July 14, 2024: Message: The Restful Home | Scripture: Psalm 127 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
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Introduction
If able, please stand as I read to you from Psalm 127. TWoL: A song of ascents. Of Solomon. 1 Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labour in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. 2 It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. 3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. 4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. 5 Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
In the earliest days of our marriage, even though we weren’t living in Toronto, Candace and I would drive into the city on weekends to see and spend time with our families, and it was during those years that I became increasingly involved with the ministries of my father’s church. And the more involved I got, the more I struggled with its theology and practice of membership, eldership, and other areas of church governance.
The more I saw and understood this problem, the more anxious I became about it—anxious to the point where I was getting into arguments with my dad regularly. I would tell him over and over that things weren’t right, and I’d challenge him: why wasn’t he, as the oldest pastor at our church, pushing for the change that I knew he desired as well? Why wasn’t he exercising his God-given authority and influence for what is clearly outlined in Scripture?
In fact, the arguments and the challenges and the anxiety became so much that I started to have mental and emotional and physical breakdowns about it at home. I remember nights waking up in tears. I remember shaking with anger. I remember being unable to sleep because I needed to make this right.
What I didn’t see, however, was how it was hurting my father, and how it was creating division and tension and provocation in the church. It’s not necessarily that I was wrong in what needed to be changed, but my approach to it—my abrasiveness, vitriol and anger—that was what was wrong. I was seeing the problem and making myself its solution, and by doing so, I was upsetting rather than rectifying that church’s life, my father’s life, and even my and my wife’s life. I had made it about me instead of making it about the church or, more importantly, instead of making it about the Lord.
And our text this morning harps on one truth: unless the Lord, all is in vain. Unless the Lord is in our going out and coming in—unless the Lord is with us—unless the Lord works through us, we can try all we want—toil through the night and fret all morning—make it about ourselves, but in the end, we will fail, be miserable, defeated, and exhausted.
What I hope our text leaves us with this day, above all days, as we dedicate the babies and children in our midst to God, is that our homes, our families, our relationships, our church—whatever it is we’re looking to build and protect—I hope that we build and protect it not in ourselves but in, with, and upon the Lord. The only measure of success that is important for whatever it is that you cherish is to ask whether God is its ultimate architect. And our proposition this morning is if you want a restful home—the kind that God has intended for us to have with him since creation—if you want a restful home—a joyous home, then make it in the Lord. Make a restful home in the Lord.
What does this mean? Well, it means three things. It means that you must be warned of that which is vain. It means you must behold the blessing that we often treat like a curse. And it means we must believe that we are loved by One whose love is uncompromising and unfailing. This is how we’re to grasp Psalm 127, and how we’re to make a restful home in the Lord. We’re to do it firstly by being warned of the vanity of adequacy.
1) Beware, the Vanity of Adequacy
Verse 1 sets the tone of the entire psalm: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” And what I need to do here is introduce you to some theological terms that you might not be as familiar with to illuminate the point of the text.
We, as your pastors, here at TCCBC, we teach that salvation is monergistic. This is a compound word of monos and ergon. Monos means one or single or alone. Ergon means work. Thus, monergistic salvation or regeneration means that repentance from sin and faith leading to obedience and everlasting life with God is brought about through the work of a single entity, through the effect of one, through God alone. It is the Holy Spirit that regenerates, quickens, creates, calls out of darkness into light, raises from death to life, makes new creatures, gives new birth, secures a new heart for us, first, so that we might believe.
Yet, when we speak of our lives after God’s monergistic saving work, we might, cautiously, use the word synergistic to describe the process of becoming holy or walking in obedience. The prefix syn means with or together, and coupled with the root ergon, again, means to work together or to work with the Holy Spirit. In other words, we rightly say that the process of becoming more like Christ—of following his commands—as saved people involves both our effort and the effort of the Spirit who walks with us, lives in and amongst us, and upholds, defends, and empowers us to do what is pleasing in God’s sight.
Now, I say we use this word cautiously, or maybe not even at all, because there’s an imbalance between what the Spirit is doing and what we are doing in our pursuit of holiness. The effort is not the same. There is a sense in which we cooperate with God in our holiness. There is a sense in which we are striving, working, building, and preserving the boast we’ve been given in Christ. But our effort and striving are unequal with the Spirit’s effort and striving—our power is not comparable with the power of God. Our wills do not possess the same resolve as the will of God.
Louis Berkhof, a systematic theologian, put it this way: “our sanctification—our walking in increasing holiness after God’s initial saving work is still fundamentally and primarily a divine operation upon the soul whereby our holy desires born in salvation are strengthened and the ability to walk in that strength is increased … when it’s said that man takes part in the work of holiness, [it does not mean that man is an independent worker, on the one hand, and God is an independent worker, on the other, like equal partners.]” It is, rather, that God makes it so that the redeemed man or woman can participate in the process—that he might be a partaker of the fruit and thereby grow in greater affection and worship of him who enables, upholds, and directs our every step (not a partnership but more like a parent and child).
Why do I say all of this? Because it has everything to do with our text. See, Solomon, who wrote this psalm as King over Israel, was called to do two things as its king. The first was to build a house for the Lord. He’s to create something, yet God’s presence was to be in Jerusalem and amongst his people, and Solomon understood, all his creating would be meaningless unless God declared it to be worthwhile—unless the Creator did the first creating. Unless God proclaimed his favour over the project and the building itself, the temple wouldn’t be a temple. It would simply be a pointless building. What made it a temple was that God declared it and provided the resources and power to make it so.
Conversely, Solomon wasn’t just to build a house for the Lord, but he was also to watch and guard the city of the Lord. To keep it—preserve it—and its people from falling apart. And yet, Solomon realized that even this—even though the temple was declared and established by God, and though his glory filled it, it would not remain standing unless the protecting and preserving was fundamentally and primarily a divine operation, working amongst his people.
Unless God was with them, unless he was undergirding them, unless he kept them alive to use the house and the city, and unless he perpetually filled the city with his glory instead of allowing it to be filled with meaningless idols, all of it—all their building—all their watching—all their hope to please God—would be empty, futile, vain. Why?
I believe Solomon would have been happy for us to read the psalm this way: Unless the Lord builds, the labourer is in vain. Unless the Lord watches, the watchman is in vain. In other words, unless the Lord makes us—unless the Lord preserves us—we are vanity—worthless—empty. Unless the Lord is at work, we who always choose our sin before we choose him will always keep choosing sin. This is true before our salvation, and unfortunately, apart from his Spirit, it would also be true after we’re saved. In order to be pleasing to God, God must make you, first, pleasing to himself—he must make you dependent upon him. He must cause you to find your ultimate satisfaction in him first, and then he must keep satisfying you.
It’s only when you’re satisfied in him that your building and watching—your creating and preserving—become worth something. It’s not that Solomon or Israel were discouraged from working; it’s that to do anything of value, their trust must be first AND last in the Lord.
This is essentially what verse 2 tells us. Verse 1 gives us the main point of the psalm, and verse 2 functions to explain what it means, namely, how to or how not to build the house and watch the city. You’re not to build and watch by trusting in yourself or worrying about yourself or thinking much of yourself at all. It’s no good killing yourself over something that is pointless and vain in itself!
That’s what eating the bread of anxious toil means. It’s that you’re so preoccupied—so blinded and burdened by the worries of your life or the worries of the world or the worries of your job or the worries of your family that it becomes the thing you live by and live for, or worse yet, it becomes what you die by and die for. It’s what you take in—what you digest—what you expel, like what you eat or what you breathe. It becomes the purpose for your waking and sleeping. And Solmon says you’re not to build and watch—create and preserve under so great a burden, thinking that you’re the ultimate builder and keeper of these things! Why? Because God gives to his beloved sleep.
What does God giving sleep have to do with not building and watching in anxious toil? Have you ever wondered why we sleep at all? Why didn’t God just make it so that we’re awake for 24 hours? It’s to remind us that God can do and does more good for us, who are his, while we’re asleep than all that we could ever hope to accomplish ourselves while awake. It’s to tell us that when we trust God—when we are his beloved—those made monergistically alive to himself and kept by himself—not only is there nothing to worry about, but even as we work, and as we worry because of our own inadequacy and sin, God promises to be the one to satisfy our every need—to show his perfect strength in our weakness—to send a substitute in his Son to die for pointless, vain creatures like us, so that we might live in peace and have our worth in him.
In other words, the way we are to build a home and watch the city—the way we are to create and to preserve—is by resting—not in our own adequacy and self-satisfaction—but in a God who reminds us, every night, that we are frail, and in a God who awakens us, every morning, to the fact that his grace and mercy for us have been made new. The purpose of our lives is to find our rest in the Lord—in all that we make and keep. Our value and our worth isn’t defined by the things of our hands but by the one who has created and sustained our hands.
Therefore, make sure to do all things in the Lord. Make a conscious choice to humble yourself and seek his face as you go to work. Fellowship with your family not in competition with one another or in provocation of each other but fellowship in the Lord. Sing and gather in the church not to display the quality of your own holiness but to recognize your gathering and service as a reflection of his fellowship and service, first, to you.
Make a home that makes it about God because it will only find rest—it will only find worth—if it is God who adequately builds and watches over it, even in your vanity. Make it, firstly, about him, then, secondly, make a restful home in the Lord by …
2) Behold, the Blessing of Mess
I hope none of us here are misguided in thinking that just because we do trust the Lord that building what he leads us to create and protecting what he gives us to keep—that it becomes easy over night because it doesn’t. Buildings come with all sorts of difficulties. In fact, we know that in the time of Solomon—all the slaves he employed to build the temple—many of them—thousands upon thousands of them died. Watchmen would fall asleep all the time, and soldiers would fall out of line risking the life of the city.
And yet, even for those who struggle with the building or with the watching, the promise is that for those who trust in God—for those who depend upon him not in anxious, burdened unrest, but who are confident that he is doing more and better than we can think or fathom through our weakness—he intends to bless them. Don’t believe me, Solomon asks? Well, let’s think of an example—the most difficult, sobering, weakness-displaying, unpredictable, uncontrollable, unrelenting example that one can think of. It’s not war. It’s not natural disaster. It’s not state-imposed autocracies. It’s children.
Nothing in the world proves a person’s inadequacy, anxiety, inability to control, and unrest more than a child does. Actually, one thing does prove a person’s inadequacy, anxiety, inability to control, and unrest more than a child, and that is more than one child—two children, three children. You know how they say the more the merrier? Well, I’m sure the person who said it didn’t have children because the only rhymes that make sense in the context of a plurality of children is ‘the more the frenzier,’ ‘the more the messier,’ or ‘the more the crazier’—not just crazier children but crazier parents.
Solomon wants to give us the most severe test case that he can think of. Is it true that if the Lord precedes our acting—if we trust in him, then we need not be anxious or burdened in anything—that we can have every assurance of finding rest? Because just think of what kids are. The act of conceiving seems utterly random. Who knows what kind of zygote you’ll get—if you’ll get one at all? The personality of the child is something that has no single playbook. Will they sleep or not sleep? Will they cry or not cry? Will they throw tantrums? Will they eat? Will they be advanced or slower? Will they be able-bodied or disabled?
Yet look at what Solomon says: Behold, children are a heritage—an inheritance—a prize—a great possession of joy—not from your own conniving or doing—but from the Lord. To which you may be saying with a faint blush in your mind that, “well, there is a sense of our planning and acting. A man and woman do have a part to play in the conception of a child.” And to that I’d say, “Sure. You can plan and act. You can make sure you’re following all the right schedules, conducting all the tests to make sure the probability of conceiving is at its highest. But at the end of the day, the only one who knows for certain whether all your planning, testing, scheduling, and acting will bear fruit is God.”
You don’t control whether your womb will be barren or full. You don’t control what you’ll get. You don’t control how they’ll ultimately react to you. You have a part to play, yes—but the outcome, for any parent sitting in this room, you know—the conception, the inner spiritual development, and the outcome of their destinies—all of it belongs to the Lord.
This is why Solomon calls the fruit of the womb a reward—a heritage—a bounty of joy from the Lord. It’s because in this example, the children are the building—they are the thing that you create. They are the thing that you as man and wife are called to build, and yet, isn’t it true that unless the Lord does the building—unless the Lord does the creating—you can try and create all you want, yet without him, it’ll all be in vain. You can worry till your hair is grey, or if it’s like mine, till it falls out, but it won’t do anything but make matters worse. That’s the building side of things. But what about the watching side of things?
I now have two children, and I’m telling you if catastrophe were to strike our house or if an enemy warlord visited our doorstep, I would feel very ill equipped because my boys aren’t arrows. They’re probably closer to something like rubber bands or, at best, thumbtacks. They’d probably dent and pierce through me and my wife or our house before they made problems for other people.
Yet, Solomon says they are like arrows—that a man is blessed whose quiver is filled with them! He shall not be put to shame when the enemy comes to his gate. What this means exegetically is that in Solomon’s day, children were the most important thing you could have not only to carry on your name and land, but because as they grew up—especially if they were boys [and for those of you who see the footnote in verse 4, the word children is really sons]—if you had sons, and they grew up, and you trained them and outfitted them for their duties well, they’d not only provide you with additional help in your work, but as you aged, they’d be able to continue standing up for you and representing the strength of your house.
See, in context, this is the watching—the protecting part of it all. You are called to build—build to conceive children—build to raise up your children, but unless the Lord builds—unless you entrust them to him, it is in vain. And you are called to protect and keep your children so that they might protect and keep you in your old age, but unless the Lord protects and keeps them—unless the Lord guards their hearts and brings them to himself—you can protect and keep all you want, but on the day of opposition, if the Lord has abandoned you and them, then the only thing you might rightly expect is destruction.
Do you see how children, now, are a heritage from the Lord? It’s because they’re meant to bring you back to him. They’re God’s direct instruments operating upon your life to strengthen and enable you to walk more closely with him. This is why if the Lord precedes us—if we trust him—we need not be anxious. Because having children—embracing the mess that they are—the trouble that they are—the weariness—the bruises and the bumps—their unpredictable natures—it begs us to do one thing: to seek the Lord—to call upon his name and to entrust these precious bundles of mayhem—bundles you’d give your life and everything for—realizing that even if you gave everything, it would still not be enough because by yourself, we are weak—we lose patience—we are insufficient, but in the Lord, his strength is perfected in our weakness. In the Lord, we find our sufficiency.
Yes, you build, and you protect, and you raise your house to be all that you can muster it to be. But believe me, when it comes to the lives and souls of other beings, there is very little that we can do. And in our incapacity, we have a decision to make when it comes to our kids, our church, our friends and family, our coworkers lost in their sin: you can either entrust them to nothing and be filled with despair when your own messy, inadequacy finally catches up to you, or you can entrust them with the only One who can do everything and go on living your life, adequate or not, messy or not, knowing that in him you’ll never have to despair.
3) Be Loved, the Faithfulness of God
Why? Because he gives to his beloved sleep. Because when we were unconscious to our own sinfulness, labouring and watching in vain—when we were unaware of the enemy who had come to bring upon us our greatest shame, God acts for our good and displays his glory by sending his Son to die upon our cross, to suffer the punishment of our guilt, to appease our inadequacy with his perfect ability, and to secure eternal life for us, who repent and trust in his redeeming work.
Jesus secures our peace. Jesus is the blessing from our mess. He is the builder who has laboured and conquered. He is the watcher who remained awake and vanquished the approaching enemy while we slumbered. He is our love, and he is the glory of God’s faithfulness.
It is because of Jesus that this psalm takes on a whole new meaning for us on this side of the cross because you might have noticed that the context of verses 3-5 don’t really apply to us anymore. We don’t live in Solomon’s day. Having more children is an expensive thing and, sometimes, unfeasible thing to do. We aren’t in an agrarian culture where we need more sons to protect us from our physical enemies.
But what we do need is someone to protect us from our great, spiritual enemy because one day death and the devil will come for each of us, hoping to drag us into hell. And on that day, what will they find in your quiver? Who will they see standing behind you as a testimony that you either trusted in yourself or in the Lord?
Will they not look first to those whom God has given you to entrust to him? For those of you who are married, will that not be your spouse and your children—will their lives declare on your behalf that your hope was in Christ? And for those of you who are unmarried, will your testimony not be reflected in your spiritual children, your disciples, and your covenant family? What will their testimony reflect about you and your trust in Jesus for them?
Will you be found to have laboured and watched in vain? Or will you have worked as one seeking, before all else, the help of your faithful God and Saviour? What shall our testimony be as parents, as grandparents, as friends and family, as members of TCCBC? May it be that our home—that this home—is a restful home—unafraid of the enemies’ darts—unafraid of the world’s troubles and concerns—because it is filled with the labouring love and watchful eye of our Lord. Trust him in your own building and watching, and give him all the glory because, through him, your work shall not be in vain.
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