August 16, 2020
Upcoming Events and Notices
Please note the time change for livestream worship service. Please join us for livestream worship at 10 AM, August 16, 2020 here.
You can find the order of worship and songs here.
The August 9, 2020 sermon, Proverbs 2:9–22. “Someone to Watch Over Me” is available on our church website. You can also catch up on older sermons from our Sermon page and subscribe to sermon podcast here.
We hope to resume our midweek online studies in a few weeks. If you have not already done so, please visit this survey and indiate all days / times you can participate.
August 16 (11:15 AM Lord's Day): Please join us for online fellowship after the worship live-stream via Google Meet. You can also join by phone. Please contact pastor Ken for call-in information.
Thank you for your coninued support of Grace Fallbrook (PCA). Your loving support makes the proclamation of the gospel and the building up of the saints possible. Please continue to mail in your gifts and offerings to our church treasurer, Bruce Summers. In addition, our church website now features online giving. Please visit the church website and click on "Give" which you will find in the upper left corner of our church's website. When you click on "Give Online Now" button on that page, you will be directed to the PCA Foundation where you give towards Grace Fallbrook (PCA).
Before We Worship
We want God to be a soft pillow. A pillow will never resist or push back. And if we happen to get smacked with a pillow, well, it really won't hurt that much. A pillow is there, at our beck and call, to mold itself around our need. Interestingly, some people think they are growing in faith because they think God more and more like a pillow, a soft, harmless, user-friendly accessory.
God is, indeed, a source of profound comfort for his people. But those who draw near God will not find him to be like a pillow. Psalm 130 describes a pilgrim whose deepening faith has left him shattered. He finds God is not like a soft pillow, but a hard rock against which he is dashed and breaks into a thousand pieces. "Our of the depths I cry to you, O LORD! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?"
Psalm 130 does not describe how the psalmist came under the conviction of sin. What we see, instead, is the end result of that painful process. The closer the psalmist drew nearer to the holy God, he found himself being undone. God was not a harmless trinket. The hardness of his holiness left the psalmist sinking into the depths, with no other plea but for mercy. Indeed, one has not made much progress in his faith (if at all) when he has not been shattered against the Rock of Ages.
God is a rock. He will dash the sinner to pieces. He will also be the immovable and unshakable rock of comfort. Verse 4 begins with one of the most important words in the whole Bible: "but". "But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared." With mercy God convicts us of our sin. With mercy he also saves us from judgment. If we are looking for a reason to stay safe before God in ourselves, that reason will not be found. Instead, what keeps us safe before God is found in his very character of mercy. This is what prompts the psalmist to say, "I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope…For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption." In other words, we are not safe because God is soft like a pillow. We are safe because his mercy is as immovable as a rock.
How shall we respond to God's mercy? We must not continue to think of him like a harmless trinket, as if he were a useful fool. We all want the God of forgiveness. But did you read what follows? "But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared." Now we must be broken before him, although in a different sense. We shatter our pride, stubbornness, selfishness, self-adulation, that we may find ourselves made whole in God. And so we will find his mercy made complete in us.