I teach biblical worldview at the Master's College and also I do worldview workshops and seminars at churches and Bible institutes. And I'm such a fan of biblical worldview. I'm convinced it's one of the main types of medicine we need today in a culture that is denying God's work in creation and providence. A biblical worldview is a powerful tool because first of all, It unites all our Christian knowledge under a very God-centered way of looking at things. It just brings joy to the heart when you see how everything is unified under the purposes of God. But there's also another wonderful use of biblical worldview, and that is for apologetics and evangelism. Biblical worldview makes your witness effective. It makes you bold when you share the Gospel. like to preach or open up the word of God against the backdrop of our culture. We have to reflect upon culture because God has called us to engage culture. And as a result of that, I am a student of Western culture. And one of the things I've discovered in the last 20 so years of study is that secular humanism has been absolutely shameless in its misuse of science to try to tell Christians to be quiet. The secularists have basically said, we will tell you what reality is. We will tell you what the universe is. You Christians will yield the floor to us because science is the only reliable way of explaining creation. So you Christians keep your beliefs to yourself, private, inward, out of government, out of education. And to a great degree, we've knuckled under to that request. The church in many ways has become ingrown, a fortress mentality. We've lost our boldness to engage culture. And part of our instruction and worldview is to regain that confidence and courage that God is sending us out into culture with a powerful message of his truth. The secularists have said the universe is self-originating. It is self-contained. It is self-sustaining. It is self-interpreting. And what does the Word of God tell us? No, that's not true, the Word of God says. Our transcendent God is the author of the universe, the upholder of it, the ruler of it. He defines it. He interprets it. He will remake it on the last day. When we think about this category of God's relationship to the universe, the fact that He's creator, sustainer and definer of what He's made, we call that particular category of Christian truth, biblical cosmology. It deals with the whole concept that God is the definer of what He has made. When the Apostle Paul was going to proclaim the knowledge of God to biblically illiterate peoples, he didn't start with the doctrine of sin. He always started with the doctrine of creation. Paul always started, when he was dealing with pagans, with the doctrine of God's relationship to what God has made. Because God's relationship to the creation, that is the ordering principle of the universe and of reality. Therefore, God's relationship to the creation is the only vantage point high enough, the only vantage point that's lofty enough to provide us with a unified view of reality. It's the only vantage point that provides a wide angle enough lens so we can see man's place in the universe. Nothing else will do. As a consequence, the doctrine of God's relationship to what he has made is the foundation for the gospel. The gospel only makes sense in a world in which God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, creator, upholder, ruler, lawmaker, and judge. The gospel has no point of contact in a world in which pagan cosmology has replaced biblical cosmology. God is the owner of all that he has made. He defines the works of his hands. He gives the designations. He tells us what's real, what's true, what's right and what is wrong. We have to understand what secularism has done. Secular humanism like an immense wrecking ball. I know you've seen that, perhaps not in Arizona, but perhaps in movie clips on tearing down buildings in New York City. This giant wrecking ball, secular humanistic wrecking ball has been moving through society for the better part of a century. It's left destruction and broken lives in its wake. This wrecking ball of Darwinian evolution and naturalism has been systematically breaking down the boundaries set by God. We refer to this Darwinian view of life as philosophic naturalism. It's the worldview of Carl Sagan, who knows better now that he's passed on. But Carl Sagan's worldview was this. The universe is all there is and all there ever will be. It's just crass materialism. This worldview has permeated our culture. It's practically our national worldview. You can't even turn on the television to watch a nature program without having Darwinian evolution shoved down your throat. You can't go to a nature center, an interpretive nature center, without having Darwinian evolution shoved down your throat. You can't stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look at the interpretive center without having evolution shoved down your throat. It is everywhere. Students who are imbued with this Darwinism find themselves adrift in a chance universe where the only reality is materialistic. Is it any wonder that 80% of college students are looking for the meaning of life? Doesn't surprise me. Doesn't surprise me at all. Because the pulpit for naturalism, the pulpit for Darwinian evolution is the college lectern. That's where they're hearing it. These poor students are torn apart. They want a meaningful existence in a meaningless universe. That's a hopeless quest, isn't it? To have a meaningful existence in a meaningless universe. Well, this secularistic wrecking ball that's been sweeping through our culture has been shredding God's divine blueprint for man. It's redefined man, not as the image of God, but as a biological machine. that simply operates based upon felt needs. This wrecking ball has been sweeping through society, redefining reality as simply matter, motion, natural laws and properties, and not the very works of God's hands. Therefore, it's up to you to define reality for yourself. You can superimpose upon reality whatever needs you have. You can make the creation serve you. With this rise of modern science, which was used by humanism, with this rise of modern science was a fascination with measuring things. Fascination with quantities. Philosophies suggested that reality can be reduced to a kind of mathematical formula. So concreteness, empiricism, precision became the most valued attributes of knowledge. And we lost biblical cosmology in the process. People began to think that the scientific method was the only valid way to understand the world. Real knowledge was verifiable, measurable, quantifiable. Sadly, many church leaders at the beginning of the 20th century accommodated their message to scientism. They were afraid of losing their market share. They wanted to remain relevant to the advances of science. And so they reframed the traditional Christian message in terms that fit the times. The church pushed its message through the grid of science, even the church believing that the only way to make sense of the world, the only way the world could be intelligible was through science. Dear brethren, this has had an extremely destructive effect upon Christianity. The net effect of replacing biblical cosmology with Darwin and evolution is this. In the minds of countless Americans, God is no longer personal, transcendent, involved with creation. That has been lost. God's direct involvement in the lives of his creatures has been ruled out to a great degree. God is no longer linked to the details of reality. He's been marginalized and retired to a subcultural role. In contemporary culture, God has been pushed over the edge as a figure who does nothing of significance. Now, when I share the gospel on campus, I'm deeply involved in university missions. I often ask students on campus, are you an atheist? And they seldom say yes. But then I ask them the next question, what does God do that's significant? Silence. In their minds, God does nothing significant. He's just a benign figure somewhere in the universe. Now, this tearing away of biblical cosmology from Christianity has also been destructive to evangelicalism. Evangelicals have stressed personal faith and piety, but they begin to divide up God's role. So great has been this division that in the minds of so many Christians, we'll let the Bible describe salvation, but we'll let science describe the universe. It appears harmless at first, but it's deadly. It produces a tear, a rend, a gash in our thinking. It is a salvation-science dichotomy which pictures God as having two radically different faces. One side of God deals with creation, but in a detached, deistic, estranged kind of way. And the other side of God deals with salvation. That's more personal, but it's private. It offers a Jesus who is sentimental. Friend, but not lord of the cosmos. You see, this is what we're discovering on college campuses. Believers on college campuses today can present Jesus as friend, but they have not a clue how to present him as lord of the cosmos. They have a truncated Jesus, who is not creator, ruler, and judge. He's only savior and friend. You see, as our young people are exposed to modern culture, this dualism between redemption and creation is deepened. The gash goes ever deeper. It's a yawning chasm that is now affecting the spiritual life of young people. Many of you here know Jim Neuheiser, who has an extensive counseling ministry. I spent some time with Jim Neuheiser and he says, Jay, it's amazing. I'm counseling someone who's in a sexual immorality situation. long time member of our church, he said it took two weeks before that individual understood that there's a connection between their walk in this present life and their belief system. In other words, it's a huge disconnect between their belief system and everyday life. That's one of the symptoms of separating creation and redemption and just leaving them so far apart. Nancy Peercy shares something in her book, Total Truth, At a Christian high school, a theology teacher drew a heart on one side of the blackboard and a brain on the other. The two are as divided as two sides of the blackboard, he told the class. The heart is used for religion, while the brain we use for science. See, there's that dichotomy, that split between redemption and creation. Now, I know this is a long introduction, but I want to set the stage for how the Book of Psalms, our worldview, overturns that absurdity that we can rend apart creation and redemption. When we study the book of Psalms, what do we find? A perfect commingling of the created order and the moral order in the universe. Psalm 19. The Psalms are given to us that we might sink our foundations deep in the truth that God's relation to the world is total. He's active in our lives. He's active in history. He's active in nature. He's active in Providence. I'm going to give you some text in just a moment. This introduction is rather lengthy, I know. Thank you for your patience. So throughout the Psalms, we see the twin themes of creation and moral order. Creation has order in it that is maintained by God, it says in Psalm 96. The Psalms assert that there is a fixity in creation that is simultaneously physical and moral. The Psalms proclaim God as the one who has created the unbreakable unity between the physical world and moral order. It says in Psalm 50, verse 6, the heavens declare his righteousness for God himself is judge. It's not just the prophets declaring his righteousness, the heavens are also doing the declaring or the preaching. Now, because this is God's world, He made it, he owns it, he rules it, he governs it by his moral uprightness. Because this is God's world, it operates in a certain way. And unbelievers imagine it operates in a different way. But what happens to the unbeliever? He keeps bumping up against God's creation structures. He keeps bumping up against beauty, majesty, his own troubled conscience, law, justice, crime, punishment. He keeps bumping up against these creation structures. And so the illusory world that he's made in his own mind, he cannot live out his worldview. Brothers and sisters, that's on your side when you share the gospel. You already know that the illusory world of the unbeliever, he cannot live it. And it does not cohere with reality. That is so powerful in your witness. I tell myself that every time I go onto a college campus, expecting to meet skeptics, that they can't live their worldview and their worldview does not match reality. I tell myself that every time. It helps give me more courage to share my faith. I also know this, that that unbeliever, made in the image of God, has God's moral mark upon him. And according to God's Word, that unbeliever is a fugitive under God's moral government. You see, the believer understands what it says in Psalm 119. Let's turn there for a moment. Psalm 119. I'm in the very first part of Psalm 119. Starting in verse 9, passage that is familiar to most of you. Psalm 119, verse 9. How can a young man keep his way pure? By keeping it according to thy word. With all my heart I have sought thee. Do not let me wander from thy commandments. Thy word I have treasured or hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Blessed art thou, O Lord. Teach me thy statutes with my lips. I have told of all the ordinances of thy mouth. I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies as much as in all riches. I will meditate on thy precepts and regard thy ways. I shall delight in thy statutes. I shall not forget thy word." I'm fascinated by the fact that I will, I shall fills the Psalms. The Book of Psalms is filled with resolve and determination to be controlled by the Word of God. It's a wonderful book by E. B. Powers, The I Wills of the Psalms, published by Banner. I highly recommend that book. He really deals with that resolve in the Psalter. Well, God's precepts are designed to keep us from self-destruction. We have self-destructive tendencies in us because of our depravity. And the psalmist is constantly interested in being examined by God. He wants God to look at his heart. He wants God to correct him. He wants God to establish his ways and remove all double-mindedness from his heart. And I would ask you this morning, does that describe your personal piety? Do you welcome God's examination of your heart? Do you regularly pray that in your quiet time? Lord, look into my heart. Search me. Examine me. Stabilize me. Give me a steadfast heart that is loyal to you alone. Remove all double-mindedness. As it says in Psalm 86, 11 and 12, Teach me thy way, O Lord. I will walk in thy truth. Unite my heart to fear thy name. I will give thanks to thee, O Lord, my God, with all my heart and will glorify thy name forever. The psalmist is constantly concerned about a united heart and not a double-minded heart. The Psalms deal with the wisdom that's needed to live a Godward life. Wisdom is living in God's world as He intends that we live. And this wisdom is comprehensive. It's not a compartment. It's across the board. It's what the great divines used to refer to as universal obedience. That there's no aspect of your life that is not under the dominion of your Lord and your God. The Psalms deal a great deal with the fact that you're sowing and building in your life. It says in Psalm 92, that when you see the wicked flourishing, and you see the unbeliever prospering, and you see the unrighteous getting on quite well, you must remember Psalm 92 verse 7, and all who did iniquity flourished, it was only that they might be destroyed forevermore." So the psalmist is always meditating on the fact that God is judge. He's active now. It appears that his justice is delayed. It appears that the justice due the saints is overdue. And so the psalmist is constantly reflecting on that theme. Psalm 37, Psalm 73, Psalm 92. You see, our hearts are an open book before the Lord. It says in Psalm 90 verse 8, our secret sins are in the light of thy presence. So much of the Psalms involves living your life in the presence of God. Now, when I think of worldview themes that are contained in the Psalms, it's a host of themes. There's far more than I'm going to give you this morning. But there are some foundation stones of Christian worldview that are very evident in the Psalms. I'm just going to race through these in sort of a survey fashion. We could go into deeper depth if we had a whole class on this, but one of the first ones that comes up is this, the creator-creature distinction. The fact that there's an infinite gulf in terms of essence between the creator and the creature. God is self-existent, everything finds its source in him, and we are creatures made in his image, finite. You say, well, that's a pretty basic truth. Yes, it is. But in the college classroom today, on the secular campus, they're using the lectern in the campus as a pulpit for pantheism. That God is somehow a part of the universe and you are God-like or maybe even part of God. This is amazing. The most basic catechism is found in Psalm 100, verse 3. He has made us and not we ourselves. Something a first grader can understand. And yet in our college classrooms, the distinction between God and the creature is being erased intentionally. So we emphasize this worldview from the Psalms. The creator-creature distinction is the foundation for the fact that God owns us. He has absolute authority over us. He has the right to tell us how to live and what to believe. He has the right to judge us someday. That's the first foundation stone of biblical worldview. the creator-creature distinction. Another one is the fact that God created the universe not by using scientific laws, but God created the universe by speaking. It's the fiat creation of the universe. It says in Psalm 33, 6, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were made. God spoke the universe into existence. He called into existence that which had no previous existence. God and matter are not co-eternal. I like what Dr. Henry Morris said. He went home to be with the Lord just a couple of years ago. Dr. Henry Morris says this of Psalm 33. In that psalm is the strongest affirmation of fiat creation in the entire Bible. It was not just by the Lord that the heavens were made, but by the word of the Lord that the heavens were made. The universe burst into existence by the infinite power of God's Word. And it was through Christ, the agent of creation, that our universe has order, rationality, purpose. Another great theme in the book of Psalms is the conflict of the ages. That there is a battle raging between truth and error, between sin and righteousness, between God and Satan. That theme fills the book of Psalms. This is the reason why the present world has so much groaning and temptation and oppression and conflict and suffering, the righteous are ever aware that God is their only refuge in this world where there's a battle between truth and error. And God will assuredly bring to pass His final victory and His final purposes. That is the hope of the saints. That righteousness will vanquish unrighteousness. It says in Psalm 5811, there is a reward for the righteous. We believe that God will bring a consummation to history. History is hurtling toward a predetermined end. Something else that's being taught in the secular classroom is that history is cyclical and not linear. That history is cyclical, like it teaches in the movie Lion King, the circle of life. It just keeps rolling and rolling on. Not so, says the psalmist. It's all moving toward Judgment Day. It's all moving toward the day when God will reveal the secrets of the heart and expose those secrets publicly. All history is moving toward a day in which God will judge the world in righteousness. And on that day, history will prove to be a record of the honoring and the dishonoring of God and what happens to each. This will be a public judgment. Another part of worldview which the Psalms declares is that we, as those made in His image, are made for God. We were created for God to be our true home. I love that little thin book by Tom Wells, Come Home Forever. It's about the fact that God is our only true home. Wells says in his book, a pilgrim feels strange in a foreign land He finds his mind repeatedly returning to home. And so it is for the true believer. We know we will not truly be home until we're with our Heavenly Father. Many of the Psalms emphasize the fact that we are essentially sojourners, pilgrims, aliens at this present time until we're home with God. It says in Psalm 90, verse 1, Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. And in Psalm 42, 1 and 2, as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? See, that's a desire to come home and be with God forever. You see, part of this yearning for God as our true home is also connected with the beauty of God. The beauty down here is stunning. It moves us to praise and worship. It's inspiring. But it cannot measure up to the beauty of God. The Lord himself is the only source of eternal and increasing satisfaction there is. The psalmist alludes to this pleasure in God in Psalm 27.4, where he says, My desire is that I might dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord. That's his controlling desire. To come home forever. See, that ought to be a way we test ourselves. Is your hope vigorous? Are you longing to be with the Lord? That's such a good litmus test of your spiritual life. Well, another great theme in the Psalms is the works of God. The Psalms teach us that creation is not the result of a big bang. is not the result of matter rearranging itself. The Psalms teach us that creation is put into place as a theatre for God's glory. The creation is a stage for God's works, a backdrop for redemptive history. The creation is a worshipping chorus of God. That's what the Psalms tell us. God's works are awesome in creation, redemption, and providence. They reveal the excellence of the Creator They move the redeemed man or woman to praise that is spontaneous. Therefore, God's works are diligently studied by the true Christian. Throughout the Psalms, the believer is depicted as preoccupied with the works of God because he wants to extol, praise, and study those works as a steward. Do you see yourself that way this morning? that everything from sunsets to the laughter of a newborn child, you're a steward of the works of God, that you might tell those works to the next generation. God requires that of us. Psalm 78. You must tell these works to the next generation that they might put their confidence in God. The works that God has done are preaching sermons. The book of Psalms talks about God's works that are inscripturated and God's works that are not put in words. In Psalm 19, we have sermons without words, the heavens are declaring the glory of God, and we have sermons with words, the perfection of God's law. So we have both kinds of sermons, sermons without words, the general revelation, and sermons with words, the inscripturated revelation. And how one treats the general revelation in creation determines how you'll treat God's special revelation put in the Word of God. This is critical because God holds all men and women responsible for how you handle both general revelation and special revelation. We're culpable for that. Another great theme connected to worldview in the Psalms is redemption. When Jesus opened up the Word of God and explained how all the scriptures testified of him after the road to Emmaus, He opened up the book of Psalms and preached the messianic passages to his disciples. What is redemption? Redemption is the condescension of the Creator to save rebels. This is such a wonderful theme. The condescension of the Creator in His incarnation, Psalm 40. In His crucifixion, Psalm 22 and 69. It is the Son of God reversing the ruin of sin and mending what sin has rent apart. He is the mediatorial king installed by God, Psalm 2. No greater condescension is imaginable than that the king of the universe should give his life's blood to make friends of former enemies. It is the lawgiver himself bearing the guilt and punishment of the lawbreaker. He says, in Psalm 10, verse 13, of the reprobate, this is how the reprobate speaks in his own heart. Thou will not require it. In other words, you aren't really a God of retribution. You're not a God of reprobation. You're not a God of reprobation. You're not a God of reprobation. You're not a God of reprobation. You're a God of reprobation. You're a God of reprobation. You aren't really a God who's just. I've escaped divine punishment so far and I will continue to escape it in the future. Every unbelieving friend and relative you have reasons that way to some degree. I have escaped and I will also escape in the future. Divines down through the history of the church have referred to this as the attitude of the unconquerable soul. I will be able to stand up against whatever judgments may come my way. Well, what they forget is that God has annexed the honor of his name to the unbreakability of his word. Another great theme in the Psalms. What is the word of God? It is the very promises, character, threats of God, promises of God, redemptive covenant of God put into words, accommodated to human language. I think about Lucifer's rebellion. probably alluded to in the book of Isaiah. I think about Lucifer's rebellion, the fact that he made a wager, so to speak, a gamble, a bet, that God would not be as good as his word. I just don't really believe he would create a lake of fire for the purpose of rebellious creatures. I think that if I won the loyalty of angels and men, God would perhaps go somewhere else in the universe and start over. and I would have my own kingdom right here on planet earth. I don't know what Satan's thoughts were, but they might have gone along those ways. He must have made some sort of wager that God was not as good as his word. That God's infinite, immutable attributes don't really stand behind the word. You see, every unbeliever also makes that wager. I don't really think God's immutable attributes stand behind the word. And that God has staked the honor of his name upon The unbreakability of Scripture. Every unbeliever suggests that God has not spoken clearly. That somehow God has stuttered. That somehow men have falsified the Word of God. That somehow the Word of God is a suggestion and not the very rule of the universe. They forget that God has bound Himself to His Word. He's raised His Word as high as His name. Human history is for the purpose of God confirming His Word publicly. What suicide it is to bet that God is not as good as His Word. I was sharing Christ with some students at UCSD down in San Diego, and they thought they'd come up with something really clever. They said, well, Jay, you believe God is infinite, right? I do. Then how can you say anything about Him? Because as soon as you describe Him, He's no longer infinite. I said, well, that's patently absurd. Because He's infinite, it doesn't mean He's everything. It doesn't mean He's both good, evil, right, wrong, capricious, stable. I said the fact that He tells us who He is in His character, that He cannot deny Himself, is in your interest. How can you trust a God who is not defined by His Word? They began to understand a little bit more of what I was saying. And finally, I shared with them, according to your worldview, you're betting that God is not as good as His Word. And the sad thing is, what you're betting is your eternal soul. And they practically staggered backward when I said that, because that's really what the stakes are. They were betting their eternal soul that God is not as good as His Word. See, God has created us to be reflectors of His character. He's created us to serve Him. He's created us to find our dignity in knowing Him. This is even symbolized in certain structures in the creation. I think about our own moon that is in orbit around our earth. Our moon has a reflected glory. It bears no light of its own. It reflects the glory that is the sun. The moon serves our earth in countless ways. It stabilizes our axis. It mixes our oceans temperatures. It flushes out our bays and estuaries and it sets the reproductive clock of a multitude of earth species. Now, in its present orbit, it serves the Earth and in some ways enables life on Earth. But if the moon somehow left its orbit to wander into deep black space, it would lose all its glory. It would be a useless ball of rock and dust sitting there right about absolute zero in black space, a wandering chunk of matter without orbit, meaning simply a pockmarked ball of rock. Dear brethren, To some degree, that's how the lost are described who enter perdition. It says of the lost in Jude 15, I'm sorry, in Jude 13, they're like wandering stars for whom black darkness has been reserved forever. This is sobering thought. Psalms restore a high view of God. We have a branch of evangelicalism today, if you can call it that, that's accommodating itself. to a God who is eminent and not transcendent. The Psalms, I believe, are a corrective for a weak church that has domesticated God and is afraid to talk about His wrath, His burning holiness, His ferocity, His vengeance, and His retribution. The Psalms restore us to a high view of God. Oh, how much this is needed today. I took my wife and daughter to a very upscale mall Two Fridays ago in La Jolla, San Diego, California. And as I sat there studying, a gentleman next to me asked me if I was a social anthropologist because I had books spread out in front of me and I was looking at people and I was not eating in this food court. I said, well, no, I'm not a social anthropologist. I'm a teacher at a Christian college. Well, he introduced himself as vice president of Hilton Hotels, who works with Paris Hilton's grandfather. Immediately, I begin to pray, Lord, if this is an opportunity to share the gospel, give me the boldness, the love, the compassion, the words to share with this man. In the first hour, he told me about his work. His work in the hotel industry, how he got started in it, how he was a POW in World War II as a teenager in Japan. He just opened up himself. In the second hour, I shared the gospel with him and he was a classic skeptic. Everything I've shared with you On the biblical worldview in the Psalms, he denied. In the last 20 minutes, he told me he had 18 months to live. Though he looked incredibly healthy as he approached the age of 80, he had cancer. He had 18 months to live. I pleaded with that man to give his life to Christ, to get ready for eternity. And his final words to me were, you are doing such a wonderful work for college students, but I will not be your proselyte. I'll take your email in case I know somebody who is willing to be. and we parted. Brethren, we need boldness today. We're living in a world where biblical worldview has been systematically broken down and eroded until it's disappearing. We must have the courage to preach biblical worldview as the backdrop for the Gospel. For God is to be feared. He rules over all history. It says in Psalm 47, He subdues nations. He is to be feared. God has judged the world globally once already. The Genesis flood is one of the themes in the book of Psalms. It says in Psalm 29.10 that he sat as king at the flood. He did not apologize for this global judgment. The scriptures tell us in 2 Peter 3 that in the last days, scoffers will multiply geometrically. There will be so many scoffers and what will they deny? that there was a global flood and that there is a global judgment by fire that is coming. There is no middle ground. All imagined neutral ground is a fallacy. God has told us that we must interpret human history through His grid, the Word of God. And His grid is creation, fall, flood, redemption, second coming. That is the grid to which we must look at all human history. And not to the grid the secularists are offering to us. We cannot make sense of life unless we look through that grid. Satan has a false worldview. And he wins converts, he wins loyalty through his false worldview. But what do the Psalms tell us? In Psalm 36.9, In thy light we see light. We see light in thy light. We must do the interpretation through the grid you have given us. God's biblical grid here is self-attesting. The moment an unbeliever opens this book, even if he's the most hardened skeptic, a work of correspondence takes place. The moment the unbeliever opens this book, this book tells him what he's known all along, that God is his maker, God is good, every blessing he enjoys has come from above, and someday God will judge him. That is not new information for the unbeliever. The moment he opens the book, that He reads what he's known all along, according to Romans 1. This work of correspondence takes place. And finally, the book of Psalms are so real to life. They take the attributes of God out of the realm of abstraction and bring them right down into your everyday walk. Look at the prayers the psalmist makes. Prayers in the midst of treachery, suffering, confusion, cynicism. Rejection. Weakness. Sickness. Sin. The psalmist meets God in some very strange places, not just in a court of praise. Psalms are utterly realistic. They deal with every heart-rending crunch of life. As John Calvin said in his commentary on the Psalms, this book is an anatomy of all parts of the soul. I encourage you to be more honest in your prayers. The Psalms are a pattern, a model for transparency before God. Lastly, the Psalms open up the subjects of resurrection and the coming kingdom of God. That is so precious to us that a day is coming when all of creation will be restored and all of creation will be unified in the praise of God, including the inanimate creation. Rivers will clap their hands. What a metaphor. Trees will sing, Psalm 96. God's coming kingdom will be involved in a celebration of eternal victory and a restored creation that worships God from one end of the galaxies to the other. And this is all based upon one thing, the hope the resurrection gives us. Another theme in the Psalms. Psalm 16 stresses that the bodily resurrection is the future hope of the redeemed because of Messiah's resurrection. We are justified using Psalm 16 to support the resurrection for the apostles did in their keystone defense of the resurrection in the book of Acts. Beloved, this nation is in trouble and I'm not referring to politics. I'm not referring to the economy. I'm referring to its spiritual state. This nation is in trouble and God has appointed the church to be the bearer of great news, to be a herald that the victory was won at Calvary 2,000 years ago. You have the words of life. You have the cure for sin and eternal death. Brothers and sisters, let's open our mouths and not be afraid to preach Christian worldview and the gospel. Amen? Amen.