Unless the LORD Builds

Psalm 127

Amen. Turn in your copy of the
scriptures to Psalm 127. Tonight, we are in the middle
of the group of three of the Psalms of ascent, 126, 127, and
128. all three go together. Remember
the pattern of three in the Psalms of Ascent are trouble, trust,
and then something about Jerusalem or Zion. In these three Psalms
that we’re looking at, there’s Zion theme throughout all three. So it’s a little bit different
than some of the others. But tonight’s theme and next
week’s theme especially are the blessing of having children. the blessing of children in the
home. So let’s give our attention now to God’s word. Psalm 127,
unless the Lord builds the house. Those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over
the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain
that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread
of the anxious toil. For he gives sleep to his beloved.
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the
womb, a reward, like arrows in the hand of a quiver. Or arrows
in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth.
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. Amen. This is the word of the
living God. May he bless our reading and
may he especially bless the preaching of his word. Somebody came to
me after the service today and said something like this. Last
Sunday’s message, that was the message in Luke on a house divided,
was exactly what I needed. They said, you must know my life
and what I needed to hear. Well, I think I preached my first
sermon about 19 years ago, and I’ve heard that same statement
over and over and over. Usually it’s in a positive way.
You must know my life because what you said today really was
relevant to something I’m going through. Sometimes you get it
in the form of an accusation. What were you trying to say to
me? But when you preach through the Bible sequentially, what
did we hear last Sunday night if tonight’s 127? We heard 126. And what did we hear the week
before? 125. And the same with Luke. We go verse by verse by
verse. And so whatever subject comes
up in God’s providence, it must be the way he intended to feed
his sheep. I remember when I was still in
college, my dad pastored a church down on the coast. And he was
preaching through the Sermon on the Mount. And on one Sunday
in particular, he was supposed to preach a sermon about why
do you see the speck in your brother’s eye when you don’t
know there’s a log in your own. Well, the day before he had been
on the elders retreat in that church, there were about 35,
36 elders. And they put a circle of chairs
with him in the middle of it. And they spent about half of
a Saturday afternoon telling him everything they thought was
wrong with him. And then he gets up and preaches the next passage
in the Bible, which was, why do you examine the speck in your
brother’s eye when you don’t see the log in your own? And
you can imagine he, I think, resigned about a month later.
But, but we always think as a family, that’s a humorous thing. You,
when you preach the Bible, you just do the next thing up and
whatever topic hits by God’s grace, uh, it is for his people. You land where the Bible lands.
And that’s over and against picking and choosing. That’s over and
against lucky dipping. A lot of preachers on Monday
morning, they’re in a panic. I’ve got to say something and
I don’t know what to say. I know that I have to preach the next
passage. I may be in a panic about it, but at least I know
I’m there. But lots of preachers pick a
topic, they pick a hobby, or they have a sermon and it’s in
search of a text. And so they know what they want
to say, and they got to find a Bible verse that props it up. But it’s
a blessing, I think, just to preach through books. It’s a
good thing. Well, Psalm 127, I think, scratches
several itches that may be facing our congregation. We talked this
morning about building a building or repairing the building that
we have. So unless the Lord builds, the labor is labor in vain. I
think we put that verse up on one of our slides. We’re a church
of families. We love children. We love grandchildren. We love the little ones that
are children of the covenant. And so that’s something that
this passage speaks about, but also we’re living in a time in
our culture where much of what we see on the news is a result
of the disintegration of the family. No child of mine would
be on the news throwing fire into someone’s place of business
and burning it down. And I trust that would be the
same for you. But we’re living in an era where some portions
of our nation are growing up 70% in a fatherless home. 70% of some of our youth in certain
segments of our society are in fatherless homes. It’s 20% in
other cases. But somewhere between 20 and 70% in various segments
of our society are growing up in a fatherless home. Absentee
parents are a huge thing. But we’re also living in a day
and age where you can build something and people will come. And that’s
true of church ministries. How many church ministries do
you know? And I’m using the term very loosely,
church ministries. If you have a TV camera and a
nice hairdo, you can get on TV and promise people lots of stuff
and make lots of money. There is gold in them there Christian
hills. And how many financial scandals
do we know of from those TV preachers, those prosperity ministries?
And so we want to remember tonight, unless God builds, you labor
in vain. And when God doesn’t build, there
is a severe disintegration of society as we’re experiencing
today. So I think Psalm 127 is very appropriate for many of
the present conditions of ourselves, our church family, but also our
culture. And so Psalm 127 speaks of building
a building and it speaks of building a family. And the theme is this,
unless the Lord builds, You will labor bricks and mortar and you
will labor with your children in vain unless the Lord is blessing
your work. Now we’ve spoken very often about
the context of these Psalms. Some will say that all of the
Psalms of ascent are written at the time the exiles returned
from Babylon. So in the 500s and into the 400s
before Christ. They’ll say every Psalm of Ascent,
Psalms 120 to 134, were written in the post-exile era. And that
may be true, but look who it says wrote Psalm 127. It says,
A Song of Ascents of Solomon. And so we remember that Solomon
was also in a building campaign. He continued his father’s building
up of Jerusalem. David had too much blood on his
hands to build the temple. So it was Solomon, the son of
King David, who finished David’s building legacy of the ancient
city of the Jebusites, which was then Jerusalem. And so he
went on a building campaign. He built temple, he built gardens,
he built, no doubt added onto the palace and the walls and
the city under Solomon’s leadership was a grand place that kings
and leaders of the earth came from far and wide to come not
only hear his wisdom, but to see what he had built. But we also know about Solomon.
How many wives, how many concubines? 700 wives, wasn’t it? And 200
or 300 concubines. You can imagine Solomon had lots
and lots of children, and so he was in a building campaign,
building a family as well, as strange as the circumstances
were. That’s what he was up to. But go back to the exiles for
a moment. The exiles returned to rebuild the city, to rebuild
the walls, to rebuild their houses, to rebuild the temple. and to
reestablish worship. And they were doing it with enemies
all around. And so you can see how, at least
thematically, Psalm 127, even if it was written four or five
hundred years before, maybe three, four hundred years before under
Solomon, you can see how its topic and theme fits with their
life situation as they returned from Babylon to rebuild the city.
One other thing to think of before we dive into the building a house
and building a family theme is that in the ancient Near East,
children were your financial safety, not the Edward Jones
office. not the Fidelity office, not
the MetLife insurance company. Now we are so laden with things
to protect us in our old age. We put stuff in a 401k, we got
the pension plan, we got our IRAs, our Roths, we got our Traditionals,
we got our life insurance, we got our long-term care insurance,
we’ve got our this, that, and the other coverage. Because very
often we raise children and what do they do? They move across
the country. And so we rely on nursing homes
and met life policies and all the rest now, but not so in the
ancient near East. Um, what was safety and security
for a man and woman in their old age? It was children who
would carry on the family farm or carry on the family home.
And in your old age, uh, they would take care of you. So let’s
look at the Psalm under two headings. If we can, the first is building
a house. And we find it in the first two verses of 127, unless
the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain, unless
the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up
early and go to late rest, go late to rest, eating the bread
of the anxious toil, for he gives sleep to his beloved. Think about
building a house for a moment. The American dream post-World
War II, most families were happy to have two bedrooms and a bath.
And that equaled maybe somewhere around 900 to 1200 square feet.
Now, y’all probably watch these home improvement shows like I
do from time to time. And you’ll see a young couple,
and they’ll tell the realtor on their little house hunter
search, well, this is our list of must-haves. It’s got to be
3,500, 5,000 square feet. There has to be granite on every
countertop. We want hardwood floors. We want
a bedroom for the dog. Y’all have seen this. It’s ridiculous,
isn’t it? No young couple needs a 5,000
square foot house, much less a 3,500 one. and much less when
they’re probably only going to have their 1.7 children, which
is, by the way, the current birth rate in America. We are self-absorbed
and we are self-sufficient. We believe we grow up, we’re
entitled to go to college, we’re entitled to a high-paying job,
and so we get two of them, and we go out and get the biggest
mortgage we can and buy the biggest house we can and put nothing
in it but our trinkets and our two little pugs or whatever kind
of dog is the dog of the day. That’s the American dream. Two
incomes, big plans. And what does this passage say
about it? Vanity. useless. If God is not the center
of building a house, if God is not the center of a family, as
we’ll see in a moment, it is vain and it is useless. If you
leave God out, oh, you can build a house, you can build a building,
and you can even build a sanctuary, but you leave God out, it is
of no value. Today in our presentation to
y’all about the sanctuary renovations, instead of starting with the
problem and how much money we needed, We wanted to keep the
big picture in mind. And so we shared with you the
mission of the church, which is worship evangelism or worship
discipleship and evangelism. Those are the three things we
must do. Jesus never says, go build a sanctuary. They are helpful,
aren’t they? I mean, isn’t it nice not to
be out under the oaks as the sun is getting hotter and the
bugs are coming out and the humidity is a little worse than it was
in previous wonderful weeks out there. And come winter time,
we’re glad we have this as well. Sanctuary is nice. And insofar
as it helps us in our mission of worship, discipleship and
evangelism, it’s a useful thing, but it’s not the main thing,
is it? And so we started with our mission. Our vision was to
be is to be a family of reformed believers, welcoming family of
reformed believers committed to the historic faith in life.
We believe that there are tons of churches out there. but very
few committed to the historic faith and life. One lady who
visited with us today told James, who got to greet her, I’m looking
for a conservative church. My church is about to install
the fog machines and all the stage lights and turn off the
lights in the congregation. And she says, I have a 16-year-old.
I want a conservative church. And he told her, well, you found
one. And she said, I’ve ridden by and seen your sign that says
standing on the Bible since 1782. And she told James, I’ve looked
that up and y’all been standing on the Bible a lot longer than
that because you have a rich Scottish Presbyterian heritage. And so we wanted today to, for
y’all to understand if we’re going to build a house or fix
our house, It’s part of the bigger plan. It’s part of our mission,
our vision, our values. Remember the list of values.
We want to worship God, our triune God, in a biblical way. We want
to learn the scriptures. We want to reach out to our friends
and family and coworkers and those in our sphere of influence
with the gospel. We want to support evangelism and worldwide missions. We want to take care of what
we have and all those wonderful things. And we want God to be
at the center. We want Christ to be at the heart
of what we do. Our chief end as individuals,
as families, but also as a church is to glorify God and enjoy him
forever. And if we can do that with two
beds and a bath for our families, and we can do that with a sanctuary
and fellowship and classroom space as a church, God, I think,
will bless that. And so if we’re going to build
a house, we should work hard to build it. whether it’s the
house we live in, the place we do our business in, or the place
where we worship, we should work hard as unto the Lord, seeking
first his kingdom and hoping that our home, our church, our
place as a business will be a place where the kingdom of God is advanced
for the glory of God and we can be a blessing to others. So unless
we build our house with God at the center and God as our help,
we will labor in vain. He uses some language here, some
interesting language of the Old Testament way. People lived in
a walled city and sentries would walk the wall at night. They
would watch and make sure no enemies were coming their way.
And so unless God is watching over the city, unless God is
watching over your house, unless God is watching over your church,
it’s all in vain. Let’s think now about the second
heading of this passage, building a family. You find it in the
last three verses, beginning at verse three. Behold, children
are a heritage from the Lord. Children are the fruit of the
womb, a reward. Children are like arrows in the
hand of a warrior and children of one’s youth. Blessed is the
man whose quiver is full of them. He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. Think about the
American dream again. You know, young couples nowadays,
they get married late. About the late 20s is average
age now. Most people used to get married young. I think my
grandmother, Fudge, she was 16 going on 17 when she married
my grandfather after the war. I was 22 when I got married.
A lot of you were probably young, but it’s increasingly getting
older and older, isn’t it? A lot of people are in their
late 20s, even their late 30s when they get married. They’re
establishing the American dream of having that 3,500 square foot
house with granite countertops and a bedroom for the dogs. But think about the American
dream towards children. What does every young couple
want? They want children, but they don’t want them just yet.
They want them on their terms and on their time. I do premarital
counseling, kind of the scared straight program way. And so
recently when I did premarital counseling with a couple that
are going to get married, I told them, God has a sense of humor. You could have kids, so be ready
for it. Don’t rely on both incomes and all those sorts of things.
But the American dream is to have kids on our terms. And the
birth rate in America right now is 1.7. Now, I don’t know how
you can have 1.7 kids. Interestingly, Solomon wrote
our psalm, and he can tell you how to have 0.5 of a kid, right?
Because he’s the one that wanted to chop one in half and give
half the baby to each of the mothers who claimed the baby
was theirs. Remember that little thing? But replacement rate of
children, the birth rate of replacement is 2.1. So if we’re at 1.7, where
are we? We’re behind. We’re in trouble.
That’s right, we’re in trouble. But everybody wants to have their
2.0 kids. I can remember when we had our
daughter in 2004, the first thing everybody said to us, now that
you’ve got your girl, what is it that you want? You’re going
to have a boy. And then what did they say? And
then you’re going to stop. That’s what everybody says. And
it’s an interesting time in our culture. It used to be people. We’re part of big families. I
think of Ferald Mann. Ferald is one of about 10 children.
There are others in our church. I think Grady Pack was one. There
are others in our church. They came from huge families. And when they say they had nine
or 10 siblings, those are the ones that lived. The infant mortality
rate is still rather high across the world and even in our own
nation it was until more recent modern and medical advances. But children, building a family
is a heritage from the Lord. It’s the fruit of the womb. It’s
as arrows in the quiver of the man. Think about Old Testament
for a minute. God made Adam. He put him in
the garden to work it, to keep it, and to make it grow. But
God said very negatively, it’s not good for man to be alone.
And so he caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam. He took a rib
from his body and he made Eve. And he told them, be fruitful
and multiply and fill the earth. And we hear that command in Genesis
and think, oh, OK, that’s that. Well, what did God tell Noah?
and his sons when they came out of the ark and he had made everything
on earth extinct be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
And so the same creation commands are proclaimed again by God,
not only to the animal world, but also to the human world in
the original creation, but also the recreation after the flood. But you bump along through the
Bible and you come to Abraham. And at first his name was Abram.
And what does Abram mean? It simply means father. But how
old was Abram before he really wasn’t Abram? He was a hundred. Can you imagine in ancient Near
East when your name meant something? I mean, we hear people’s names,
John and Larry and Daryl and Susie and Billy and whatever.
We hear names and we really don’t think anything of it. But when
people thought of Abram, they immediately knew his name means
father. And what a joke it was, in a sense, for Abram. Hey, my
name’s Abram. Well, how many kids do you have
there, old man? Well, none yet. And then God, when he came to
him in a moment of covenanting with him, said, I’m going to
change your name to Abraham. And what does that name mean?
Father of many. Yes, the irony thickened, as
it were. And how many children did Abram
Abraham really have. Ishmael didn’t count, right?
He wasn’t the child of promise. One. And from that one child,
the offspring of Abraham have come to outnumber the sand on
the seashore and the stars of the heaven. And people will argue
all day long about how many kids you got to have, what is really
a quiverful. We went to a church some years
ago where families were a big thing and we walked in with our
3.0 children and we were sort of, well, I don’t know, how would
you put it? We were, we just weren’t in the
club. And, you know, nobody stopped
to ask, you know, why or what, or is this all God gave us or
whatever? It was a badge. And so we have to be careful
with placing a number on families. But Abraham was able to do it
with one. Isaac, how many children did
he have? Two, these were the patriarchs. And what’s a patriarch?
They’re the fathers. These were the ones that were
the fathers of our nation. And after a while, Esau has a
bunch of children, Jacob and others do. And so the family
of God grows. But children are a heritage from
the Lord. They are a fruit of the womb. They are like arrows
in a man’s quiver. Now, let’s think about both these
themes together for just a moment. This is God built houses, like
God hyphen built, like God built them. God built houses and God
built homes. That will change the decline
in our society, won’t it? And I think very sadly the church
over the last hundred years, and I’m just putting a hundred
years on it, the church has become really like the world. We have
moved in the last hundred years or so in America where children
are not part of the church. We’ve taken children out of public
worship. We’ve not treated them as the covenant community that
they are members of. We have decided that if we entertain
them, maybe, just maybe, they’ll like church better. We’ve taken
the role and responsibility of parents to teach them the Word
of God and we have handed it over to others. But I think nowadays
if you look at most churches, many children are not part of
the discipleship ministry of the church. They’re definitely
not part of the worship ministry of the church. And then you get
a busy household with school and work and all the afternoon
activities. Young child can grow up in a
Christian home, as it were, and really not hear much about who
God is and what he’s done. And so that’s something that
has to change. We need to have God-built houses
and God-built families, God-built homes. And there are 18 to 25
intense years. If you have one child and then
a few after, and you raise them until they’re 18 and send them
off, You’ve got 18 to 25 very intense years. You’ve got the
baby stage, the toddler stage, the children and teenage and
young adult stage. And every day you’ve got to change diapers
and feed them. You’ve got to do the wash. You’ve got to teach
them and shape them, teach them how to worship and serve and
learn and discipline them. You’ve got to bring them to church
on Sunday. But all of that has really disappeared. Why is that?
It’s because moms and dads are chasing the American dream. They
want the 3,500 square foot home. It takes two incomes. Mom and
dad are off at work building their professional careers and
they’ve left the child rearing to someone else. And the results
are there. And then you have the American
dream of the home. We want our 2.0 kids, but our
2.0 kids cannot disrupt our life. We still need our weekends with
the girls and our weekends with the boys. We still need our hobbies.
And most of y’all know this, I think. You have kids, your
life just gets really quiet for a really long time. And if you
put in the work, it’s such a blessing. God is good and gracious if we
teach and shape and worship with them and serve with them. as
they learn and are disciplined. And so we want to build a house.
We want to build a family. We want to be part of a household
of God. And it’s tiring, right? Tomorrow morning, I’m going to
get up, and the first thing on my to-do list is something I
do every week. I roll the trash out. comes every
Monday. And what do I do on Tuesday?
I roll the trash back in. Every night, we take the trash
out of the kitchen. We take the recycling bucket
out of the kitchen, and we dump it. And it’s monotony, isn’t
it? And you go from there. We kept my brother’s two children
this week, and had basically a three-year-old and a five-year-old
in the house. That experience has not been ours for quite a
while. Our kids are pretty self-sufficient, and they take care of us now,
just like Psalm 127 says. They really do. But hands-on toddler work, it
is hard. It is moment by moment. Y’all know this too with the
grandchild in the house during the week. It’s just hard. It’s
tiring. Building a church is hard. Building
a congregation, pastoring a church, the elders can all say amen.
It is tiring and it is slow, but it is beneficial. It is so beneficial to build
a home and to build a household of faith. And it pays dividends
for generations. You think about unfaithful churches
and unfaithful homes. Well, that’s what we’re seeing
in America, isn’t it? We’re seeing the result of unfaithful homes
and unfaithful churches with a protest culture. We’ll burn
it down if we don’t like it. We’ll take it over. Can y’all
believe we have places in America that are taking over This sounds
like the revolution, you know, from a couple hundred years ago.
But it’s nuts where we are these days. And these are children
of privilege who went to college, and this is what we have turned
them into. But if we have God-built homes
and God-blessed families, we will reach far into eternity. And that’s a great promise that
we can bank on. Let’s go to God in prayer. Lord,
we give you thanks tonight for your word that reminds us of
the importance of the task that we have. We pray that you would
bless our church, bless our homes, help us to keep faithful in the
work and keep strong in our labors for your kingdom, for your glory’s
sake, but also for the good of this world. We are reminded that
through the Lord Jesus Christ and through being the offspring
of Abraham, that we can be a great witness, a great impact on this
world. So hear us and help us as we make our prayer. In the
strong name of Jesus this night, amen.