Satisfied in Yahweh

Last week, the worship band introduced us to the song that we just sang.

It's from Psalm 84, and called Yahweh.

And it's based from this psalm, beautiful psalm, How lovely is your dwelling place, Yahweh Almighty, my soul yearns even faints for the courts of Yahweh.

My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

The psalmist has found, it probably is a he, his satisfaction in God, in God's holy personal name, Yahweh.

And one might observe from this psalm in particular, he doesn't celebrate how good it is to accumulate knowledge about God, though there are other psalms that tend to lean in that direction.

This time, he's just talking about dwelling with and near Yahweh.

And when he does that, his soul is satisfied.

In fact, a little bit later on in Psalm 84, he says one day so satisfied in the presence of Yahweh is worth a thousand elsewhere.

He is satisfied in Yahweh.

Can I ask you this morning, are you satisfied in God?

Do you find your satisfaction in the living God, creator of all things, giver of life, provider of your salvation in Jesus Christ, God's Son?

Are you satisfied today in Yahweh?

Have you found a rhythm of life where you can come back to that place of revelation and awareness, the aha that you know, know my satisfaction is in you, Lord God, I sing about it regularly, but I find it is true.

You satisfy my deepest desires.

The English rock band, The Rolling Stones, of course had that 1965 hit, I Can't Get No Satisfaction.

It became an anthem for celebrities, I guess, throughout the decades, people that have found success, found a whole lot of money only to find that satisfaction eluded them.

And sometimes they sought satisfaction in illicit drugs, only again to find that satisfaction wasn't found in escaping.

I read last week that the fastest growing section of Australian society using cocaine is a surprising grip.

Did you read that in the paper?

You probably wouldn't pick it.

It's well-to-do soccer mums.

True.

Well-to-do soccer mums.

Women, in fact, more specifically, as I said, mums are using cocaine in increasing amounts.

They can't get no satisfaction, and they're stressed.

And cocaine is arriving like an Uber eats at your door.

It's very sad, isn't it?

Not to bring judgment on those mums.

But I think it's a sad reality that in our lifetime, where we have so much, we feel like it's not enough.

And the Rolling Stones' song sort of sings true.

I can't get no satisfaction.

The end of this wonderful story that Pam read for us tells us in verse 42, they all ate and were satisfied.

The human soul longs for satisfaction.

And I believe today we should be reminded from our text that ultimate satisfaction is found in God.

That is something as Christians we are familiar with, that type of statement.

But I hope today we might come under it in a fresh and new way and be struck by this reality that there is great satisfaction found in Yahweh our God.

Previously, in Mark's Gospel, the disciples have been sent out on mission for the first time.

Ben taught us from the previous passage last week in such a way that was so wonderful.

I was so encouraged.

If you didn't get to listen to or watch last week's sermon, please do, it's really worthwhile.

We read that they are sent out, the disciples are sent out two by two.

They are doing the works of Jesus.

They have been observing him, doing it himself, the works of the kingdom come, manifest amongst them, and now by God's grace, they're sent out, and they start doing the same things.

Mark 16, Mark chapter 6, verse 13 summarises the mission of the disciples.

They drove out demons, healed the sick and preached the kingdom, the exact things Jesus had been doing.

And then in chapter 630, the apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to him all they had done and taught.

Then because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, Jesus takes them away.

So they're on mission.

They've left their jobs, their everyday lives to follow Jesus on a adventure, on an adventure, and he is delivering it.

It's an adventure.

They are going really hard, serving, ministering, healing, delivering, teaching, preaching.

And now Jesus needs to teach them about how he sustains this frenetic output.

He steals away to a quiet place.

And so we're told, because so many people were coming and going, they did not even have a chance to eat, Jesus says to them, come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.

So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.

Jesus has in mind to teach them not just about casting out demons and healing the sick and teaching the gospel, but they need to know about rest, about rhythm of ministry and life.

But the crowd has other intentions.

The disciples are in a boat and the crowd are on land and they follow along.

And so the ministry continues.

And what ensues is one of the great stories of the gospel, the feeding of the 5,000.

Jesus, we're told, has compassion on this crowd who are like, as we're told here, sheep without a shepherd.

Jesus sees them as sheep without a shepherd.

And then after challenging the disciples to find a way to feed the huge crowd, he takes two fish and five loaves and he performs a feat of miraculous multiplication, of provision.

The bread keeps coming and so does the fish.

It's a miracle which is absolutely loaded with fulfilment motifs from the Old Testament.

It recalls many things.

I'm just gonna highlight a couple.

Where God answered Moses' prayer to provide food for the whinging, complaining, grumbling people of Israel back in Numbers 11.

They basically said, let us go back to Egypt.

At least we had food there.

They were very short on memory that they were also flogged and worked seven days a week mercilessly by the Egyptians.

But they were like, well, let us go back.

And God says, is the Lord's arm too short, Numbers 11?

And the Lord provides the people in the wilderness quail for a month.

So Jesus is the new Moses only, better.

And he does the things that Moses did.

He provides for the people in the wilderness.

And then there's Elisha and his response to the servant in 2 Kings 4, verse 42.

A man came from Baal Shalisha, bringing the man of God, Elisha, 20 loaves of barley bread baked from the first ripe grain.

And he says, give it to the people, Elisha said.

And there's this little vignette of a miraculous provision story from the prophet Elisha who takes 20 loaves and feeds 100 men.

And there is food left over.

And so Jesus is a prophet.

We heard about this just in the previous chapter.

We looked at a few weeks ago.

Nazareth, he's announced that he's a prophet.

And he's a prophet in the line of Elijah and Elisha, the great prophets.

And he does what prophets do.

He feeds people miraculously.

So there are these motifs from the Old Testament that we're finding in the life and ministry of Jesus.

And even the fact that he says to the crowd that they were like sheep without a shepherd is a direct link, a beautiful link to Psalm 23.

Can you think of how it connects?

The Lord is my shepherd.

He makes me lie down in what sort of pastures?

Green pastures.

And it just happens, not by coincidence, that Mark says he made them sit down on the green grass because they were sheep without a shepherd.

And this is the great shepherd.

He's the great shepherd that Moses prayed about in Numbers 27.

He was referring to, initially, Joshua.

Moses speaks in 27, 15.

May the Lord, the God of the spirits of all mankind, appoint a man over his community.

This community, to go out and come in before them.

One who will lead them out and bring them in so the Lord's people will not be like sheep without a shepherd.

Joshua comes as that initial fulfilment, but it's pointing to the great shepherd, amen?

The one who would come and look after his sheep, and that's Jesus.

So there's so much macro goodness from the wide angle lens that we can see in this story.

But today, my sense, my hope is that we could put the telephoto lens on and look at something in the micro in the story.

After all their busy ministry, Jesus says to his disciples in verse 31, come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.

So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.

Jesus knows exactly what his disciples need.

Something that it's very easy as a human being to forget, don't you think?

Sometimes it's easy for us, like Adam and Eve in the garden, you know, let's be honest.

We think that God, he's good at working out how to get us into heaven, but we can sort things out until we get to that point.

Is he the smartest in Jesus, the smartest person who ever lived?

Is God the one who created the universe and has our best at heart?

Of course, the devil came to Adam and Eve and said, you can't trust God, he's not good.

He doesn't have good for you.

He's stingy, he wants you to have less than you could have.

You've got to grab it, take your life yourself.

Don't trust him to give it to you as a gift by grace.

But that's not true, amen.

That is not true.

We find our deepest satisfaction in following the ways of Yahweh, the ways of the shepherd, the son of God Jesus and guided by the Spirit.

Like the psalmist cried out in Psalm 84, how lovely is your dwelling place, Yahweh Almighty.

My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of Yahweh.

My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

The psalmist wants God.

Wants God.

Because to be with God in awe of Yahweh, embraced in the love of Yahweh, is the soul's true home.

Adam and Eve were designed to walk in fellowship with God in the garden.

But sin messed that up.

So to receive satisfaction, I think we see a really beautiful sort of picture in a few verses from verse 31.

Receiving satisfaction is all about listening to Jesus.

He says, come with me by yourself to a quiet place, get some rest.

They went in community.

They needed patience.

Jesus met them with provision from heaven.

They were satisfied and there was abundance.

Hallelujah.

We were designed to find satisfaction in God.

We are restless souls until we find our home in Christ with God.

Blaise Pascal said, and this is very hard.

If you can follow this, kudos to you.

I couldn't, I still don't.

What else does this craving and this helplessness proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?

Then he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there, the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object, in other words, by God himself.

Commonly summarised for good reason by this.

There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person and it can never be filled by any created thing, it can only be filled by God made known through Jesus Christ.

There is a God-shaped vacuum, there's a hole, there's a desperate need we have been designed to have that is a homing device, a magnet drawn towards the living God.

We will not find our satisfaction until we find God.

Deep settled satisfaction, peace providing, craving, filling satisfaction involves being with Jesus, which is the same thing as being with God.

Jesus said, come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.

Later on, we hear him unpack this in, I guess, a deeper way in John 15, where he says, abide in me and I in you.

And then he takes us to this metaphor of the vine.

As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself and let it, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

I am the vine, you are the branches.

He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit, for without me, you can do nothing.

He's describing the with God life, isn't he?

The satisfied life, what others have called the practice of the presence of God, God with us.

John 14, 23, Jesus says, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

Don't let that just run over you.

Think about what that just said.

If we obey his word and live by faith with Jesus, he says, my father will love them, and we will come to him, them, and make our home with them.

What does that mean?

The father, the Trinitarian reality, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit will come and make their home in us.

There's a language of intimacy, isn't it?

It's sort of mystical, it's sort of weird.

It's like, really?

God would make his home in a person who is in relationship with him through Jesus.

To follow Jesus is to know God, to be with God in the mundane and the magnificent stuff of life.

Amen?

Amen?

The mundane.

Life is mundane a lot of the time and every now and then it is magnificent.

And in both, God wants to be with us.

Come with me.

Satisfaction begins by leaving the hustle and bustle of distraction and being with God so that we can realise he is with us and we are with him in the hustle and bustle and distraction.

But stealing away is part of the process.

So if we follow the text of Mark 6, we find this progression, and I'm repeating myself.

Come with me, Jesus says.

Buy yourself to a quiet place, get some rest.

They went in community, which I find very interesting.

He says to them, come with me, like steal away and do it together.

Do it in community.

I am blessed to be a teacher of the Bible.

I've been doing it for a long time.

And I love preaching the Bible.

I find it incredible privilege.

And I'm convinced that learning the Bible is essential.

And when you think about it in church, in the rhythms that we have, it probably looks like coming to church regularly and going to a Bible study.

And there's also lots of opportunities to read books and read the Bible ourselves.

Clearly, we've got so many ways that we can access good teaching.

With online, it's sort of endless, I guess, where you could gather information about God, where you could sort of drop your bucket and draw water from the well.

And as a pastor and pastors on a church team, we feel the responsibility of providing teaching.

We want to teach the Bible.

So we're always thinking, how can we do that?

How can we train people?

Again, not that we have all the answers, but can we provide so that we're a healthy church?

So we call that midweek training often.

So you have courses you do midweek and church services and then life hubs, but then you add it all up and people are ministering.

And I find there's a tension because the last thing we want to do is just make people more and more busy.

And it's just hard in our busy world in the 21st century.

How do you provide good teaching and it's done in community so you can learn from one another, but don't load people up with endless nights out.

And it's just, are you with me?

You feel it.

And so I appreciate a focus on men's ministry and over the years we've done different courses written by different people with great skill and insight.

And a few times over the years, I've summarized these courses and we've done them maybe over four weeks or even 10 weeks.

And I was doing this again and I was pulling together a sort of a heavy download of content and I was also struck by conversation I had with someone whose job it is to help people get fit, to use physical exercise and different exercises.

In this person's job, they have an expertise, a training in picking just the right exercises for a person's needs.

And they were telling me that, you know, recently talking to some of their colleagues in the whole exercise physiology field and they were lamenting the fact that as much as they love, they love coming up with unique, specific, customized exercises for a person and giving them a protocol, a program to get their best results, they said, you know what is more important than fancy exercises?

Adherence to any bunch of exercises.

Adherence that produces adaptation and change is more important than a whole stack of new exercises or new content.

And so that got me to thinking, what if what the men at NorthernLife need more than another big download of content was a protocol of regular time with Jesus by themselves in a quiet place, yet accountable because other guys were doing the same thing.

What if regular time with Jesus in a quiet place was as important, not completely replacing, but was as important as more knowledge filling of one's mind about Jesus?

So this idea gave birth to what we now call Daily Sevens.

Daily Sevens is a 40-day journey.

It's a 40-day time with Jesus twice a day, Monday to Friday, where groups of around seven men follow a set devotional book.

This is the book we're using.

It's called Day by Day by Pete Scazzaro.

We do a daily office twice a day.

We meet with Jesus around a scripture, a devotion, a thought, and a prayer, and the commitment is eight weeks long.

The most challenging part of it is not the one-minute-enduration devotion.

The challenging part, which sounds again strange, is you have to stop for at least two minutes in stillness and solitude and silence before the devotion, and then you're meant to finish off that time with the Lord with another two minutes plus of stillness and solitude.

This happens maybe before you go to your day in the morning and maybe at lunchtime or at lunchtime and at night.

The part that's been interesting for the guys, the 26 men who are in four different groups and are two or one week into this experiment, the biggest challenge has been stopping and experiencing stillness before God.

And many of the men have said, you know, it's really strange to do it in the middle of the day.

It tends to be located early morning or late at night, but not in your day.

You know, that's a secular part of your life.

And it's been an interesting process for people to stop and just still themselves, a bit like the monks used to do seven times a day.

But we're doing it twice a day.

And it's called the Daily Office, which was from the Latin daily opus, which means the daily work.

So every day, twice a day, stopping and acknowledging, stopping and learning this truth again, because we forget, my satisfaction is found in the with God life.

My satisfaction is found in the with God life.

Not a three session download of an hour and a half and a heap of content, but an 80 session download of a shorter period of time with Jesus over 40 days, with other men doing the exact same thing.

Because remember, if I summarize what we read in our text, Jesus said, come with me by yourself to a quiet place, get some rest, and they went and did it in community.

The groups have a WhatsApp group, as we like to do these days in church world.

And we're accountable to let the people in your group know that you've done your devotion.

And again, that sounds so simple, but it's been beautiful.

It's so good.

And we said at the start, the thing you're probably gonna experience is failure.

You're gonna fail.

You're gonna sin and not feel like meeting with God, but you said you would.

So you need to understand grace, don't you, if you're gonna meet with God regularly.

And sometimes life happens, and you can't do your devotion.

It's up to you whether you want to catch up, but you have to tell your men, this is what's happening in my life.

And so then we say once per week on the weekend, so all you have to do is say, that devotion, done.

There's not writing an essay, but once a week, we've said it, the weekend, you have to write a lengthier reflection, couple of paragraphs, about what you've learned.

So two weeks in, one week in for one of our group, two weeks in for three of our groups, guess what?

Stopping and being with Jesus around his word works.

Who would have thought, like it is growing in its satisfaction, the level of satisfaction, and the goal of it all is not to do something that you might call religious.

It's not that, but the goal is that we could become more cognizant of the presence of Jesus with us, not just twice a day, but throughout the day, amen?

But that's the point, because Christianity is the with-God life.

What's fascinating about this process is it recognising the importance of the quiet place.

Of course, Jesus is teaching his disciples here in Mark 6 about his process, isn't he?

He's launching them into ministry and mission, and there's this power of God that's available to them, but Jesus is teaching them about how he does mission, how he does life, and there's this very important place in that rhythm called the quiet place.

In fact, the quiet place is a word we read in verse 31, and then a solitary place in verse 32, it's the same word.

They translate it quiet and solitary, and it's the same word described for the wilderness that Jesus was led into to be tempted.

It's the Greek word, eramos.

Eramos can mean deserted place, wilderness, quiet place, solitary place, secret place.

It's the place, eramos, where Jesus went to be with his father.

Gethsemane was a quiet place.

The Bible says he went there as was his practice.

Isn't that interesting?

He used to go to Gethsemane to hang out with his father.

And that's how Judas knew that he'd be there, because it was his habit.

Doesn't that sort of flip what a quiet place is?

Could be a place where you come into contact with truth, truth about who God is and his call on your life.

That's what Jesus experienced.

And also truth about who I am and what I need to open up to the Lord.

A lot of what we all need in this quiet place, and I'm more and more struck by this being probably the most important thing we could do in our life other than understand the gospel, is to go to quiet places and learn how much God loves us.

Because you can't love without knowing what love is.

I don't think I've ever known that quite as much as it struck me this week.

You learn how to love others by being loved.

And that's what happens in the quiet place.

Often times when we are led to the aramos, we find something else, pain.

Because when you stop and you hear your soul spinning top, slow down and stop and just be still before God, you realise life has given you some stuff that hurts.

And there's pain.

And you realise we spend a lot of time denying that pain and detaching from that pain and drugging that pain.

But God wants to take us through that pain and show you that He's with us in it.

And we can learn from it and we can help others as we walk in that pain.

I've been astounded with these Daily Sevens, just how impacting our first couple of weeks have been on the men involved as we spend time.

Unhurried time with Jesus by His Spirit, we are changed.

We receive and experience deep, nourishing satisfaction.

And so the disciples, they meet with Jesus, and of course this beautiful, the Ramos experience is transformed into a busy ministry night.

And their hunger and that of the crowds is satisfied.

In verse 39, we read, He commanded them to make them all sit down in groups on the green grass, because patience is part of this process of satisfaction.

So they'd sat down in ranks in hundreds and in fifties, and when he had taken the loaves and the fish, he looked up to heaven blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to his disciples to set before them.

And the two fish he divided among them all.

So they all ate and were satisfied.

They were filled.

And they took up 12 basketfuls full of fragments and of the fish.

And now those who had eaten the loaves were about 5,000 men.

They were satisfied with abundance overflowing, 12 basketfuls, which as we know, 12 means more than just those people there.

12 is a picture of humanity.

So this is the experience of the psalmist that we started quoting.

Verse five in Psalm 84 says, a very important truth, blessed, which means more than happy.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

This desire to be nourished and satisfied in God is a journey, a pilgrimage.

And sometimes it's going to be harder than other times to have that reality so aware, clear in our minds and our hearts.

But it's the journey we're on because the good life is on the other side of the with God life, amen?

The good life is on the other side of stealing away and getting rid of the clutter enough that God can love you without the noise.

And that doesn't mean he's not a holy God loving you.

Worthy of our fear and the Gospel is all part of that.

But if we have no space to stop and hear and feel and know that God has shown his love for us in Christ while we were still sinners, we will be less than we could be.

The good life is on the other side of the with God life.

So we're keen to set up more groups of Daily Sevens.

It was an experiment.

We just asked a few people, and of course, it doesn't have to be just men.

We're just doing it with men at the start.

And we have women's groups that we are planning to start in about a month's time, Lord willing.

And if you would like to be part of a group, we have some sheets out there.

And if you would like to, just put your name down and your phone number, and we'll get in touch in the next week and organise some more groups.

And it's an eight-week commitment.

The great thing about this idea is that some of our people in the groups are overseas currently, and some will be before the eight weeks are over.

But there's a thing called the internet, and you can stay connected online as well.

Jesus is God with us.

And of course, the point is that satisfaction comes because Jesus, as God with us, paid for our sins and rose again.

That is how we can be satisfied, because we have a longing to have our sin dealt with, because we feel the proper sense that we should, that we feel guilty and ashamed because we have done wrong before a holy God.

Jesus fixed that problem when he died on the cross for our sin.

He made it available for us to appropriate what he did, his atoning work.

He paid for our sin by his perfect life and his blood, and we are called from the Bible's gospel, the truth, the good news, to confess our sins, to turn from our sins, and believe in Jesus as Lord and Saviour, and we will be saved.

He has made a way to fix the problem of sin.

The door is open for us with God because Jesus was God with us.

Hallelujah.

Jesus is God with us so that we could experience us with God.

That's the true home.

That's your soul's true home.

And I am just so confident that hardly any of us have this sorted.

I'm sorry if that sounds judgmental or arrogant, but from a sample size of 26 men and from our life hub when I asked, who has this stuff down pat?

Who has these rhythms in your busy life down that you are overwhelmed with a reality of the love of God and you steal away to the aramos regularly?

Hardly anyone ever says, I do that.

So I know you're hearing this and I just want to encourage you, find your place.

Find that place where you can stop for one minute, two minutes and experience the distraction that is your mind and your heart just, stop, be still and know that he is God, amen.

Be still and know that I am God is the same.

Are you satisfied today in Yahweh?

If we are not, we are vulnerable, aren't we?

If we don't find our satisfaction in the one who is the source of all satisfaction, we are vulnerable to all the gods that say, I will satisfy you, come and give your best to me.

But we want to pull down those gods and chase the one living God.

Jesus, I believe, says to us today with a smile on his face, he has a smile, he has a body, he's resurrected, and he's a human being, and he is God.

And he says, come with me by yourself to a quiet place.

Get some rest, lots of people in those first two minutes, you know what they do?

Fall asleep.

And the soul is saying, we are busy, aren't we?

And God says, yeah, have a rest, stop.

Come with me by yourself to a quiet place, get some rest, go in community, be patient.

Jesus will meet you with provision from heaven.

You will be satisfied and there will be abundance, amen.

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you provide us with the perfect example of how to do life as a human being.

Lord, I think of my brothers and sisters here and many of us feel a sense, a wave of anxiety because we wonder, how can we do this?

Lord, I thank you that you're the Prince of Peace, Lord Jesus, and you satisfy and you calm and you tell us to cast all our anxiety and worry upon you because you care for us.

And I pray that we could do that.

Some of us are in pain because of physical suffering and the pain is noisy, it's distracting.

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you went through pain and suffering and you know what it's like to sweat drops of blood and to be anxious about the journey ahead.

Lord, I thank you so much that there's nothing better than knowing you're with us in whatever journey we're on, whatever season, whatever stage of the pilgrimage.

Lord Jesus, thank you for your word and how you inspired Paul to say things like, when we are weak, we are strong.

Your grace is sufficient for us.

Some of us feel very weak.

Lord, we thank you for your presence with us.

Lord, I pray against the work of the evil one who would now try to bring distraction and guilt and shame and accusation, who would send fiery arrows of distraction.

We stand against that.

We pray, Lord, you would enable us to hold the shield of faith with which we can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

Lord, would you protect our mind, renew our mind, that we could offer our whole bodies as a living sacrifice, known and loved and pleasing to you.

This is our heart's desire.

So Lord God, thank you that you have promised to inhabit the praises of your people, that you, Lord, by your Spirit are here amongst us, and you have the power to change and transform and set captives free and satisfy.

In Jesus' name I pray, Amen.

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