Sermon Tone Analysis

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Introduction
In the October of 1898, Theodore Roosevelt was one of the brightest rising stars of New York state politics.
Just two months before, he had returned to Long Island as a war hero, having led the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry (the “Rough Riders”) to spectacular victory in the Spanish-American War, and now the Republican party was hoping he would lead them to another victory by taking the Governor’s mansion in November.
So Teddy enlisted a few of his Rough Rider friends and set off on a whistle-stop tour of the state, making hundreds of campaign speeches from the back of his train carriage.
When the train came through Port Jervis, Teddy asked one of his men, Sgt.
Buck Taylor, to introduce him.
As the gathered reporters hastily scribbled down his every word, the sergeant poured out his heart to the crowd:
“I want to talk to you about mah Colonel.
He kept ev’y promise he made to us and he will to you.
He told us we might meet wounds and death, and we done it, but he was thar in the midst of us, and when it came to the great day he led us up San Juan Hill like sheep to the slaughter and so he will lead you!”
If only today’s politicians would be so honest in their campaigns!
We even have a name for the kind of breezy dishonesty that pervades our politics: “Campaign promises!”
They know they’re going to break their promises, we know they’re going to break them—they may as well just come clean about the fact that they’re going to betray the trust we put in them!
Now, it may feel uncomfortable to make this comparison, but I believe this is where our psalm today is taking us: How many times have you felt that all God’s promises to you were just “campaign promises?”
That you trusted Him to care for you, but your circumstances make it feel an awful lot like He has forgotten you.
You have not wandered away from Him, you are not flirting with sin or disobedience, you’re leaning on Him and not on your own strength.
But instead of responding with faithfulness, it seems like He is leaving you to twist in the wind.
A friend of mine who has spent thirty years ministering and living in South Asia, pouring his whole life into the people there, was recently denied re-entry into the country.
He is sixty-two years old—he’s lived there for most of his life, and now his whole life and ministry has been taken away from him.
(Some of his friends had postponed their daughter’s graduation party for months so that he could be there for it, and now he never will!)
In his recent prayer letter, he wondered why God would pull the rug out from under him like this? Thirty years of faithful Gospel service, gone with the wind.
Have you had that happen to you?
You have been as faithful to God as you know how to be, but it feels like He isn’t being faithful to you?
Your kids return your faithful love and sacrifice with scorn and selfishness, your boss takes advantage of your integrity and honesty by giving you all the work that no one else wants to do, you step out in faith and follow God’s call to a new ministry or avenue of service, and the people you’re supposed to be partnering with greet you with distrust and apathy.
You’re trusting God, leaning on Him, seeking Him in prayer and worship, and in return it seems like He is leading you like “sheep to the slaughter.”
That’s the question the psalmist is struggling with here in Psalm 44:
What are we to do when what we know about God (His faithfulness) conflicts with what we experience of Him (that He has forgotten us)?
Look, for instance, starting in verse 17:
Why does God sometimes meet our faithfulness with silence?
Why does He seem to turn His face away from us when we have been seeking His face with everything in us?
What I want to show you this morning from this psalm is that God’s forgetfulness does not mean faithlessness, but that:
God’s “faithful forgetfulness” is a precious path to our Christlikeness.
Look with me at the way the psalmist lays out his plea.
First, he sings of how
I.
We Remember God (Verses 1-8)
Look at verses 1-4:
He says, “God, you have been faithful!
You have delivered us, you have fought for us, you have delighted in us!
We know that you are a faithful God!” The psalmist sings that
God has been faithful to defend, deliver and delight in His people
And then he goes on to express his deep and unreserved faith in God in verses 5-8:
That word, Selah, at the end of verse 8, is the psalmist’s invitation to pause and consider what he has just sung.
He really wants us to get the point that he is trusting in God.
It’s not about him or his own strength or his own goodness—it is about God!
If he had written this psalm a couple thousand years later, he might very well have ended this section with the Latin phrase Soli Deo Gloria!—the cry of the Reformation, “Glory to God alone!”
The psalmist shows a deep and genuine trust in the faithfulness of God.
But then in verse 9, how does God respond to the Psalmist’s full-throated cry of faith in Him?
II.
God Forgets Us (Verses 9-16)
Look at verses 9-10:
It seems as though God has forgotten any of His past faithfulness to the psalmist, doesn’t it?
Instead of defending him from his enemies, God is delivering him up to them
Look at verses 11-12:
He goes on to say that God has “made us a byword among the nations and a laughingstock among the peoples” (v.
14), and that he is continually disgraced and embarrassed before the taunts and revilings of his enemies (vv.
15-16).
And you can hear the anguish in his voice as he goes in in verses 17-19:
“God, why are You doing this??
We haven’t betrayed You, or forgotten Your Name (v.
20)—so why have You forgotten us??” Verse 24:
He hasn’t forgotten God, but it seems like God has forgotten him!
By the end of the psalm,
All the psalmist can do is stake his hope on God’s unbreakable promises to love him.
Verse 26:
As we’ve seen in the past few weeks, the psalmist doesn’t just listen to himself: (“God has forgotten you, He doesn’t keep His promises—He’s turned against you; you’re on your own!”)
He preaches to himself: “God cannot break His promises to His people!” Notice in Verse 23, he cries out
Once again, see how he calls on God as YHWH, as if to say, “You are the God of the Covenant—you cannot break your promises to Your people!
Whatever is going on right now that makes it seem as though your love for me has failed, I know it cannot be true!
You are YHWH, and you will never let your covenant love for me fall!”
The psalmist is clinging to what he knows about God—that God may seem “forgetful”, but it is faithful forgetfulness!
III.
God’s Faithful Forgetfulness
God is not abandoning him because He has stopped loving him—He is sending this turmoil and trouble and scorn and isolation and hardship his way because He loves him!
This sense of abandonment the psalmist is experiencing (and that we experience from time to time as well) is not a sign that God’s love has failed.
Instead,
This apparent forgetfulness on God’s part is not a failure of His faithfulness, but is in fact another expression of His faithfulness
We see this clearly when we set Psalm 44 up against the one place that it is quoted in the New Testament.
Turn with me to Romans 8 (p.
945).
Paul is talking about the steadfast love of Christ for us that will hold us through any trial.
Look starting in verse 35:
Consider this: When the Apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wanted to quote a Scripture that proved his point that nothing would ever cause God to turn His love away from His people, where did he turn?
To Psalm 44! Paul says, “Yes, there are times when you walk through such a dark place that it seems like God’s love has failed you.
You can go through such times of hardship, misery, scorn, abuse, hatred, loneliness and pain that you begin to wonder if God has turned against you, and is sending you to the slaughterhouse.
But that is not a sign that His love has failed!
Because nothing in all creation can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus!
Beloved, never forget that:
In Jesus we have the ultimate example of God’s “faithful forgetfulness”
Isaiah writes that:
Jesus Himself was “led like a lamb to the slaughter”—utterly innocent, utterly faithful to His Father, yet He was “cut off out of the land of the living”, taken away, “crushed” and “put to grief” (Isa.
53:10).
But did God really forget Him? Did He abandon His soul to the grave and leave Him in the tomb?
No—He raised Him to life again!
When He “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death on a cross”, what happened next?
God’s “faithful forgetfulness” does not end in death, but in resurrection
Christian, here is your hope when you feel like God has abandoned you, when He has turned His face away from your plight, when all of His words of faithfulness sound like empty campaign promises!
When you experience the “forgetfulness of God” in those times of darkness and isolation —you are experiencing the same darkness Jesus did.
You are walking in His steps when you are “killed all the day long; regarded as sheep to be slaughtered!”
The times when we experience the “faithful forgetfulness of God” are
IV.
Our Path to Christlikeness
Look at what the Scripture says.
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