Fetching Us Back Home Again

What follows is a transcript of our guest speaker's message from our Sunday morning gathering. We share these messages on our blog for those who appreciate the opportunity to read the sermon again—whether for deeper reflection, personal study, or a quieter moment of prayer and introspection. As you read, we invite you to linger with the words, notice what resonates, and remain open to how God may be speaking to you through them.

by Chaplain Greg Thogmartin

We're going to look at Psalm 19 and then a few verses from Psalm 119. Psalm 19 divides into two sections. The first six verses are about how God is revealed in the creation, especially when you look into the starry sky.

So, living at Stanbury, if you work at the hospital, it makes absolutely no sense to fall at 136 all the way in and then have to cut back south. It's safer to go through the blacktop than it is to come past the Mozingo intersection, for sure. And there's been a few times when I've left Stanbury when it has been really pretty foggy.

I've got to Conception, I've made the turn, I'm on the blacktop headed west, and when you get to where Double V hits N, and then you're going to turn and go north to get to the Arco Road. This has happened to me more than once now. It's like I get out there and suddenly there's a hole in the sky.

And in the midst of the fog, there'll be this opening, and a couple times then the Milky Way has been so bright and so beautiful looking through that hole that it's easy for me to think about what this scripture means. So, Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes throughout all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man runs his course with joy.

Its rising is from the end of heaven, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. So those first six verses are about the way God is revealed in the world around us. When Romans 1 says that man is without excuse, because what can be known about God's existence and about his power, this is kind of where Paul's arguing from.

But I wanted to highlight a couple of things for me that just stress, so we call this general revelation, the ways in which God reveals himself to all people through his created order. So we're living there at Stanbury. One of my daughters has planted a whole bunch of zinnias in our garden.

I mean, they're just scattered all over that and sunflowers. So the sunflowers have been attracting a pair of cardinals and some goldfinches, but the zinnias have attracted hummingbirds, and we've not had hummingbirds in our yard before. And I've not, until the other day, I had never seen one sit still before, which really amazed me.

But when I think about how tiny they are and how they flit around and just, they're amazing, right? So I thought about that as an evidence of a creator. And then, if you will remember, last year, it was in the summer, I guess, weather was warm. The northern lights were visible down here.

They weren't just visible like in a faint glow in the sky. They were like crazy bright. Actually, some of what people were seeing here was probably brighter than anything I ever saw in the total of nine years that I lived in Alaska, as far as just coming down, basically, it almost looked like it touched the earth.

But how could you see that and not think there's some, someone behind this? Because I don't want to call God a thing. I don't want to say something, but someone behind this. Well, the psalmist goes on to tell us that this someone who's behind all of this then has spoken.

And so then what we talk about the Bible and about the Scripture, we talk about special revelation, that God has taken a step beyond just what can be known in creation to reveal himself. And I'm going to be reading now from the New King James, and I want to ask this question, though. There used to be, in some churches, we sang Scripture choruses.

Would any of you have ever sung Psalm 19 beginning in verse 7? The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. More to be desired are they than gold, giving much fine gold.

Sweeter also than honey in the honeycomb. And I'm guessing by the look Bob's giving me, he never sang that song before. So I have to pick on him.

We have this special relationship from him volunteering at the hospital. I had been telling him that today's my sermon title was going to be from a movie that had Richard Dreyfuss and Bill Murray in it. What about Bob? But it's not.

So this section of Scripture begins with the law of the Lord is perfect, and the New King James and King James versions say converting the soul. Then you look at the newer translations, and they might either say reviving the soul or restoring the soul. And the word that's used here for converting is the same word that's used in Psalm 23 verse 3, he restores my soul.

Okay? But it's got several layers of meaning, and that's where I get my title, because one of them is to fetch back home again. I think one of the things the Word of God does is that it calls us back home again. I've got a book on my shelves at home.

It's my favorite book title ever when it comes to spiritual things, and the title of that book is How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home. It's not just a journey it starts us on. It doesn't drop us off someplace.

It gets us all the way home, and the Spirit making the Word of God come alive to us fetches us back home again when we stray. So think about this for just a minute. Stone-Campbell movement.

Alexander Campbell and those folks were known for saying, no book but the Bible. No creed but Christ, right? No, but no book but the Bible. John Wesley, whom I love to study about, at one point in time early on had heard some guy talking, and he took these words for himself, but it's a Latin phrase, Homo Unus Libre, man of one book. And then he had prayed, Lord, let me be a man of one book. And both the disciples of Christ and the Methodists had claimed to be people of the book. I don't know if you all would have ever heard of Randy Mark Miles.

He was a pastor in Indiana. He had a music ministry. He traveled.

He was a disciples pastor. He came to Stanbury. That's the only reason I know about him.

Back when we pastored in Rosendale, so we drove the 35 miles to Stanbury to hear this presentation, and he had a song about people of the book. And I'm not going to try and sing it for you, but anyway. But it was specifically focused on our identity as Christians, and are we tied to this book, and what does the book do for us? And part of what he talked about was that we have a story for the world to tell.

But beginning in verse 7 and going down for the next few verses, there's some statements here about the word of God. So the law of the Lord is perfect to converting the soul. So it restores the soul.

It revives the soul. It fetches us back home again. The testimony of the Lord is sure.

Now that means it's reliable. It makes wise the simple. So simple here is not like Henry David Thoreau and wanting to live on Walden Pond, you know, and have a simple life.

Simple in the wisdom literature, which would be Psalms, Proverbs, some of the other books in the Old Testament, has to do with perhaps being naive, inexperienced, possibly a little foolish. See, when I see the word simple, though, I don't think that. I've got a more positive thing in my head.

Any country music fans here? All right. The three of us are on our own, okay? But there was a song by John Conley a long time ago. He said, I'm just a common man.

I drive a common van. My dog ain't got no pedigree. If I have my say, it's going to stay that way, because high-browed people lose their sanity.

A common man is what I'll be. And we won't sing the rest of it, but that's what I think of. I think about this person who's just, you know, kind of ordinary and common, and that's not what simple means here.

So what it's telling us is that the Word of God can protect the person who's come from this simple background and can grow them up, can bring them to wisdom. There are six statements here. You've got the law of the Lord, the testimony of the Lord, statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. And the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

And those are basically six. Let's think of a diamond. Those are six facets of turning that diamond.

But when you read the law of the Lord, you're not just thinking of thou shalt and thou shalt nots. We're talking about everything that God has done to reveal himself, to make himself known to us, that we might know him, because otherwise we could know that there's a God, but we wouldn't necessarily know God himself. It's only when God chooses to reveal himself to us, and then he sends his son later on, for the fullest revelation, that we have the privilege really of knowing who God is.

We would have just some vague knowledge that there's got to be someone behind this, something behind this. And then he offers us his word. So the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

So the Bible brings us joy. That's a novel thing for some people to think about, because they're thinking, ah, that dusty old book. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

It's the idea that there's light. Maybe you might think in terms of guidance. Maybe you might think in terms of Psalm 119, verse 105.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. Now, I saw two different ways that commentators translated or interpreted this verse.

One was the idea that the Scripture leads us to the fear of the Lord, to reverence God, to hold God in awe, and then we will live accordingly. Others thought that the fear of the Lord here was about those passages, perhaps, that ought to make us tremble when we read them. I kind of prefer the first interpretation.

That doesn't mean I'm right, but I do think part of what that means is that the fear of the Lord not only does it endure, but it leads us to worship. It reminds me that there's an end to what I can do and an end to what I know, and I need so much more help than what I'm capable of providing for myself. And the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether, and probably the translations you would look at would have altogether like A-L-T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R, and maybe it would be better if it was separated out, two words reminding us that all those things altogether are true and right.

Okay, so I told Bob while ago that, so my wife has been working me like a dog, just so you know, out in the yard. I've sweat off about seven pounds in the last month, and I'm grateful for a little weight loss, but somewhere in there I had this beautiful set of notes in a kind of a purple folder. I have no idea where that folder is.

I thought it was in my office. I got up early and left Stanbury, come over here this morning so I could go to my office. It was in my office earlier this week.

I know it was, but it's not there now, and it's not where I would have left it at the house. I have no idea where it is, so I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants up here, if I can make a confession, right? But the scripture tells us then that these things are more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold. It's the idea that they're precious and they're valuable, and we ought to hold them as precious.

Then when I see sweeter than honey in the honeycomb, I'm reminded of the story where Jonathan, they're in battle, right, and Saul has issued this stupid injunction, if you will, that they are not to eat until they have vanquished the enemy, and they have battled all day long. His guys are running out of steam. They are, in fact, winning, but they are running out of steam, and as Jonathan and his armor bearer come through this patch of woods, they find honey oozing out of the side of this tree, and he dips his staff in the honey and tastes it, and it talks about how the light returned to his eyes.

Honey is sweet, and it's a delicious thing, but I think also in the sense of it being life-giving and energizing. It goes on to say in verse 11, More over by them your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward. So verse 12 says, Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from my secret faults.

So here's the idea, maybe, that the scripture for us is almost like having a searchlight turned on us. It will help us to see things that we could not see ourselves. Now, just let me be real honest for a minute.

If we hang out together and I get to know you very well, I'll figure out what your faults are. I may not know my own, but I'll probably figure out what yours are, right? And you'd do the same for me. You'd be thinking, well, that Greg, man, he's such a stinker at times.

Why does he care about that, or why did he get irritated about this thing? And the scripture can shine light on who we are and help us to see, as the Holy Spirit makes that word come alive, that we have these things. Maybe part of it is sometimes, it's not just that they're tiny little sins, but it's just maybe we have lived in such a way that that's just become a part of who we are. We don't even recognize it as a fault until somehow the Holy Spirit breaks through with the Word of God and convicts us.

Then it says in verse 13, keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins, and presumptuous as to the idea of things that are willful. You know, in the Old Testament, there is no prescribed ceremonial kind of offering for willful sin. There's all sorts of things that are prescribed if a sin, if you kind of stumble into something, but if you have willfully sinned.

Now, there is forgiveness. It has to be confessed and repented of, and then the sacrifice is offered. But God took willful sin very seriously, and so keep me from that.

Help me to think clearly. Take this Word and write it across my heart. So keep me from, keep your servant from presumptuous sins.

Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression, and their part of it may be, the word great might actually mean like much transgression that I'm gonna, not that I'm not gonna do wrong things, but hopefully I'll do less and less wrong things. Alistair Begg wrote a book called Brave by Faith, about the first six chapters of the Book of Daniel, and one of the things he talks about there is when you get older, temptation doesn't just go away.

Maybe they change, but it doesn't just go away. You know, because some people might think, well, when you get older, man, that stuff's not gonna matter to you. You're just gonna be holy.

Well, not necessarily. But, you know, it's not necessarily you know, and for some of us, there will be things perhaps that were a challenge when we were 20, and they were a challenge when we were 30, and they're a challenge when we were 40, and I don't want those girls back in the back to know how old I am. Although I was in one of them's hometown 39 years ago to watch DJs from WHO out of Des Moines that were broadcasting from the top of the green elevator, because they had offered their audience a chance to say, hey, broadcast from here and give them ideas.

And so, in Joaquin, Iowa, there they were, and we were there with my wife's grandfather watching them, because he loved, I can't remember the guy's name, but Patty was the female co-host. But 39 years ago, there we were, and you know, some of the things that might have been a challenge for me 39 years ago could very well still be a challenge now, but along the way, I've accumulated a few new things, whether it's to walk in humility, you know, or I don't want to go into a list of what my foibles might be, but I got them, just so you know. I have to repent of them, and I have to confess them, and I have to ask for forgiveness.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. That was my aunt, Loden Shalkathi, my Aunt Ruth, that was her favorite way to end a prayer. Anytime I ever heard her pray, she always ended it that way.

But notice here, David's talked about all these things, all these challenges, but he doesn't say at the end of this psalm, Lord, I'm just a stinking sinner. Instead, he prays more as if he is a servant. You've done all these things for me.

Now, may the meditation of my heart, the words of my mouth be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. So very quickly, Psalm 119, if you're not familiar with it, I would ask you to get familiar with it. It's 176 verses, longest psalm out of the 150 psalms, longest chapter in the Bible.

It's an acrostic, so it's divided out by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and there are 22. So, every eight verses, the first word begins with whatever that letter would be in the order, and they're listed in order. So, Aleph for the first eight, and then Bet for the next eight, and Daleph, and that's about the extent of my Hebrew right there, right? But it's an amazing thing because, so for eight verses, the first word will always begin with whatever that letter is, and it's masterful.

Part of your homework ought to be to go back and to read through Psalm 119 and look for the word delight and for the word rejoice. But in Psalm 119, we get a couple of things. One is in verses 8 through 11, or 9 through 11, excuse me, how can a young man cleanse his way by taking heed according to your word? With my whole heart I have sought you.

Let me not wander from your commandments. Your word have I hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you. So how can a young man cleanse his way by taking heed? That means you listen and you pay attention.

With my whole heart, to be wholehearted in our faith is a beautiful thing. And then it says, your word I've hidden in my heart, and then the question would be, how do you do that? So, here's one real simple key to it. You can't hide it in your heart if you don't spend time in it.

Now part of what I'm trying to get to here is there's… you all are parents and grandparents. For all I know, some of you are great-grandparents. I don't know.

And your grandkids might just say, well, they were great-grandparents before we ever had the other generation that came along. But for months I used to write my in-laws about things that I was reading, and I would always quote from these different books, and my hope was that they would talk to the grandkids then about these things of faith. I'm not going to tell you what a failure I was as far as getting them to do that, but part of what I'm hoping for today is there might be something here that is worth having a discussion with the people that are in your family.

What is the place of the word of God in your life? So, you hide it by reading slowly and prayerfully and imaginatively. You hide it by meditating on it. So last time I was here, we looked at Joshua 1-9, and one of the things that was in Joshua 1-9 was this phrase, as I was with Moses, so I will be with you.

And I can't tell you after I had read that passage, just think about that sermon, how many times just that thought came to mind, as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. And just letting that roll over and over in my heart and brain like a rock in a rock tumbler. What is there for me to hear in this, Lord? What is there for me to maybe to share with others? What is, how should this affect my doing and my being, right? And then pray in the scripture.

But Psalm 1-19 says in verse 105, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. So having lived in Alaska in the land of real earthquakes and having experienced a couple of them that were over seven, one of them where I was in a doctor's examination room, and he was sitting there on a stool that had wheels on it. And when the earthquake first struck, the power went off.

There was just this rumble. And when the lights flashed back on, he was in a different part of the room, because the stool had wheels, right? And then they flashed off and flashed back on again, and he was in a different part of the room. And the third time they flashed back on, he was hanging onto a table like this, so he wouldn't be flying across the room.

Headlamps are a big deal up there, right, with the strap. We'd use them for lots of different things. But I didn't go anyplace really prior to that earthquake without a light with me.

And after that, I certainly did not, because I had to go to too many places on Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson that were below ground level, and there were no windows. And then it was, you were in Carlsbad Caverns, right, and you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. So, real quick, what do you believe about the Bible? That's an important question.

I'm not going to tell you how to answer it, but I ask you that question. An even more important question for me as a pastor and as chaplain is, what's your attitude toward the Bible, and does it have a place of prominence in your life? John Wesley told his preachers that they should read and pray a certain number of hours a day, and I'm not laying that burden on you, but he told them if they couldn't, if they wouldn't feel like they couldn't do that, they didn't have the desire to do that, they should pray until they had the desire to do that. He said, otherwise you will be triflers all your day.

And we don't use the word trifle a lot probably in current English, but it's the idea of just, we're just playing, right? I went to an army school at Fort Leavenworth years ago, and the guy that led our class was a Christian man, and the day we graduated, after we'd been to the ceremony in this room at Leavenworth they called the big blue bedroom because so many people would fall asleep during presentations in this auditorium, he brought us back to our classroom and he goes, he's going to pass out our certificates and things to us, and all the graded assignments he had for us, and he goes, but before you go, let me tell you this. And he read to us from John chapter 10 in the King James, which talks about the good shepherd, and instead of the hired man like you might read about in the New Revised Standard, it talked about the hireling. And he was challenging us to be the real thing, and don't be a hireling so that when trouble comes that you cut and run, you're only thinking about yourself.

But ever since he shared that with us, I can't think of the word hireling without just feeling like I need to spit, it just has such a nasty taste in my mouth to call somebody a hireling. Well, to call somebody a trifler would be the same thing for me, or if you're familiar with John Eldridge, who wrote a number of books for men over the last 20 years, he talks about being a poser. And several of my chaplains used that a lot when I was in Iraq the second time, they would preach these sermons, and this one guy was always after the soldiers, don't be a poser, don't be a poser, right? So here's a way to think about it.

So I mentioned the hummingbirds a while ago, and some of you probably have hummingbird feeders, and you know they have voracious appetites, especially if you get a group of them coming, they can drain a feeder pretty quick, and then you're out there pouring more stuff in it. Had a friend at Fort Leonard Wood, she had 13 of them in her yard on a regular basis, and they were beautiful, it was so fun to watch them. She was getting tired of paying for hummingbird juice at the commissary, so she went online looking for a recipe, and she found several, but every one of them, below the bottom of the recipe, then there would be a disclaimer, you know, don't use a sugar-free sweetener, right? Because it will taste sweet to them, they can drink themselves to death, because there's no calories there to sustain them, right? And so just the idea that there's something in the Word of God for us that you cannot substitute for.

So your homework again is read Psalm 19 and 119, and especially look for the words delight and rejoice. Consider how even those two words might influence your attitude toward the Word of God. You know, 1 John chapter 5 verse 3 says, his commands are not burdensome.

So just let me real quick tell you why, one of the reasons why this is so important to me. Why would I take the time to talk to you about reading the Word of God? I have found in my adult life times in the midst of struggles when I kept on reading the Word of God, and suddenly there was something there in the darkness that turned on the light for me. My dad died right after my 25th, or right before my 25th birthday.

I went off to seminary. I'm down there with a whole bunch of wonderful young people who are supposed to be prepared to take care of other people, and they didn't know squat, that's a technical term just in case you didn't know, about caring for somebody who was grieving. And I was so stinking lonely.

I'd gone from Princeton down to Tulsa, Oklahoma to go to school. And sometime, my dad had died in August, sometime in November I think it was, maybe the first week of December. I'm reading along one morning.

I'd taken a bath. I was getting ready to go study Greek. Sat in the bathtub and cried, and got out and was looking at the Psalms, and Psalm 31 says, Praise be to the Lord who showed me his marvelous kindness when I was in a city under siege.

Just when I said, I am cut off from your sight, yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help. It was a passage I'd highlighted when I'd read it before, probably because I thought it was cool. But that morning, it was the personal flotation device that kept this kid from going under.

Because I took it as a promise that even if I thought, man my prayers can't get past the ceiling, somehow Lord you've heard me, and I am not lost to your sight. So you fast forward a few years. This past week was the 37th anniversary of the stillbirth of our son, Jedediah, who was stillborn at 37 weeks.

About three weeks prior to that, I'd been reading in the Gospel of Matthew. I'm done with seminary. You know, I've had classes on the Gospels, but I'm reading Matthew 11, 28 through 30, come unto me all you that are weary and burdened, or weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart. And it goes on, you will find rest for your souls. And I had read that, and all of a sudden it just dawned on me, it's like there is something there that I don't understand, or more than I understand.

So I studied it in Greek. One of the things I saw in Greek, there was an emphatic pronoun where it says, and I will give you rest. And we don't do a good job with this in English translation.

It says, and I myself will give you rest. It's kind of like the whole Hummingbird thing there, except no substitutes, right? I even went one night to a Bible study that we did at our church, and it was primarily older people that came, and I said, hey, I've read this passage of scripture, I'm kind of, I'm wrestling with it, help me. And they went around the room, and each one of them said what they thought it meant.

And it was a beautiful evening. Most of the folks there were 65 and older, seasoned, seasoned adults, right? And then the following week, on my birthday, my wife said, I don't feel the baby move today. And so we, and I don't want to, I'm not trying to drive you to tears.

I hope my own don't bother you, but so we went and saw the doctor. They did everything they needed to do that evening. Everything's fine.

Just go home and rest. But by tomorrow at noon, if you haven't felt 12 movements, and we want you to go to Wichita, because we were living out in Kansas. And anyway, from there, the rest is history.

There were no movements. By the time we got to Wichita the next afternoon, the baby had, there was no heartbeat. And then we delivered a still birth in the middle of the night.

And we named him Jedediah, which means loved by the Lord. But those verses from Matthew, there was a life ring. In one case, it was stuff that came to me in the midst of my challenges.

In another, it was like it was placed there to prepare us for our challenges. Because nothing that I was going through, or nothing that my wife was going, and I were going through, caught God by surprise. That's one of the reasons why I tell people to be in the Scripture.

God can speak to you, but you've got to crack the book open. You know, it's not like the college kid that thinks, well, I'm going to study psychology, and they put it under their pillow and think, I can do this by osmosis. It's not going to work that way.

So I thank you for your attention, and our sending forth song today is from Come to Me, O Weary Traveler. But let me pray before we sing that, and then I know Jason will offer the benediction. But Lord, we thank you for your word.

Thank you, Lord, for the promises that are in your word, of your presence with us, of you knowing who we are and where we are, and that you never lose sight or never lose track of us. Draw us to you. Make us to know the wonder of your love and of your grace.

So we seek a blessing in Christ's name. Amen.