A Faithful God for All Generations

Psalm 71, and I'm reading from the ESV version. It speaks to us deeply about a life of faith over many years. You might imagine the man who wrote this psalm, not necessarily David, is an elderly man reflecting on his life. He learned to lean on God from his youth right through to old age. It can certainly teach us, a church of twenty-five years, something about how to press on for the next twenty-five years, how to pass on faith to the next generation, and how to trust God as years add up.

Let's read it now. Psalm 71. In you, O Lord, do I take refuge. Let me never be put to shame. In your righteousness, deliver me and rescue me.

Incline your ear to me and save me. Be to me a rock of refuge to which I may continually come. You have given the command to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress. Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel man. For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth.

Upon you I've leaned from before my birth. You are He who took me from my mother's womb. My praise is continually of you. I've been a portent to many, but you are my strong refuge. My mouth is filled with your praise and with your glory all the day.

Do not cast me off in the time of old age. Forsake me not when my strength is spent, for my enemies speak concerning me. Those who watch for my life consult together and say, God has forsaken him. Pursue and seize him, for there is none to deliver him. O God, be not far from me.

O my God, make haste to help me. May my accusers be put to shame and consumed with scorn and disgrace. May they be covered who seek my hurt. But I will hope continually, and I will praise you yet more and more. My mouth will tell of your righteous acts, of your deeds of salvation all the day, for their number is past my knowledge.

With the mighty deeds of the Lord I will come, and I will remind them of your righteousness, yours alone. O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and grey hairs, O God, do not forsake me until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come. Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?

You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again. From the depths of the earth you will bring me up again. You will increase my greatness and comfort me again. I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, O my God. I will sing praise to you with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel.

My lips will shout for joy when I sing praise to you, my soul also which you have redeemed. And my tongue will talk of your righteous help all day long, for they have been put to shame and disappointed who sought to do me harm. So far from God's word. Well, congratulations, Open House. Twenty-five years, that's a quarter of a century.

That's long enough to have seen multiple pastors come and go, to say nothing of office bearers coming and going, to say nothing of members coming and going. Sometimes we wonder if we have a revolving door instead of a sliding door at the front of the church. Twenty-five years means a lot of building improvements and repairs. There's a lot that goes into managing and maintaining this site and keeping it looking so schmick. Our thanks to the people who turned up for yet another working day even yesterday.

Twenty-five years means morning teas served every Sunday, enough to realise that God's people are not going to go hungry on Sundays. And of course, goes without mention, the church coffee served faithfully after every worship service. Still the same brew, like it or loathe it. It's always served with love. It's fair to say twenty-five years of church life isn't necessarily glamorous.

There were probably times when someone forgot to turn the urn on just before we're ready to finish the service. Or the pastor's microphone's been sabotaged and the battery goes flat halfway through point two. And all good sermons have three points, you know that. I know there was a time when the chairs we used to sit on were not as solid and as comfortable as the chairs you're seated on today. And there was an occasion when the minister asked everyone to take a seat.

One dear saint came to grief when his seat gave way, and he came crashing down to the floor. And that same Sunday, there was a call for a third offering to replace the broken chair. And yet, through all these seeming imperfections, we're here to declare God has been perfect in His faithfulness, in His love, and His mercy to Open House Christian Reformed Church. I want to suggest twenty-five years is long enough to have seen God do some amazing things through us and with us. Lives that have been changed.

Families restored and able to worship together, faith born in the hearts of those who once doubted, and through it all, the steady unshakable confidence of knowing the faithfulness of God through and through. Anniversaries like this are not necessarily about patting ourselves on the back, are they? They're more about looking up. They're more about remembering who it is that got us here. And that's why Psalm 71 is the perfect passage for today.

It's a psalm that's been written by someone who's walked with God for a long time. Someone who is prepared to reflect and look back over the years of both joy and pain and say, God, you have been my rock, my refuge all my life. Psalm 71 is in essence the prayer of an old saint with a young heart. And that's exactly what the church should be after twenty-five years. Not old and tired, but seasoned and matured and alive with gratitude for the past and faith for the future. Let's have a look at it.

Psalm 71. It begins like this. In you, O Lord, I've taken refuge. Let me never be put to shame. The Hebrew word for refuge means shelter, a safe place, a place to which someone can run to for protection.

The same word is used in Psalm 46, might be more familiar to Luther's great Reformation psalm. God is our refuge and our strength. It describes not just a hiding place from danger, but a home, a safe place, a warm place in the middle of chaos. The psalmist isn't saying, O God, I found you to be my refuge occasionally. He's saying, I built my whole life around you all of the time.

This is not a casual on-again off-again kind of faith. No matter how hard the storms of life will beat and batter him, this guy is safe. He's secure. He knows where his true home is with God. God is his refuge.

But notice what the psalmist says next. Be my rock of refuge to which I can always go. Always. Not just when it's convenient, not just when the church roof leaks and the plaster's peeling off the walls. Not just when the board of management tells us that the budget is taking a hit. No.

Always be my rock in the good times and the bad. And if we can learn anything from the past twenty-five years, it's surely this. God has always been faithful. Always. Not only in the big visible things, but in the quiet things.

God's sustaining grace that gets us here from one Sunday to the next, from one service to the next, from one generation to the next, as we'll see. When the psalmist calls God a rock, the Hebrew word evokes permanence. Something he can stand on. Something that's solid and reliable. And God is that strong foundation on which he can take a stand.

In a world of shifting sands, God is the immovable foundation. We live in a culture that prides itself on novelty, new phones, new ideas, new movements. But the church thrives on something ancient and timeless, the unchanging character of God. Think about it. Every other foundation we choose to build our lives on will crack and one day disappear.

Our own abilities will fade and fail us. Our institutions falter. Our heroes disappoint us, but God never does. And when we look over twenty-five years of ministry, we can say with the psalmist, from our youth you have taught us, and to this day we declare your marvellous deeds. That's the heartbeat of the psalm really.

It depends on the psalmist's ability to remember, to recall. This is not nostalgia or sentimentalism, but this is remembrance. Nostalgia is sentimental, and it can amount to warm fuzzies and a few regrets. But remembrance, on the other hand, gives rise to praise and worship. It's very focused, and it appreciates the firm foundation of a life built on God's saving grace.

Nostalgia suggests that we might be saying, remember the good old days, or back in the day when we did it this way or that way. Things were so much better then, weren't they? Remembrance says, hasn't God been great all along? Imagine that God's been making a work of art with our church, with Open House. A mosaic made up of lots of broken pieces of ceramic tiles, different sizes and different shapes.

Every tile in the mosaic is part of a bigger picture. A baptism here, a marriage restored there, a faithful volunteer who served week after week, a young believer about to do their profession of faith, a Christian reaching out, discipling someone else. Some of the tiles in the mosaic are bright and shining. They're filled with joy and thanksgiving. Other tiles are darker, representing seasons of despair and depression.

But it's not until you stand back. When you look at the whole mosaic, you see something absolutely breathtaking. You see Jesus shaping beauty out of broken pieces, placing each tile over the last twenty-five years exactly where He wants them to be. And the result is the story of Open House Christian Reformed Church. And it's the story of Psalm 71.

God is our refuge and our rock, shaping lives through His faithfulness and love. Now the psalm doesn't just look backwards. It also looks around him in the present. Fearing for his future, the psalmist says, do not cast me away when I'm old. Do not forsake me when my strength is gone.

The psalmist is saying, God, I know about your faithfulness in the past, but as I get older, my sense is I need more and more of you to be in my life always. In a way, that's the tension of any anniversary. An anniversary, you see, is the ability to celebrate the past. It means we're another year older. We're not young anymore, and we have to deal with the future.

Some of us are older, and we've had too many anniversaries and birthdays, maybe too many to count. And at those times, we take stock of our lives and wonder about the future. Where is my life going? What's going to be a priority going forward? I don't want to live with any regrets.

We all think about it. We might have reason to worry, even to fear the future. In verse 14, the psalmist can say this about his own future. As for me, I will always have hope. I'll praise you more and more.

You see, he can boast of his confidence. There's always hope. There is fear. He's concerned about his enemies, about what his future might hold, but he has this thing called hope. Hope literally means a cord or a rope in the original language.

It's the same word used in Joshua chapter 2 when Rahab ties a scarlet cord in the window of her house, what was to become a symbol of salvation. Having that red cord hanging from her window meant that she and her household were spared from the coming destruction that came upon Jericho. We might be inclined to think hope is just being an optimist, you know, upbeat, like I'm standing here with my fingers crossed hoping for the best. But hope in the original isn't just optimism or positive thinking. It's more like a lifeline.

It's what you cling to when everything else shakes. And the psalmist says, I'll hold onto God as my rope of hope because God has held onto me. So the image here is of holding onto God's promises as a kind of a lifeline, as a way out from certain destruction. Hope for us is looking to the Good Shepherd to lead, to guide, to protect us. We, the sheep of His pasture.

And after twenty-five years, that's what Open House Church has done again and again. We've been looking and we keep looking, trusting in the Great Shepherd of the sheep through all kinds of challenges and uncertainties. There've been transitions in leadership, some very awkward, some very natural. There have been our plans and aspirations for ministry, for small groups to grow and flourish among us, for a new pastor to come and serve with us, for the mission of the church to reach out to the community around us. And then of course, there's always the board of management's wish list, something to keep us humble, something to keep us dependent upon God.

And so by the grace of God, we're all still here. And we have this comfortable air-conditioned room in which to worship. We have this company of so many friends and family members. We welcome immigrant families with all the challenges that migrant families face. They've come to call Australia home, and now they have a spiritual home at Open House Church too.

But it all comes together under the care and provision of the Good Shepherd, and He has never let us fail. That's something to celebrate. So along with the psalmist, we can sing more and more. Verse 23, my lips will shout for joy when I sing praise to you, I whom you have redeemed. To be redeemed, it means to be bought back, to be paid for, the ransom has been paid.

Our praise is the music of the redeemed. We don't sing because everything's perfect. We don't sing because everything's hunky-dory in the church. We sing because we know the Good Shepherd. We know the Shepherd who laid down His life for the sheep.

And we sing because we belong to Him and He's taking good care of us. So we keep singing through the good times and the bad, through the happy and the sad. We sing because we belong to the Redeemer Shepherd. Now as we've mentioned earlier, we've been saying Psalm 71 is not sentimental. It certainly doesn't end with nostalgia.

It looks forward intentionally, missionally, joyfully. Verse 18, even when I'm old and grey, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come. You see, the psalmist's deepest desire is not simply to finish well, but to pass it on. So we say, we are the church that wants to grow in and share the love of Christ. Do you recognise the picture behind me?

It's our mission statement. It's something you drive past every time you come to church. But it's not just a board out front of the church. The message there is written in our hearts also. We want to grow in and share the love of Christ.

Verse 16 of the psalm gets very specific. It says we're to pass on that love to others. I will come and proclaim your righteous acts, yours alone. And here, righteous acts refers to relational faithfulness, God's covenant of love, His chesed love, His commitment to saving His people. In other words, the psalmist is saying, I will tell of the God who's always been faithful to me.

His love is what binds me to Him. And that's the testimony that he gives to the next generation, and it's our message too. It's not look how faithful we have been, but look how faithful God has been. As we've been saying earlier in the service, His love endures forever. It's helpful to think of your life as a relay race.

Each generation runs its leg holding the baton of the gospel. The goal isn't just to run well, but it's to pass the baton on. You can't win if you drop the baton or it somehow gets forgotten about. Open House Church, you've been running your leg of the race for twenty-five years. But the call of Psalm 71 is this: we're not done until the next generation takes hold of the baton, this gospel message.

We don't just preserve the gospel, we proclaim it. We don't just build a church, we build disciples. We're in a race, and we can't afford to lose the baton of the gospel. When Jesus rose from the dead, He entrusted His disciples with a mission. Their mission would outlast every culture, every empire, every century.

Jesus said, go, make disciples of all nations. Psalm 71 finds its ultimate fulfilment by declaring God's power to all who are to come. And here's the amazing truth. Jesus is both the message and the means. He's the righteousness we proclaim and the refuge to which we invite people.

So, Open House, as you look to the next twenty-five years, our calling is not to preserve this moment in history, but to be engaged in a mission. Not just to celebrate our history, but to carry forward His story. I think we have at least two members here this morning who have been part of this church from the very beginning for more than just twenty-five years. Others have been coming for a decade or more. It doesn't matter.

Maybe you're brand new here. Either way, Psalm 71 is calling us together to keep declaring God's power and might to the next generation. I've retired from formal duties as a pastor, but no one ever retires from this: serving the gospel, carrying the baton, passing it on. Hear the aging apostle Paul in one of the last letters he wrote in the New Testament. Here he is speaking to his youngest son in the faith, Timothy.

You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who'll be able to teach others also. So at one level, you have Paul the apostle passing the baton on to Timothy. Next level, you see Timothy passing it on to faithful men, and they in turn will be able to pass it on to others also. Serving the gospel this way gives us new life, new vigour, and we see it taking hold of the generations yet to come. I've known of at least one family in Open House that can boast of four generations of God's faithfulness and love.

Clearly, not all of them have been here for twenty-five years. But even the oldest in their family has real vigour and real energy. She recognises she's got the gospel to pass on. And so one generation becomes a faithful witness to the next. And if you dispute this, there's an invitation from me this morning to go to the matriarch of this family and take that issue up with her.

She'll deal gently with you, I'm sure. It's great to see them represented here this morning. Now question: which generation do you think bears the greater responsibility for passing the baton of the gospel on? Is this just something relegated to the elderly, the older generation, the senior saints in the church? No way.

Timothy was a young man when he received this charge from Paul. Can I suggest it starts with you and me, right where we're at today? Where we have an influence with our children and our grandchildren, where we have an influence with our extended family, where we have an influence with others that God has yet to call to Himself. So we don't settle for maintenance in the church as if we have to keep the wheels ticking over. We're on a mission.

We don't grow older, but we grow bolder in grace. We don't just aim to survive, but we aim to thrive. Because God has demonstrated His faithfulness in the past, we have every confidence that He will demonstrate His power for the future. Again, verse 18, even when I'm old and grey, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your mighty acts to all who are to come. Do you hear this man's plea?

He's saying, Lord, don't let me die until I pass this on. And that's the challenge of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Open House Christian Reformed Church. How will the children here present today look back in another twenty-five years? By then, Luke will be 26 years old. What will he be thinking when he sits in church, maybe with generations of his family?

Will he be able to say, they told us about God's mighty acts? They showed us Jesus. They lived with hope. They passed on the baton. There's a story about a church celebrating one hundred years.

The preacher was passionate talking about Jesus, His death and resurrection. A little girl, maybe four, five years old, during the service was listening intently. And she said to her parent, wow. Did this church start right after Jesus rose from the dead? Out of the mouth of babes. I think you get the point.

In her mind, there was a strong connection between the church and the gospel, and that's what we want to hear. The church, you see, doesn't celebrate itself. It celebrates Jesus in every generation. And that's why the psalmist can end with joy. My lips will shout for joy when I sing praise to you, I whom you have delivered. When you know God's faithfulness stretches forward into the future and way back into the past, all you can do is sing.

And when you think about it, you and I have every reason to sing. We see what the psalmist only glimpsed, peeked at just for a moment. We see Jesus who's the same yesterday, today, and forever. It was in the context of our making disciples that Jesus declared, I am with you to the very end of the age. That's our hope for the next twenty-five years and beyond.

So how to live this out? Remember. It's the underlying theme of the psalm. Remember God's faithfulness in the past. Tell the stories of His faithfulness.

Share them with your children, with new believers, with one another. Renew your hope. Keep clinging to the rope of hope. Don't lose heart. The best is yet to come.

And retell the gospel. Invest in the next generation. Let this anniversary not be just a monument, but a movement. You and I are not here by accident. We're only here because God delights in the stories of His grace through ordinary people, through Open House Christian Reformed Church.

And guess what? God's not finished yet. Let's pray. Gracious Father, we're here today in awe, in gratitude. You've saved us. You've called us to be your own.

We recognise that over twenty-five years, you've been our refuge, our rock, our fortress. You've sustained and been very gracious to Open House through joys and trials, through laughter and tears. You've redeemed, you've restored, and renewed your people. Lord Jesus, you are our hope, our living hope, a rope that holds us fast and secure. May our whole lives be built on the sure foundation of knowing you as our hope now and always.

And Holy Spirit, fill us anew, we pray, with courage and compassion. Make us the people who remember well, who hope deeply, and proclaim boldly. And as we look to the next twenty-five years, may we continue to be a house that is truly open, not just open to people, but open to your presence, open to your mission, open to your purposes for your church, and most of all, to your grace. For you alone, O God, are our rock and our redeemer. To you be glory in this generation and in all to come.

And in Jesus' name we pray, and we say together, amen.