with me in your Bibles to Psalm 137. We're going to be particularly focusing on verse 6 tonight together. Before we dive in, let's go to the Lord in prayer one more time. Lord God, we so thank you for your word and we feel our inability and our weakness and we don't even deserve to sit under this word. It's a wonderful thing. It is really living and active. We do pray that you would change us, fashion us, mold us into the image of Christ through the word of God. Speak to us through your spirit, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. So assimilation, we've all done it or been a part of it in some way. Maybe it was as simple as moving to another state and assimilating to another region's culture in America. Maybe it was you yourself immigrating from a different country to America. and sort of assimilating to the culture there. I remember myself, I studied abroad in Greece. The first time I was away from home for that long I was devastatingly, cripplingly homesick and I had to come to grips with the fact that it's time to assimilate and get used to the fact that you gotta get used to Greek culture. So we've all in varying degrees Let a dominant culture take over ours or reshape ours or we ourselves have sought to kind of conform to a dominant culture. It can be benign, even necessary. But other forms of assimilation, they're not so good. They're not necessarily so benign. I wonder if any of you have heard of the Uyghurs in northwestern China. They're this Muslim minority group, and the Chinese have sought to kind of kidnap them from their homes, put them in these camps, take away their language, take away their culture, and cause them to become Chinese to some degree. That's not the best kind of assimilation. How about spiritual assimilation? And one of this kind, when the dominant culture of ungodliness seeks to oppress and change a godly people and fashion them in their own image. Well, that's what we see happening in Psalm 137. The Israelites are strangers in a strange land. They're exiled. They're living in Babylon. They're surrounded by the godless, they're pressured into conformity to them. What will they do? So let's turn now to Psalm 137. Again, we're focusing particularly on verse 6. We're going to read the whole psalm for the sake of context and we'll get right to it. Psalm 137 beginning in verse 1, By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. And here's our verse in question. Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said, lay it bare, lay it bare down to its foundations. O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us. Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock. We see from verses 1 to 3, And even 4 to 5 and 6, from sorrow to determination, from the taunts of the enemy to godly resolution. Now this is often called by commentators a pious psalm. Why is that? In the midst of the pull and temptation of Babylon. The godly psalmist determines within himself and refuses to budge. It's that sixth verse, Psalm 137.6, let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Brothers and sisters, I'm sure all of us seek to be godly church members. I would assume that all of you in front of me want to be as unstained and unspotted from the world as possible. Friend, in the midst of this world, with all its allurements, determine to set the church of Jesus Christ above your highest joy. As strangers in a strange land, take care to set the church of Jesus Christ as your highest joy on this earth. And that's what the psalmist determined to do with a Jerusalem that was abandoned, that he had left in exile, and that's what you and I have to do with the church. What's the goal here tonight? The goal is for us to imitate the psalmist on serving devotion to having Jerusalem, the seat of God's worship on earth, be his greatest joy. and that that would be true of us. So we'll look at two lessons from this psalm for godly church members, but first I'm just going to go through the background and kind of just talk about the psalm in general and then we're going to just laser focus on verse six. The psalm can be divided in three ways. First, the plural. of verses 1 to 4, which is this we, this congregation, wailing and lamenting before God, their exile. And then the singular determination of verses 5 and 6, and then you have the imprecatory prayer of verses 7 and 9. We can see in Psalm 137 the congregation is in exile in Babylon. They're weeping as they think about their abandoned Zion. Their tormentors, the Babylonians in verse 3, demand a joyful noise from them, a kind of Babylonian joyful noise. They mockingly demand that the Israelites sing the songs of Zion. And it's a way, they're asking for them to sing it in a way that would compromise, be a sense of compromise for the Israelites and a mocking and a forgetting of the glories and joys of Zion. It might be looked at as maybe the equivalent of your local Unitarian church inviting you over to pray a prayer or sing a godly hymn and join hands in ungodliness. And that's why The Israelites hung their lyres on the willows that surround those rivers that go through Babylon. Why'd they do that? Verses 5 and 6 provide us with this sandwich. So we go from the we, the plural, to the singular determination of the psalmist not to do this. And there's this sandwich of a kind of curse he calls upon himself if he were to compromise in singing the song. And this is what the psalmist sends again. Notice the bookends between the if I forget you Jerusalem in the top of verse 5 And the end of verse 6, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy, if I do not remember you, at the end of verse 6. If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill, let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. The psalmist is basically saying, you want me to sing? May I never sing again. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth rather than compromise with Babylon and forget Jerusalem. You want me to play the instrumentals of Jerusalem with my right hand and my hand never perform service again rather than compromise. Let me set Jerusalem above my highest joy. And in the end it goes from the we, the congregation lamenting, to the me, I determine not to do this, to the they. He prays an imprecatory prayer or says some imprecatory things towards the Babylonians, citing the Edomites, this enemy of the people of God in Israel. We see in verse 8, strikingly, O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, in verse 8, points us to its fulfillment, as we'll talk about later, in Revelation 18, where Babylon drinks of the cup of God's wrath. Okay, so what does all this have to do with the Church? Well, friends, if you read your Bibles, you'll see that there are two cities kind of traced throughout the Scriptures. You've got your Babel or Babylon, and you've got your Jerusalem. And from Genesis 11 to Revelation 18, you can see the trajectory of the godless Babylon and the way of Jerusalem. of which we're inhabitants, citizens, if we trust in Christ. Friend, you are a citizen of either city. You are either a citizen of Jerusalem and thus by consequence a member of a local church or you are a member of Babylon. But friend, there is no in between. But church member, brother and sister, you are a citizen of Jerusalem, because as we'd heard last Sunday in the evening devotion, we've already arrived to that heavenly Jerusalem, that Mount Zion, by trusting in Christ, having our names written in heaven. We were chosen in Jesus Christ before the foundations began, selected by God as his people. In Jesus, the true Israel, And we are members of His kingdom, signified by Jerusalem. So, we've established that this is for the church, so now for our holiness, and for the sake of protecting our devotion to the church, two lessons every church member should learn from Psalm 137, verse 6. These are just two, I'm sure there are many others, but just two for the sake of time. First, that love for the church, notice that language of joy, setting Jerusalem above one's highest joy, love for the church should be affectional. The psalmist, we talked about, goes from congregational lament to individual determination and he is determined that Jerusalem would be set above his highest joy. In the midst of Babylon, with all of the voices of sensuality and lust and power and riches. In this instance, the pull of spiritual compromise. We're much in the same way, maybe, in our lives. Perhaps we're not suffering persecution the same way the Israelites did, but experiencing the pull, the allurement of Babylon powerfully upon us. A thousand little compromises related to riches and immorality and idolatry and pride and comfort and power. But what's most striking about this is it wasn't enough for the psalmist to have a mere doctrinal allegiance towards Jerusalem. He was determined individually to set Jerusalem above his highest joy. He must reserve the highest place in his own heart for Jerusalem. So brothers and sisters, Do you yourself, and I'm going to borrow a term from a pastor, have a hermetically sealed chamber in your own heart devoted to the church? Have you yourself reserved the highest affections imaginable for the church, for its ordinances, its preaching, its members, even its progress? What's so convicting about this psalm, for me at least, is The psalmist and the congregation of Israel is downcast and weeping at the state of Zion, the state of Jerusalem. Are we, like the psalmist, downcast when we see the church in trouble anywhere in the world where missionaries are struggling, where Christians are being persecuted? Are we ecstatic or earnestly awaiting for the pouring out of God's Spirit upon portions of the universal church? Is our interior life invested in the progress of the church? According to Psalm 137, it seems that God demands our chief affections for His church, His very body. We've got tons of models of this in the New Testament, obviously. I'll just go through some of them. 1 John 4.20, if anyone says, I love God and hates His brother, He is a liar, for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. If you want to see yearning, tender yearning for the church and highest affections for the church, look to Paul all over the place. In Romans 1-11 he longed to see the Romans. so that he might impart some spiritual gift to make them strong. Philippians 1.8, Paul yearns for the Philippians with the affection of Christ. In 2 Corinthians 12.14, he says to the Corinthians, I don't come for what is yours, but you. It's impossible to look at Paul's life and not see this hermetically sealed affection for the church. What about Christ? He gives his people the chiefest love In John chapter 15, verse 9, he tells his disciples, as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. And Jesus loved the church and gave himself up for her. We see in Ephesians 5, 25. But secondly, in this kind of, and just briefly in this category of having affections for the church and setting the progress of Jerusalem, higher than your own joys. Have you ever thought of the fact that you yourself must battle and determine within yourself that you might love the church more than your highest joy? In the midst of the pulls and allurements, as I talked about at Babylon, the self-determination to kill everything that would steal your concern and tender love and care for the sake of the church. Do it for the sake of loving the Church. So, brothers and sisters, let's pray to God for the wisdom and leading to set up this hermetically sealed chamber in our hearts, unimpeded by competitors, where we would say with the psalmist that we would rather not sing in compromise, not do anything in compromise, but remember Jerusalem as above our highest joy, the Church as above our highest joy. Second kind of takeaway. is that the joys of the church outweigh all competing joys. The psalmist determines to have Jerusalem set above his highest joy and he's echoing what's found in the Hebrew in verse 3 where the captors required of the Israelites songs and their tormentors mirth. These songs of joy. This specifically Babylonian joy. And that joy is contrasted with the psalmist's desire to put Jerusalem as the very highest joy, true joy, above his own highest joy. So the two are contrasted there. We notice, friends, the destinies of the two people of these cities. We notice Babylon with its false joy is doomed to be destroyed in verse 8. It's temporary glee, temporary riches, temporary victory, temporary sense of domineering over the people of God. What is the power of luxurious living, riches, and sexual immorality, as Revelation 18 defines Babylon, if the cup of God's wrath is destined to be poured out on those who partake of it? It's a temporary, fleeting, damning pleasure. This is joy, but the psalmist doesn't necessarily say that this joy is above the Babylonian joys. He's contrasting it with verse 3 perhaps, but it's above his own joys, even lawful joys, good joys. The psalmist has set the joys of Jerusalem above lawful, even good joys. Now no doubt the psalmist mind in the midst of Babylon, in the midst of kind of sin and temptation, or in the midst of this domineering nation mocking these people of God that are exiled, no doubt the psalmist mind would go back to the incomparable joys and glories of Jerusalem now in despair. Perhaps the psalmist would think back and remember the glory days of the stories of God's faithfulness in preserving his elect. Memories of the Israelites singing to one another as they took the ascent to Jerusalem for the festivals. Remembering lessons of sin pardoned, signified by the blood sacrifices that took place in the temple. Stories of the glory cloud descending upon the temple as the temple was inaugurated. And even personal experiences, as in Psalm 73, of redirections towards holiness. When you thought so fleshly, and the moment you entered into the house of the Lord, Redirection towards holiness in the midst of sin. All these sorts of blessed memories, no doubt, crowded the psalmist as he was in the midst of sin and temptation and misery in Babylon. Brothers, sisters, don't you find that the purported joys of Babylon tremble in comparison with the joys of the church? us together, the congregated brothers and sisters in Christ. I'm sure you can testify to the fact of these joyful experiences happening and remember them even in the midst of sojourn in Babylon. Where sinners' chains are broken, their iniquities pardoned by the blood of Jesus Christ even in these pews. We see men and women, boys and girls transformed from death to life in these very pews. where God's presence is manifested and cherished, an intimate, sweet communion predicated upon knowledge of the Scriptures takes place, where spiritual fellowship and communion with the saints is our delight and joy every time we get together in this church. Friends, Babylon's Allurements tremble just at the streams on earth God has caused us to taste as one hymn wrote or had in its hymn. As we sang this morning, who can faint amidst all the trouble of sin and temptation? Who can faint while such a river ever flows their thirst to assuage? Yet Babylon's temporary pleasures ought to be contrasted as well with these eternal ones in this way. All the sort of fleshly, carnal, evil indulgences that surround us as inhabitants of the kingdom of God in the midst of evil will be destroyed along with Babylon. Babylon's on a downward trajectory and is going to be gone and destroyed and going to be drinking from the cup of God's wrath. But the joys of Jerusalem have a different kind of trajectory. The joys we experience in this church have an upward trajectory. While fleshliness and sinfulness and carnality will disappear, we will swim in the waters of the joys of the church for eternity. Increasing knowledge of God's person will be our joy in heaven. Ecstatic fellowship with Christ will be elevated and enhanced. Intimate spiritual fellowship with one another will be unending. There will be no temperance in heaven and no impediments to our enjoyment of these spiritual realities we experience in church together. So brothers and sisters, the church of Jesus Christ is worthy of our highest joy. With the psalmist, let's radically resist sinful assimilation. Let our tongues cling to the roof of our mouths before we sing for them. Let's ask the Lord for widened, inflamed love for the church, killing all competitors in the heart. And let's remember the incomparable joys of church life over and against the joys of Babylon. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, we are not necessarily a literally exiled people like Israel and we are not persecuted even as they were and even taunted to the level that they were. But Lord, we know what it is to live in Babylon in a nation and a culture and a world that is awash with the love of God. lust and money and power and greed. Lord God, we do ask that you would cause us to be stable and steadfast in our witness to this dying world. Cause us to be pure and unspotted and please Lord, we pray for the determination of the psalmist in the wake of compromise. that our tongues would cleave to the roof of our mouths before we would compromise and mix with sin. Cause us to be a distinct people. Cause us, Lord, to cherish Jerusalem above all else. We love your church, O God. Cause us, Lord, to love it all the more. In Jesus' name, Amen.