, and, you know, I love maps like that. They’re always fun to look at. You unfold them, and if you can get them folded back up and unfolded again, great. That’s the first challenge, but the other challenge with a map like that, so much more so than the little tourism map I was talking about, say, the strip on Country Music Boulevard in Branson or something, where it’s not that hard to figure out exactly where you are. Are there a bunch of theaters around you? Oh, I know where I am. No theaters? Okay, I’m not there.
With a big map like this map of Missouri, let’s say you turn around, and you’re in a town, and you make a wrong turn out in the country, and you go for a while, and then you make several more turns, and then you say, okay, I’m lost. I need my map, and before we could pull out a phone and tell it to locate, there was a problem that these maps couldn’t solve for me. You need to know where you are to find yourself on the map to figure out where you are, and if you don’t know at all where you are, what are you going to do?
It’s fine for the Hannas of the world who get things right and know how to stay fixed on where they’re going, and they open up the map, and boom, there it is. There’s God’s Promises. I’m just cruising along on it, but what do you do when you say, okay, I think I’m somewhere in the bottom right quadrant of the state, but I don’t know where, and I can’t see any signs, and then you find a highway sign, and this is what I would often do. I’d find the highway sign. Okay, I know I’m on Route 61. Great, and I’d say, okay, it looks like I need to turn this way, and I’d inevitably turn the wrong direction. I’m going north where I need to go south, or south where I need to go north, or whatever the case might be.
The Promises we read in God’s Word, how do they, what do they do if we’re in that boat? And we think about this better map. This better map is not just for Hannas, not even just for Davids. It’s for those of us who look at the map and go the wrong way.
Let’s go ahead and pray tonight that God would help us, because what we need to have applied to our hearts is that God’s faithfulness, it’s not just faithfulness for those who have everything in order, who know how to read the map all the time. It’s for those of us who go the wrong way and wander all the time. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, would you help us as we turn the map upside down, as we turn right when we should turn left, we make several wrong turns and just keep turning further and further away from where you want us to go? That you are the God who understands that, knows that about us, and loves us anyway. Well, Lord, would you provide us with the comfort that we need today? We pray this in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
So I think about this, and it’s so hard to read about these faithful people, but the Psalms aren’t surprised, because God isn’t surprised. Psalm 89, verse 30. Listen to what the psalmist says. If his sons, that’s David’s sons, forsake my law and do not follow my statutes, if they violate my decrees and fail to keep my commands, I will punish their sin with the rod, their iniquity with flogging.
You say, I thought this was supposed to be an encouraging sermon today. That doesn’t sound very encouraging, does it? Anyone feel encouraged by saying that God will punish people with flogging? Well, it may not be the most encouraging, but Psalm 89 is thought to have probably been written during the period of the exile. The people have been unfaithful. There was no longer a king sitting on the throne, because there was no throne to sit on. They were in Babylon, because they had turned away from their God. And so the people understand that something bad’s happened. It’s not like it’s saying it will happen. No, they understand clearly, right?
When something is horribly wrong in our lives, we don’t have to have anyone say, you know, something might go wrong in your life at some point. We get that. It’s, well, can my course be corrected? Is there a hope? Well, how did they get here? That’s often the first thing we need to ask. We need to understand why God has us in that spot. They needed to understand that. And so the psalmist recites what had happened.
He says, they profaned God’s law. Or if they violate my statutes, that’s a little milder. But it could be profane. I like profane, because it gets the sense of how brutal it was. It wasn’t just, you know, maybe we’ll sometimes not do what God’s called us to do. It was, we don’t care. We don’t want to follow the law. And he goes on, if they do not keep my commandments, and we might say, well, so what are statutes and what are commandments? Really, the point isn’t to break these down into categories and spend a lot of time on that. The point here is to say, if they could break it, they broke it. Let’s be comprehensive here, is basically what the psalmist has been saying. And not just they, we. We’ve broken it. That’s why we’re here right now, the psalmist says.
So how do we get from there back to God’s promises? How do we get back on the right highway? Well, that’s not always easy. It’s not easy at all. It’s impossible if it’s up to us, because what do you know? After we went down the road, the road closed. The bridge is out now. We can’t get back.
But the psalm tells us that there’s hope. It’s not over. Why are we starting? Now, we’re in the middle of the psalm, but why are we starting with this broken down, unfaithful picture? Why would we want to go there for hope? Well, I really like what John Calvin says reflecting on this passage. He says the reason why the psalmist makes this big deal here of what they’ve done, and he says, let’s be comprehensive about it, so that when we read this psalm, we’re reminded that whatever sins we’ve committed, they’re encompassed in this.
We don’t say, well, okay, if there’s a route back here that’s being described in the psalm, maybe it’s good for people that didn’t do what I did. If they did what I did, you just say, too bad the bridge is out. The psalmist says, no, let’s be clear. The people being referred to here, they’re like us. Whatever the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life is, that goes into the categories that they did. And so when we read this psalm, the point is for us to hear this and say, oh, these aren’t the heroes of the faith that, yeah, they did some bad things, right? David did some bad things, but he was so good the rest of the time, somehow he made up for it. No, the point is, whatever we’ve done, God knows that we could do it and that we would do it. You’re not surprising me. I knew it. You’re not surprising me. But I’m your faithful God who gives you his faithfulness.
We can all think of the stories of where we’ve failed, those things that we’ve done, those things that we wake up in the middle of the night and we beat ourselves up with, those things that we think, oh, could God really forgive that? Sometimes, on the other hand, we become blind to sin, right? A lot of the people in Israel before the exile, they’d become blind to it. If you’d ask them, are you sinning against the Lord and doing all kinds of deeply displeasing things that he told you not to do? They’d say, well, no, of course not, right?
Every time I’m on the way to the temple for the prophets of Baal to get a prophecy or to have them pray to Baal to bring a fruitful season to my fields, every time I also stop and make a donation at the temple of the Lord. I still make the sacrifices. And of course, it’s absurd, but it’s funny how we can compartmentalize like that and say, yeah, every time I go and do what God doesn’t want me to do, I stopped and did what God wanted me to do first. It’s no problem.
They violate my statutes and do not keep my commandments. They profaned the commandments of God and we profaned the commandments of God, and God knows that. If we support false teaching, if we spread gossip, if we let our temper get out of control, God knows that we were going to do that.
He says, I know you and I love you. But the first thing we need to understand is that our name is not perfect. Our name is not great. Our name is sinner. Romans 3:23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
I read about a woman by the name of Nantra Yantaprasert. I think I got that right. It’s quite a mouthful. She lives in New York and I think she was used to, for her entire life, people trying to spill out her last name. Yantaprasert. And so when she became engaged to be married, she was eager to take her husband’s name because it wouldn’t be so hard for people to say any longer. Ah, here’s a solution. Seemed good.
Her husband’s name is only four letters long. Nice, simple, easy. On the phone, you don’t have to spell for a long time to get your name down. You just utter those four letters and probably, what do you know? People know how to spell it anyway. His name, his last name’s Null. N-U-L-L. Easy, right?
Well, suddenly though, she found herself invited to a friend’s wedding back in India where her family’s from and she wanted to go back. She tried to buy the plane ticket and every time she tried to buy the plane ticket, an error cropped up. She could never get everything to clear. She couldn’t get her passport to clear and she couldn’t figure out why until it finally became clear it was because of her last name.
Null is the value that computers use to represent a missing field, something that hasn’t been filled in. And so whenever someone would type in her last name, the computer would say, oh, you didn’t give a last name yet and reject it.
And so here she was, she was riding high on this idea that I now have a name that isn’t going to be a pain. This is wonderful. And she’d gone from here’s a difficult name to here’s a name that brings up errors and you can’t even go anywhere.
Israel, they’ve been chosen by God. They’ve been given the name God’s chosen people and they were riding high on that even as they turned their back on him. They didn’t realize that their name wasn’t faithful. It was null. And if there isn’t someone to reprogram the system and make it work, they’re just going to get rejected.
It was sinner, so is ours. But how did Natra Null get to fly to India? She did get to, she made it to the wedding. How did she get to do it? Well, she did it because someone went in and fixed the system. Someone found the bug in the system that didn’t tell the difference between when the field is blank and when someone actually intends to write in N-U-L-L, went in and fixed it and made it so she could get cleared with her passport and take the flight.
And what we need to understand about this passage that initially doesn’t feel all that helpful is that it’s about how God corrects us because he loves us. The term blows sounds awfully harsh, but it’s referring to the sort of discipline a parent would do to a child. It’s not talking about beating someone to a pulp. It’s talking about correction. What’s God doing? He’s correcting his children. And I think that’s the point. He’s doing something for them.
Calvin, going on in this passage, he says, the reason why God leaves hope of pardon, even for detestable and deadly transgressions, is that the enormity of our sin may not keep us back or hinder us from seeking reconciliation with him. You need to know that. You see, yes, when we’re presented with the opportunity, who give God our unfaithfulness, but in exchange, God gives us his faithfulness.
This map that we’re seeing form here, as we think about how God is putting the pieces into place, he’s putting in faithful heroes of the faith that do things that then set other pieces in motion to give us the messianic line, to give us ultimately Jesus, the incarnation here as God came into the world in the flesh in that line.
Why is he doing that? Because he knows that we have detestable sins, that we do those things that Calvin refers to there, that this violating of statutes, this perversion, this failing to keep commandments, it’s every awful thing we ever do. God says, I know that you were going to do that. I knew it. You’re not surprising me. But I’m your faithful God who gives you his faithfulness.
Verse 33, but I will not take my love from him. That is the line of David. Nor will I ever betray my faithfulness. I will not violate my covenant or alter what my lips have uttered. Once for all, I have sworn by my holiness and I will not lie to David that his line will continue forever. His throne endure before me like the sun. It will be established forever like the moon. The faithful witness in the sky.
God gives us his faithfulness. As the psalmist describes what the people have done, he’s including the line of David in that. The line of David was rotten a lot of the time. They did horrible things. They misled the people. They led the people into sin oftentimes rather than leading them towards the Lord. But God says, I’m faithful. I don’t forget my promises. You may not see that in this moment, but let me tell you that my promises is true right now to these people out in exile wondering what’s going on as it was when David had all of his power and splendor. It’s not any less. God didn’t forget.
The grace to that line speaks of God’s grace for all of us. That he doesn’t forget you and he doesn’t forget me either. He looks at us and says, yeah, I know you’re not perfect. I didn’t tell you I’d rescue you because I thought that you were the ones that weren’t so messed up.
You’re driving down the road and you see a garage sale and there’s something that you need for your house and you see it sitting there on the driveway and you think, well, I’ll pull over and take a look. Maybe I can save some money. And so you pull over and it’s all beaten up and it says, as is for parts.
Well, if you need it for your house, you probably get back in your car and say, well, that’s not it, right? It’s broken, I don’t want it. Well, God sees us as is for parts. We’re broken, we’re useless. And what does God say? He says, I want you exactly as you are because I’m the one who fixes you.
Now it’s been noted here that as it talks about that permanent appointment or that promise to David that God would give a king forever, what could he have done? He could have meant, well, for as long as the kingdom lasts, right? Well, for now, there’ll be a king. And then when there’s no more Israel, well, there was never a time that it was the kingdom and there wasn’t a line of someone, an heir of David there. But now that there’s no kingdom, let’s forget it.
That’s not what God does. Forever is forever in God’s mind. God doubles down. He says, no, I’m gonna keep you here. I’m gonna keep loving you. And when God can say, well, you are so unfaithful. I forget that promise. No, what does he do? He doubles down, Hosea 3:5. “Afterward, the Israelites will return and seek the Lord, their God, and David, their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last days.”
Amos 9:11. “And that day, I will restore David’s fallen shelter. I will repair its broken walls and restore its ruins and will rebuild it as it used to be.”
What does God do? He says, no, I know that you’re unfaithful. I know that you’re going to wander. And you know what? I’m gonna tell you how faithful I will be to you all the more, even in the midst of that. Even as I have to correct you, even as the prophets come and reset things, even as you find yourself in exile and you’re away from where you wanted to be and the promises you wanted, I am going to be with you.
A couple of verses earlier in Psalm 89, verse 27, “And I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” We didn’t need to promise that he would choose a firstborn, right? Human beings can’t choose a firstborn, but God can. He didn’t have to make the line of David the firstborn. He didn’t have to choose that, but he did, knowing all this. And he applies it to all who trust in him.
Romans chapter 4: “For if those who depend on the law are heirs, faith means nothing and the promise is worthless because the law brings wrath. Where there is no law, there is no transgression. Therefore, the promise comes by faith so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring, not only those who are on the right path, but all those who are on the wrong path. Not only those who are of the law, but to those who have the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all.”
God can choose a firstborn and God can choose descendants of Abraham. And he does. He takes us and says, you’re mine. I want you to be mine. And because I’m choosing you, it’s not because of what you’re doing. It’s not because you’ve measured up to a certain level and now you’re good enough to be part of my family. But no, I am choosing you. You can’t somehow be unchosen. You can’t disqualify yourself and pass away. It’s something that people here need to hear.
Yes, were they facing the consequences of their sin? Was it nasty and painful at that moment? Yes. Do we see the ugliness of sin and how just this world is broken and the bad things that happen? Yes. But God says in the midst of that, hear what I always say. I’m faithful.
If you’re a geek like me, you already knew this. You knew that a vast percentage of what happens on the internet runs on Amazon’s infrastructure. But for a lot of people, if you don’t really get into the nitty gritty of technical stuff, you probably don’t think about it, right? I mean, you go to, say, Disney+, you’re not thinking that Amazon has involvement in that. You go to your bank, you’re not thinking Amazon has involvement in that. You’re thinking you’re dealing with your bank or your Disney+, or whatever it might be.
Until a day like, oh, say, last Monday. Amazon’s systems run about 37% of the internet, they say today. And they do that because they’ve been known as incredibly reliable. Amazon built these huge resilient systems because they needed to deal with Black Friday shoppers as they grew, and they learned how to do it, and they did it, and then they sold it to other people and they’ve been doing ever since.
And you might say it’s mostly reliable until it isn’t. And actually, in all fairness, I could still say it’s mostly reliable because if you think about how much of the time you don’t spend thinking about how Amazon runs a lot of the internet, well, that’s a sign that it usually works. But like everything human that we do, at some point, it doesn’t. And then what? Well, then there’s scramble. Maybe we need to not have all of our eggs in one basket. We need to have several different things we can depend on because, you know, sometimes it goes down and I don’t want 37% of the internet to go down at the same time. You don’t, right? It’s mostly reliable.
And so if I were a salesperson for Amazon’s cloud services right now, I’d say, well, look at how reliable we are most of the time. And I’d start to, maybe we’re unbreakable before. Let me backpedal that just a little bit. I’ll just talk about how percentage-wise, you know, it’s really pretty good if you look at it. We start to backpedal, soften the promise a little bit, right?
If you ever had to sell something that isn’t perfectly reliable, you know that once you realize it’s not reliable, maybe you need to not build it up quite as much. And the tempting thing would be in the Psalms and the prophets to say, you know, God’s a really faithful, powerful God. But if you mess up so much, you know, at some point, at some point, maybe, maybe, maybe it just doesn’t work anymore.
But now what does the Psalms say? It says that God continues to be faithful like the moon, verse 37. It shall be established forever, a faithful witness in the skies. God’s covenant doesn’t weaken. How can that be? The Davidic line isn’t faithful enough to even see it go through, right? The kingdom has fallen. How can it be?
Well, in Jesus, we finally see how God’s promises are indeed as stable as the moon. Luke 1:32. He will be called great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father, David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever. His kingdom will never end.
People in Psalm 89, they were hundreds of years before this, they couldn’t see the fullness of it. But God says, my promise is so sure that even if you can’t see it right now, even if it feels distant, know this, know this, it’s true.
And for you and me, as God’s promises seem at times distant, as the earth seems broken, he says, know this, my promise is true. We might live in the not yet. We don’t see it fully. We don’t have the king of the universe wiping away the tears from our eyes today, but he says, that’s coming and you can trust it.
Today is Reformation Sunday. And when we think about what the Reformation was about as most basic, it was really this. Can we trust that God’s promise is unequivocally true, that what he says he’ll do for us will happen, or is it about what we can do? Whether it’s our faithfulness or our money buying replacement for faithfulness.
When Martin Luther nailed those 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church, it was all about depending on God as genuinely, unequivocally, lastingly, unmistakably faithful.
We live in the not yet, but we can have confidence right now that God is faithful. And so whatever we see in our lifetime, and if our lifetime ends before Jesus returns, it doesn’t change the fact that he is faithful to you and he’s faithful to me and he will remain so. He will not allow his mission to fail, and his mission is a mission of salvation, of restoration.
And if God is that faithful to us, then he sends us on that mission. And he says, be those who look at those around us, and we see the ways that those around us do awful things and get things terribly wrong and fail over and over again, but be those who give forgiveness because we are those who have received forgiveness.
You see, what this assures us of is because God’s faithful, one, he’s faithful to us and he’ll forgive us, and two, we are those who then carry that burden. We are those who then carry that faithfulness onto others. It’s not a license to sin, but rather it’s a license to give grace, to experience that grace, to dwell in that grace, and then to give that grace. Because we aren’t reliable. The sons of David weren’t reliable. The people of Israel weren’t reliable. The people of the church over the millennia, we have not been reliable, but God is anyway. And the God who is always reliable is reliable even to us unreliable ones.
That’s the hope we have tonight. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we come before you as those who are unreliable, who get so much wrong. Lord, you are reliable, and we pray that you’d apply that truth to our hearts, that we would feel it, that we would know that your promises are good and true and will come to fruition, that they will not fail, that you don’t backpedal, you don’t try to soften it. You are the God who is fully committed every day for eternity to your faithfulness. And you show that faithful love to us. Would you help us to feel that today, to live in that today, and then to show that to others today? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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