Hello, and welcome to the Westside Church's special Monday Morning Coffee Podcast. On this podcast, our preacher, Mark Roberts, will help you get your week started right with a look back at yesterday's sermon so that we can think through each other and better work the applications into our daily life. Mark will then look forward into this week's final reading so that we can know what to expect and watch for. And he may have some extra bonus thoughts from time to time. So grab a cup of coffee as we start the week together on Monday morning coffee with Mark.

I'm Mark. I've got some great coffee here, and I am excited about this week. This is Thanksgiving week, one of my favorite holidays all year long. I know it's one of your favorites as well. We've got the Thanksgiving prayer service coming up Wednesday night and yesterday. Just worked on gratitude and Thanksgiving. Love every bit of that. Think it's so important, and I'm so glad to have the podcast today. Think about Thanksgiving more, develop that more, and keep that spiritual momentum rolling into this very, very special week. So grab your Bible, grab your coffee, let's grow together. Let's think a little bit more about the sermon in the 1040 yesterday. I preached from Luke 17, talked about those 10 lepers. Where are the nine? And I do think that when we start talking about Turkey Day, we focus on the food and the family. And as I said several times yesterday, the football. And there's not anything wrong with that. But the real lesson from Luke 17 is about spiritual blessings, blessings from God. Sometimes those can seem almost invisible. And Jesus healed 10 men of leprosy, yet only one of them came back to say thank you. Nine just went on with their lives, taking for granted the miracle that had changed everything. That was a visible blessing. How much more are invisible blessings? We need to stop and think about our life in Christ. We've been forgiven, we've been redeemed, we've been adopted into God's family, promised eternal life. We've been given the Spirit to lead us and guide us. These spiritual blessings far outweigh any physical gift, any feast, any blessing that we might know in the material realm. But we've got to make an effort to be thankful. Gratitude is not just a polite word. It's not just a cliche that we mumbled in prayer. It is about our heart. Stopping, turning back, and acknowledging the giver of every good gift, like that one leper did. So this Thanksgiving, we want to be like that leper who returned. We will not take the blessings of God for granted. We'll pause, we'll reflect, we'll pour out our things for the spiritual blessings that make all of the difference. And if you remember what I said in the 9 a.m. yesterday from Psalm 65, we'll let those spiritual blessings drive all of our Thanksgiving. Thankful for salvation, mercy, love, forgiveness, and that will lead us to be thankful for the bountiful physical blessings that we also enjoy. That is what Thanksgiving Week needs to be all about. And I hope yesterday's sermon set the right note for that and set you on your way to a week of extra special Thanksgiving. And now let's turn to the Psalms. There's a lot here that you will recognize that you've heard before. And I love how this Psalm is just about God. It's a thanksgiving Him for the greatness of God. It extols God's power and majesty nearly from every conceivable angle. And it is beautifully set up. The structure of the Psalm is simple: four paragraphs, six verses each, and the key ideas are that God knows the psalmist completely and intimately, that God searches man's ways, looking carefully at how we live, and that God is a God who cares about us as individuals. Let's tackle some of this. Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me, verse one. Known, you know, verse two when I sit down and when I rise up. That's very relational. Know, have relationship with here. And sitting down and rising up, verse two suggests that God knows all that we are doing. He is intimately involved in our lives. And this psalm will help you see that God knows you better than you know yourself. Maybe that gives us a hint when somebody says, I need to find myself. A good place to start is in God's book, because God made you and God knows you better than you know yourself. You need to find yourself, let the Lord help you do that. Verse 7, you can't go anywhere that God is not. Where shall I go from your spirit, the Holy Spirit, that's God's presence? And the psalmist says, verse 8, that God is aware of what happens everywhere, even in the realm of the dead. And I love wings of the morning. That's such a beautiful expression. That's a reference there to the atmosphere, that's a reference there to space. And then if I go as high up as I could go, go down as low as I could go in the sea, it won't make any difference. The Lord will know where I am and will know what I am doing. He is the creator. Verse 13, he formed my inward parts. United me together in my mother's womb. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. If you know anything about infants and babies and having a child, the more science uncovers, the more medicine knows about bringing a new life into the world, the more amazing and astonishing it is. Just incredibly complex, and yet God made that whole process where it works so well. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. Verse 15 and 16 seem to even say that when David was an embryo, when he was in the womb, God knows him. Some have taken verse 16, and the Hebrew there is complex, that God has mapped out life in advance. And certainly God certainly knows all the decisions that we will be making and those kind of things, but it does seem to say more about when I was in the womb, you still knew me even there. And then there is a zeal for God, beginning in verse 19. Because we love the Lord, those who oppose God, we have to oppose them. And so finally the psalm concludes then by saying, Search me, God, you will see. I stand for you and I stand with you. It is an amazing psalm. It is a powerful psalm. God knows us. And I think sometimes some of these ideas are used. I can remember singing that song as a child, there's an all-seeing eye, and it was just creeping me out. And that whole concept of God's just looking over your shoulder all the time. And well, I guess if we're doing bad things, doing things we shouldn't be doing, then that ought to creep you out. But the psalmist here finds that to be wonderfully reassuring and comforting. God knows where I am all the time. God is always aware of me and what I need and who I am. It's not designed to creep us out. The giant eyeball in the sky is watching us, big brothers coming after us. That's not the point of Psalm 139 at all. The point is the Lord knows me, cares about me, and knows what I need and where I am, and every time I am in his presence, what joy and comfort that is. The reading for Monday, Psalm 139. It's Tuesday. It is Tuesday, and our reading today is the 65th Psalm, Psalm 65. And I preached on this Psalm Sunday in the 9 a.m. So there's really not much here that I want to add to that. One writer said, This psalm, this beautiful psalm, is a c has a climax that is as fresh and irrepressible as the land it describes. It puts every harvest hymn to shame. And I think that's exactly right. It's a song that well expresses the deep dependence upon God that those who make their living from the land have always felt. And the challenge from Sunday's sermon was for city dwellers like you and me, people who think that all those groceries and so forth just show up at the Kroger. They're growing down there somehow, I guess. No, we need to get back to the reality that God makes all of those things happen, and we need to be thankful to God for all of those physical blessings. It is, I mentioned this heavily on Sunday, it is infused with grace, grace that begins with forgiveness in the first four verses, and that empowers and leads everything else that's going to happen in this Psalm. So lots on Psalm 65 Sunday in the 9 a.m. I hope you made some notes on the margin of your Bible. Go back and listen to that sermon. Or if you did not get to hear it on Sunday, go and listen to that sermon. That'll stand as the podcast for Tuesday. There's no Zoom call tonight. This is Thanksgiving week. Lots of crazy things happening. Lots of people going and coming and all sorts of things. No Zoom call tonight. I'll see you on the podcast tomorrow. The reading for Tuesday, Psalm 65. It's Wednesday. It is Wednesday, a special, special day at Westside. Tonight we'll have our annual Thanksgiving Eve prayer service. It is the best Wednesday night of the year. I can hardly wait. Before we get there, though, we need to do some daily Bible reading. We're in Psalm 68. Psalm 68 is easily one of the most difficult psalms in the Bible. I'll talk about why in just a moment. It is, one scholar said, boisterous and exhilarating and uncontainably enthusiastic. Well, I need a little more coffee to go with that. And at some point I wrote in the margin of my Bible, this is the Tigger Psalm, because it's just so bouncy, flouncy, trouncy, pouncy like Tigger is. You know how much I love Tigger. This is a pretty Tiggerish psalm, but it doesn't always fit our normal patterns and paradigms of thinking about the Psalms. It seems to be largely a hymn of praise to God. And if you look at verse 35, it certainly ends that way. Awesome is God from his sanctuary, the God of Israel, he's the one who gives power and strength to his people. Blessed be God. What does that mean to bless God? To bless God means to recognize his greatness and strength and gracious bounty, to express our gratitude and delight at who he is. And usually this Psalm is associated with the capture of Jerusalem and especially the bringing of the Ark into Jerusalem, although that's not entirely certain. Maybe you're thinking, well, it looks kind of long, but what's the big deal? Why is this so troublesome? And the answer is it's very difficult to translate. The difficulties here in all of the Hebrew are almost legendary among scholars. More than 15 words and expressions in this psalm don't appear anywhere else in the biblical literature. And there are as many as two dozen words which are found less than 20 times anywhere else in biblical literature. In fact, the Masoretic text, which is one of the best and oldest texts from which your Old Testament comes from, in that Masoretic text, they used a special marker to indicate to the scribe that his word appeared only in the text here, and that way he would copy it exactly right. There are 32 of those markings in Psalm 68. The other issue is it's just really disconnected. Someone said it reads like the index page from your hymn book. It's just all over the map, bounce and bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, just all excited about what God is doing and who God is, but it doesn't seem to follow any discernible pattern. I'll give you an outline for what it's worth. God is coming, verse 1 to 6. God is marching, verses 7 to 18. God is dwelling with us, verses 19 to 27, and God is receiving our universal praise in the end of the Psalm, verse 28 to 35. It really starts off pretty simply, and I don't think it's too difficult, but then about the time you hit verse 11, it becomes really hard to make some sense of. There's this imagery in the first stanza of defeated soldiers fleeing in panic. And then as we get to this God marching before us part in verses 70 to 18, it gets a little harder. There are a lot of echoes here of the song of Deborah, particularly starting in about verse 11. And some of this is very hard to make sense of. The women announced the news, the women defied the spoil, though the men lie among the sheepfold. Remember how some of the tribes didn't come and help Deborah in that great fight in Judges chapter 5, and she shames Reuben for staying home. Maybe there's an echo there. What are the wings of the dove in verse 13? One scholar lists all these different options. Israel basking in prosperity, the enemy in flight, the glory of the Lord, a particular trophy seized in battle. Someone else wondered if it could be signal doves, kind of like homing pigeons. You turn them loose to bring news of the battle. And then we have snow in verse 14. What's that doing in the battle? Maybe God is using the weather as a weapon. Just not certain at all. In verse 18, Paul actually quotes that passage and applies it to Jesus. Here, the captives are probably enemy prisoners. Paul applies the Psalm to the gifts that Christ gives to the church after his victory at Calvary and taking death as his captive. That's a little different twist there. And then we get this idea of God dwelling with us, and things start to smooth out a little bit until I hit verse 21 and I've got hairy crowns. And that may that may signify these enemy warriors who are so strong and masculine, they've got those long flowing locks of hair. Maybe that's Absalom. I think about the Viking warriors are famous for having those blonde braids. And then it closes with this section that really sounds kind of prophetic where Gentile nations come and they submit to Jehovah the God of Israel. They bring him their praise. O kingdoms of the earth, verse 32, sing to God, sing praises to the Lord. And I like this idea here of God being the sky rider, verse 33, to him who rides in the heavens. That's a common image in the prophets. God is the one who rides on the clouds. Oh, I forgot to say something about verse 30. I can never miss an opportunity to say something about hippopotamuses. Rebuke the beasts that dwell among the reeds, verse 30. Yep, that's probably a probably a reference to the hippo, maybe a reference to Egypt. The hippo would be a symbol of Egypt in some ways. Wow. Didn't think, didn't think you were going to have hippopotamuses on your plate today. Maybe saying on your plate is not the way I want to say that as we're getting ready for Thanksgiving, but didn't imagine we'd be talking about hippos on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. But here we are. Psalm 68 says a lot of great things. Figuring out exactly how all that fits together and the overall themes, pretty complicated and not easy, but I hope this psalm helps you today. And I look forward to seeing you tonight in our Wednesday, our Thanksgiving Eve prayer service. If you're not a member of the Westside Church, you're certainly welcome to come and worship with us tonight. It is a wonderful, wonderful time of prayer, and it will put you in the right frame of mind for the events of tomorrow. If you are too far away to commute over and come see us tonight, please do join us, live stream that. There's a little bit of terminology in verse 9 that may say some things about the Babylonian captivity, for example, and some wonder if maybe this is a hymn of David's, and then it got adapted later on by God's people when they were in exile. And I like how this psalm just opens verses 1 to 5 with a call for one person to praise God. And the psalmist tries to praise God with everything that he has. And someone has called this opening section the Lord's benefit package, and it really is magnificent. Then we get the idea of man's history, the wayward child and the gentle father, verses 6 to 18. And this psalm is very much about how God forgives. The language in verse 12 is so beautiful. As far as the East is from the West, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. He knows our frame, verse 14. He knows that we are dust. He knows our frailty. He knows our humanity. He knows our struggles. And then all are called to praise God, verses 19 to 22. In some ways, this psalm reminds of other psalms like Psalm 22 that just open up into ever-widening circles. The individual praises God, the community of God's people praise God. The entire world is invited to praise God. That's what's happening, is this psalm comes to a swelling and beautiful conclusion. Bless the Lord. Be thankful to God for all his benefits. And please do make a note, verse 18. Who blesses the Lord? Those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments. Psalm 103 is our reading today on Thanksgiving Day. It's Friday. Welcome to Friday. Today we read the 108th Psalm. Today is Black Friday. I'm old enough to remember when that meant you got up at 2 o'clock in the morning and went and froze to death standing in line outside of Best Buy or Bass Pro because you wanted some amazing door buster special. You wanted a giant TV for$5, or you wanted some kind of hunting gear, maybe expensive boots for a buck. And I've done that. Now we all just now we all just surf the internet and click on stuff. Black Friday started in July. I'm not sure what to make of all of that. But in the middle of all the Black Friday shopping, how about we read the 108th Psalm? This is a little song and it does have a big secret in it. And that secret is what? It's a combo psalm. It is a combination. Verses 1 to 5 come from Psalm 57, verses 7 to 11, and verses 6 to 11 come from Psalm 60, verses 5 to 12. We read Psalm 108 back in week 42. So if some of this sounds familiar, then yes, it is familiar. We've talked a little bit about this before, and we've worked through this psalm before. But I'll say a little bit more about it. The important thing about that, knowing that it's a combo psalm, is that we can go back to Psalm 60, and there's a heading there that ascribes that Psalm to David during a threat from the Edomites. That's probably the crisis of 2 Samuel 8. So now you know that this is a lament and that David will be asking for God's help. And so it begins, verses 1 to 5, with the praise of God and with confidence in God. Verse 1, my heart is steadfast. I'm not going to let this, this isn't going to shake my faith. I have constancy in the Lord. I'm going to stand with the Lord. Please notice, even in the middle of a crisis, the psalmist does not begin immediately with, Lord, this is what I need. This is what you need to do. Get on this. Instead, there's lots of thanksgiving, praising of God. Then, verse 6 through verse 9, David prays for God's help in the battle. And the keynote of the Psalm really is verse 6. There, your beloved ones may be delivered. Give salvation by your right hand and answer me. And note the reliance on the promises of God. Verse 7, God has promised in his holiness that he will do these things. And then finally, the Psalm concludes. David expresses his confidence that with God we will gain the victory. Verses 10 to 13. It's a beautiful little psalm and a helpful little psalm. Use that psalm when your heart is crying out to God, when you need deliverance. And remember verse 13 with God we shall do valiantly. It is he who will tread down our foes. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast this week. I've loved having an opportunity to talk to you about the Psalms and about the sermons. Just love everything about the podcast. It is my joy to open the scriptures with you every day. Hope you're having a great Thanksgiving week. I'm Mark Roberts. And I want to go to heaven. I want you to come too. I'll see you Monday with a cup of coffee.

Thanks for listening to the Westside Church of Christ podcast, Monday Morning Coffee with Mark. For more information about Westside, you can connect with us through our website, just Christians.com, and our Facebook page. Our music is from Upbeat.io. That's Upbeat with two P's, U-P-P-B-E-A-T, where creators can get free music. Please share our podcast with others, and we look forward to seeing you again with a cup of coffee, of course, on next Monday.