Be Still

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Today we begin this new series called BE. And at the beginning of a new year, I don't know, I, as a kid, I remember everybody made a New Year's resolution. Anybody make those anymore? Well, yeah, that's the problem. By Valentine's Day, they're over, if not sooner. It was always amazing to me when I was up in Gainesville, I was a member of a gym there, and January was packed. Everybody was at the gym in January. February, not so much. It's amazing how resolutions do that. It's amazing, too, how most of the resolutions we make are about what we're going to do or stop doing. We are so focused on being active, and we think, I think sometimes, especially here in our culture, we have turned into human doings rather than human beings. It's all about what you do. In fact, that's how you introduce yourself, right? When you meet somebody, you tell them what you do. That's not always the way it is in all cultures, and I don't think it's the way that God necessarily intends us to be either. So the real issue isn't necessarily what you're always doing. It's who you are in the first place, and out of your being comes your activities and your doing. David Platt wrote this. He said, What if the main issue in our culture today is not poverty or sex trafficking, homosexuality, or abortion? What if the main issue is God? What might happen if we made Him our focus instead? How would we act if we fixed our gaze on the holiness, love, goodness, truth, justice, authority, and mercy of God revealed in the gospel? I think that's what we're going to be doing in this series at the beginning of the year. And today we're going to talk about being still. We'll also be talking in the future about be present, be content, be thankful, be at rest, be awake, be loved. God is more interested really in your character than in your activities. Most students at the university, and I was like this too, you think always about your career. What am I going to do? And it's really more about your character, not your career. And I don't think that's an overstatement. In fact, God Himself, the intention He has shown in the scriptures, in Romans chapter 8, He tells us what God wants to happen for us, how we are to become. He says, For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. God wants you to become like Jesus. God has the intent throughout the scriptures. From the beginning words in Genesis, we see that God made us in His image. What is that image? It is that we image Him, that we reflect Him to this world, that we look like Him, that we are the mirror image to Him of His glory. We voice, we give word, we give praise, we give definition, we live out His goodness, His grace, His faithfulness, His truth to this world. That's who we are to be. We voice His beauty. So today we're going to start with be still. It occurs a number of times in scripture actually, the one that everybody seems to know and have memorized is from Psalm 46, Be still and know that I am God. But it also occurs elsewhere. For instance, in Exodus 14, it says, The Lord will fight for you. You only need to be still. And this is when the children of Israel are backed up at the Red Sea and Pharaoh's army is coming down on them. They are ready to panic and attack. And God says, I got this. You don't do anything. Just stand there and watch. But the one that we're going to look at today specifically is from a psalm, Psalm 37. It's an acrostic psalm, which means each letter of the Hebrew alphabet starts the next verse. So it's a little long. We're only going to look at eight verses to start with and then a few others throughout. It's Psalm 37 where we read, fret not yourself because of evildoers. Be not envious for wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord. Trust in him and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the noonday. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him. Fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices. Refrain from anger and forsake wrath. Fret not yourself, it tends only to evil. So this psalm continues to go on to these themes about being still and fretting not. In fact, the words fret not comes up four times in this text. And we're going to be looking at these three points today from this. The source of fretting in our lives, the radical call to be still, and then how can one actually be still? That's the hard part for me. It's like, okay, I know I should, but I'm just not comfortable with it. Why? The Psalms often d...