Acts 5:31 “God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior.”

No Christian doubts that Jesus is royalty, royalty of a sort that far surpasses all the nobility in all the world.

But Peter’s understanding of the term “Prince” in his day does not include some of the notions that word may suggest to us nearly 2000 years later. The stress is not on making and enforcing of laws. That Jesus does this is, of course, true. But that is not his main concern with us. When we Christians see Jesus mainly as heavenly law enforcement, we wind up with all kinds of distortions in our relationship to him and our service to him. We feel less cared for and more watched. We experience less peace and more fear. We serve less freely, less joyfully, and more driven. A big, threatening, otherworldly cop tapping his billy club in his hand is not the picture of Jesus Peter wants us to see as we look to God’s right hand.

Nor Peter does not choose the term “Prince” to suggest that Jesus is something less than the King. He is not junior royalty, royalty in training, something less than the Ruler of heaven and earth. Many times we would be happy to demote Jesus to that kind of figure head position. Then we feel free to take issue with him on some pet desire of ours or another. I have heard otherwise sober Christians challenge a direct quote from Christ when they didn’t want to give up some selfish practice or let go of some cherished misbelief. It’s as though we would presume to be Jesus’ teachers, instead of his students; to explain to him how things really work and what is really right.

No, Peter’s description of Jesus as Prince wants to bring to mind another function of royalty that has been mostly forgotten in our time. In medieval times people believed that God had created three estates on earth: the clergy to pray, the nobility to fight and defend, and the peasants to produce food. The idea that the nobility had the responsibility to fight for and protect the people they ruled was not unique to that time, but stretches at least as far back as the Kings and Judges of Israel. Every year King David went to war to protect his people against attackers.

It is in this sense that Jesus is our “Prince,” a hero or champion who will fight to defend and protect his people. He didn’t leave us in the struggle with sin alone. He didn’t even give us a part in overcoming the debt created by our guilt. He took the whole battle on himself when he took responsibility for our all our sin and let it kill him in our place.

He didn’t sit back and watch the futility with which we attack death. The whole human race puts their collective heads together. They gather all their technology and medical know-how, and what do we accomplish? We drive death back a few months here, a couple of years there. Over the last ten years, the life expectancy for an average American has grown from 76 and a half years to just shy of 78 years. Most recently they say we have even lost some ground. When he rose from the dead, Jesus didn’t merely extend our life expectancy. He destroyed death altogether. Now the life expectancy of the average Christian is infinity, because our Prince defeated our enemy and gives us life that never ends.

Can you think of a better place to see Jesus as our Princely Protector than at the right hand of God’s power, where he has all the weapons he needs to continue to defend our faith? With Jesus at God’s right hand in heaven, we can see the Prince who is fighting on our side.

Psalm 67:5-7 “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. Then the land will yield its harvest, and God our God will bless us. God will bless us, and all the ends of the earth will fear him.”

Do you like farming, or gardening? If you do, you look forward to a harvest. You expect a harvest. It is why you started this whole process in the first place. But the harvest is the one part of the process we don’t directly control. We can choose good seed. We can plant at the proper time. We can water and weed and fertilize. But after that we wait. Like Jesus said in the parable, “A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain–first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

Jesus wasn’t interested in farming so much, and neither is this psalm. Our harvest is a harvest of souls. We can plant the message of God’s grace in people’s minds and hearts. We can pray for God’s grace to give them faith. After that it is up to God to give the harvest.

Though we don’t control the harvest, that doesn’t mean we don’t expect one. Notice how this part of the prayer reads: “Then the land will yield its harvest.” More souls saved, a bigger family of faith, more and more children of the heavenly Father is God’s will for our mission work, not just ours. When the Lord himself teaches us to pray for something, we expect him to give us what we ask.

Those souls, those people, those family members in faith are the reward for our work. They are the content of the promise that “God, our God, will bless us.” My sins were forgiven, and heaven became my own, over a half a century ago when God claimed me as a child by faith through baptism. That was a settled issue long before I ever thought to tell anyone else about the Jesus who has done so much for me.

But since that time through the preaching of God’s grace the Lord has given a harvest. He has grown the family of faith around me. I am sure that my houses haven’t loved me, especially the way they have treated me. My last home spit sewage all around under the crawl space and made me crawl on my hands and knees underneath to clean it up.

My cars don’t love me, either. When I get old, and weak, and move into a nursing home someday, my cars won’t care about me enough to come and see me. They won’t call me and see how I am doing. They will just sit in the driveway and ignore me, or worse yet, abandon me to drive someone else around town.

But the people, the people who have become my brothers and sisters by faith, show their love for me every day by supporting my ministry, and working alongside me in God’s mission. They are my friends in the ups and downs of everyday life. Someday they, and other members of the family I have never met, may care enough about me to come and see me when I am sick, or old and weak. And all of us are going to share an eternal home with Jesus where we will love each other perfectly without end.

The people are God’s harvest. They are God’s blessing to me. They are an answer to our prayers.

Psalm 67:1-4 “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth.”

The psalmist is seeking a very specific application of God’s grace when he asks God to be gracious to us. Here we are, able to cope with life now, and on the last day we will rise to live forever, because we have this gracious God who loves and saves us. Can we keep this secret to ourselves? We aren’t in a competition with the rest of humanity. Letting them in on the secret takes nothing away from us. How can we let them be lost?

So we pray like a missionary. We pray for God’s grace and blessing so that his ways–his loving, saving way of dealing with us– can be known everywhere, among all nations. We pray for God’s grace because this task is bigger than us. There are billions of people to reach. We seem so few. We get distracted by all the other things we think are important. But is anything more important than the eternal fate of souls Jesus purchased with his own blood? We pray like a missionary when we pray for God’s grace to reach all the nations.

Once that word is out, we don’t want it to fall to the ground with no effect. We pray some more. We pray for God’s praises to come from the nations. “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you.”

Do you see the implication that is sitting between God’s salvation becoming known among all the nations, and all the peoples praising this same God? You don’t praise God for something you don’t believe in. You don’t praise a God whom you don’t believe in. Praying for the peoples to praise God assumes that the message of grace has given them a living faith.

Faith and praise are the responses that fit God’s saving grace. I suppose that it is possible to force words of praise from people without faith, but is that really praise at all? Maybe you remember the character Max from the movie The Sound of Music. He is the family friend who helped the Von Trapp family escape the Nazis. After Austria falls to Germany, the whole nation is expected to take up the greeting “Heil Hitler!” The true converts do it with gusto, but not Max. He weakly raises his hand to say it, and the words barely stumble out of his mouth. He has no real praise for his new dictator.

Jesus does not conquer the nations with a military machine. He does not force the peoples into subjection. He wins them with his grace. He overwhelms them with his love. Every word of praise, then, oozes with sincerity and joy.

And why shouldn’t it? Why shouldn’t the praises be sincere and come straight from a heart of faith? “…for you rule the people’s justly and guide the nations of the earth.” Jesus’ brand of justice has no hint of graft or corruption. We sometimes call our elected officials “public servants,” but Jesus truly is. He rules and leads as the one who made himself our servant. Everything he does is about us–our forgiveness, our salvation, our life, our eternity. We pray like a missionary, then, when we pray that the peoples will see it, and believe it, and then God’s praises will come from the nations.

Psalm 67:1 “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us.”

There is a whole world view in the words with which the psalmist begins this prayer. In Christianity, everything begins with grace. Asking God to be gracious to us is more than a request for God to be kind to us, to do something nice for us. If you ever listen to radio personality Dave Ramsey greet his callers, when they ask him “how are you?” his stock answer is “better than I deserve.” Better than I deserve. That’s God being gracious.

A Christian doesn’t approach God and say, “Just give me what I’ve got coming to me.” That would be insane. What I’ve got coming to me is really, really hot, and really, really uncomfortable, and lasts forever and ever. I have offended God with my life, and with my attitudes, not the least of which is the idea that somehow I deserve better than I’ve been getting. Asking God to be gracious is a way of saying, “I get it. I haven’t been banking all kinds of favors that you owe me, and now I am calling some of them in. It’s a blessing that you haven’t decided to squish me yet, because every day I am giving you more reasons to.”

But there is a more important part of this world view behind our prayer for God to be gracious. It is our complete confidence that he is! We don’t approach him in utter terror. We don’t come to him as a last resort because we are just that desperate. This is the God whose every dealing with us is always, only love. He doesn’t just send us a Savior. He comes here himself to rescue us. He doesn’t just put up a stiff fight to deliver us from our sins, and dig deep into his pockets to finance the operation. He dies in our place, he lays down his life as the payment that sets us free from all our sins deserved.

Maybe you heard of a campaign for evangelical Christians to text “God is not dead” to all their friends at Easter a couple of years ago. It was inspired by a movie of the same title. It’s true that he is not dead. But at the cross he was dead when Jesus breathed his last. He was dead until Easter morning, all because God is gracious, all because God is so intent on loving me and saving me that there is no price too high for him to pay. In Christianity, everything begins with grace, like this prayer, which understands from the very first words exactly where we stand with God. It starts and ends with grace.

Psalm 66:16-20 “Come and listen, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me. I cried out to him with my mouth; his praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened; but God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer. Praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me.”

Notice the pronouns the psalmist is using. In earlier verses he talked about “we” and “our” and “us.” Now he switches to talking about “I” and “my” and “me.” This is his testimonial. Because the Lord had tested him, and then preserved him, he had a story to tell. And so do you. And so do I.

Our story is the stuff of real praise because it is not so much our story as it is his story. Praising God is more than repeating acceptable slogans and phrases like “Praise the Lord,” or “Hallelujah” or “Hosanna.” It involves telling the story. Have you ever seen the Disney movie Finding Nemo? The little clownfish Nemo has been captured by an Australian dentist to be added to his aquarium. His father Marlin swims half-way across the Pacific Ocean to try to rescue him. He fights off sharks and jelly fish and hungry sea gulls along the way. Toward the end of his journey, Marlin’s story of adventure and perseverance gets picked up by some sea turtles. They tell it to other sea creatures. Pretty soon Marlin has become a living legend under the sea.

Our story is important not because we are the hero or the legend. We are more like little Nemo, stuck in the fish tank, waiting to be rescued. Our story is important because Jesus has come to the rescue—from sin, and death, and a whole host of lesser problems scattered across our lives. There is no higher or sincerer way of praising him than telling the story in which he is the hero every time that it’s told. “But God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer. Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!”

Does the story always have a happy ending? Maybe not when viewed through merely human eyes. Sometimes Israel lost its battles. Sometimes the Apostles died for their faith. Sometimes our circumstances go from bad to worse. Jesus’ own body was taken lifeless from the cross.

But we live every day and all of life in the light of Jesus’ empty tomb. His empty grave promises there is more to the story than meets the eye, and that our story, like his story, isn’t over yet. We worship the God who raises the dead. Praise the God who hears our prayers and never withholds his love!

Psalm 66:12-15 “…but you brought us to a place of abundance. I will come to your temple with burnt offerings and fulfill my vows to you–vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke when I was in trouble. I will sacrifice fat animals to you and an offering of rams; I will offer bulls and goats.”

The prosperity preachers tend to suggest that you can buy God off. If you just bring a big enough gift, the Lord will practically be forced to give you what you want. First comes your offering. Then comes God’s response.

The psalmist says it works the other way around. God’s goodness comes first. Our offerings are the response. We can’t pay God off. We have nothing to offer that isn’t already his. He needs nothing from us. Our combined treasures wouldn’t be worth a drop of Jesus’ blood, or a moment of his love, or an extra second added to our lives.

But God has already poured out streams of Jesus’ blood from the cross, and we live under the endless umbrella of his love every moment of our lives. He has forgiven all our sins and given us lives that never end. That inspires a response. I would like to give him something. What we bring is really just a token, just a symbol, that we are giving God the only thing he ever really wanted from us: our hearts!

The psalmist shows this with the gift he selected. The offering he brings to the temple is a whole burnt offering. This was the one kind of Old Testament sacrifice that was completely reduced to ashes when it was placed on the altar, kind of like when you get distracted and forget about the burgers on the grill. Most of the sacrifices at the temple merely cooked the meat, which was then eaten by the priests, or in some cases eaten by the worshipers themselves. The whole burnt offering was a sign of total dedication to God. It said, “Here, Lord, you get the whole thing–not just this animal, but my head, my hands, and my heart as well.”

That’s what the Lord wants us to bring him in response to his grace. In the first verse of Romans chapter 12, after exploring all the ins and outs of God’s saving grace for eleven chapters, Paul concludes, “Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship.” Again, first God acts with his saving mercy. Then we respond with our offering: our whole bodies, our whole selves, given up in praise to the God who preserves his people.

Psalm 66:8-12  “Praise our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard; he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping. For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.”

Take a moment to think about all your favorite stories, movies, or TV shows in which nothing ever goes wrong. There are no disasters or tragedies. Everyone always gets along all the time. No one makes any mistakes. No one is ever in danger, ever in pain, ever embarrassed. Can you think of any? I can’t. Whether it is drama or comedy, there has to be some sort of tension to make the story work.

Real life is similar. As hard as we may try to make sure that nothing ever goes wrong, it is filled with drama, trouble, and tension. Only now it doesn’t simply serve to make life more interesting. It makes it a little scary. Most stories and shows have a happy ending. Reality doesn’t always work that way.

If you back up a few verses, it seems that Psalm 66 has the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea in mind. When it speaks of “preserving our life” and “keeping our feet from slipping,” it is clear that something hasn’t been going smoothly. Now here’s the shocking thing: Not only did our God know about it and fail to stop it. Sometimes he was the one behind it! “For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and water…”

“You did this, God,” the psalmist says. “You brought us into prison.” Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you feel trapped? You size up the situation, look at your alternatives, and none of them seem very good? I can quit my job at a time when jobs in my field are scarce and face bankruptcy and starvation. Or I can keep showing up for work that is slowly robbing me of my sanity, raising my blood pressure to dangerous levels, driving me to an early grave. I can skip the chemotherapy, let the cancer take its course, and leave my children fatherless or motherless. Or I can take the poison, suffer through months of misery, and maybe leave my children fatherless or motherless in the end anyway.

“You put me in this prison,” the psalmist says. “You laid this burden on my back, or at least you let the bad guys ride all over my head.” Why? Why would my Lord do such a thing? “For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver.” Precious metals come from metal ores that have a lot of worthless garbage mixed in with the silver or the gold. It’s all good for nothing until you drop it into a blast furnace, turn the heat up to a couple of thousand degrees, and burn out all the impurities.

Sons and daughters of God come from raw material that has a lot of worthless sin mixed in, not the least of which is the pride that makes us think that we are gifted enough and good enough to get by on our own. It is dangerous to deny it. It will bite you if you do. We might as well own up to it. God intends to refine us, to burn that pride out of us by bringing us to situations that bring us to our knees. He leads us to that place where we can do no more for ourselves. All we can do is cry out, “Lord, help me!” Here is the test: Will we despair and give up? Will we get mad at God and turn away from him? Or will we trust him?

His salvation is waiting. “…but you brought us to a place of abundance.” When the Lord first leads a person to faith, he works in a similar way, doesn’t he? He leads us to feel the heavy burden of our guilt. He brings us to see that our sin is bigger than us. It’s crushing weight brings us to the place where we see there is nothing left for us to do. “Lord, help me!” And then he brings us to the cross, where we find an abundance of grace, more love and forgiveness than we ever thought possible. He doesn’t just help us with the heavy load. At the cross, Jesus removes it entirely and carries it himself. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” In leading us to repentance and faith, he brings us to a place of abundance.

The testing God sends after we come to faith brings us to a similar place of abundance. In stripping us of our self-dependence, and teaching us to depend on him, the Lord is drawing us closer to himself. He is showing us, truly, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” He is building in us the humble character and patient endurance that is appropriate for people who call themselves God’s sons and daughters. Even if the testing kills us, literally, he is only taking us home to the abundance of heaven. We have every reason to praise the God who preserves his people even though he may be testing us at any given moment.

Psalm 90:13-15 “Relent, O Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.”

An old saying claims, “Hunger is the best cook.” Food never tastes better than when you have worked up a voracious appetite. When Moses says, “Relent O Lord! How long will it be?” he is speaking as a hungry man. But the food he longs for is something to fill the spiritual emptiness created by a long meditation on sin and death. If all we knew of God was his anger at sin and the death it brings, we would spiritually starve to death. But it also gives us an appetite for something else from God: his unfailing love.

You see, for as long and as passionately as our God has hated our sin, he has loved us with a love that knows no limits and knows no rest. His love knows no limits. Think about it. What could you possibly imagine to ask God to give up that would be such an imposition, such an outrageous request, such a painful sacrifice, that he would say to you, “Now that is going too far. That’s out of bounds. That’s just too much to give up.” What could you ask him? He has already given up his home, his power, his respect, his Son, his life to love you. Isn’t that what Jesus is all about, God giving up everything to forgive you and to save you?

His love knows no rest. It is unfailing love. He doesn’t have a bad day at the office and take it home to take out on you. He doesn’t grow in a different direction and grow apart from us. He doesn’t burn out from constantly pouring himself into this relationship with little or no appreciation in return. His love is unfailing. It knows no rest. It never takes a day off.

Doesn’t that satisfy the hunger, like a bowl of hot soup on a cold day? But doesn’t that also serve as something of an appetizer for even more? Happiness and peace are elusive in this world. We find our little moments of relief, we experience some joy, but it is all so fleeting.

There is only one place I know where God will make us glad for as many days as he has afflicted us, and even more, and that is in heaven. This is yet another promise of his unfailing love, and if we have learned to number our days here, we will spend them longing for the better days to come.

Psalm 90:1 “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.”

God has been our dwelling place. There is a comforting picture of his constant care in that statement. God has been like a home around us. The help we receive from him is not so much like going to the doctor’s office. That isn’t some place you live. It’s some place you occasionally visit only when you are very ill. God is more than someone we go to for an occasional visit. He is like home. We live with him and in him. He is the one who has been our constant protection from the elements. He is the one whose grace shelters our souls.

The word that Moses chose for “dwelling place” also suggests that it is something of a hideaway, an escape where trouble cannot find us. Wild animals often have homes that are camouflaged and hidden to avoid the attack of predators. When we are dwelling with the Lord, we are likewise hidden away in his protection from those who want to prey on us. The devil may “prowl around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). But wrapped in the righteous life of our Savior, covered in the blood of his forgiveness, we are perfectly safe from the devil’s accusations.

This is where we have lived all our days as believers in him. God has always been our dwelling place, not only for us, but for our parents and grandparents before us and for our children and grandchildren to follow us, ‘throughout all generations.” It’s not as though people have ever had different options here. “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” Even before creation, our God is the one who stretches back forever without beginning. He didn’t replace some other god somewhere along the way. He didn’t come to his position by promotion, or succession, or acquisition. He has always been there, just as he will always be there. He is the only God there is. As we pray this psalm with Moses, we note that every day we have lived has been lived in his constant care.