A New Song for a New Time

Carter Conlon from the historic Times Square Church in New York City. I'm not following what I think that my life should be. I'm following what God is calling me to do, acknowledging, as you and I both need to do, that the thoughts of God are higher than our thoughts and His ways are higher than our ways.

We're glad you've joined us for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon. If you feel like you're stuck in a pit or sinking in despair, that's not what God wants you to continue to endure. If you'll just open your heart and open your ears to Him, He will lift you out of that place and show you a path for your life that He will empower and one where He will be glorified. Carter will explain more in today's message from Psalm 40 titled, A New Song for a New Season. Today I want to speak to you about this season that we're now living in.

I've given it a title, A New Song for a New Season. Psalm 40, beginning at verse 1, David, the future king, says, I waited patiently for the Lord, and He inclined to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay. In other words, David is saying, I was down in a place that was dark.

I didn't know how to get out of it myself. Even worse, there was a sinking feeling going on inside of that place that he found himself in. But he said he brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock and established my steps. And he's put a new song in my mouth. Praise to our God.

Many will see it and fear and will trust in the Lord. So David is saying, God lifted me out of this place, lifted me out of this pit that I found myself in, this place where I felt like my hope, in a sense, was sinking in my heart. And he brought me out and he put my feet in such a large and firm and wonderful place that it actually came with a song. It wasn't just a song you could hear.

As a matter of fact, David says, it's a song you could see. It's a song of praise that is deeper than just words. It's deeper than just the lyrics to a verse that we might sing. It's a song that emanates from the whole being of somebody who is fully given to the ways of God. Blessed is the man, he says in verse 4, who makes the Lord his trust and does not respect the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.

David is saying that there are all kinds of voices. There are voices that are raised against the ways of God. The proud, of course, will put their own objectives and own thoughts above the thoughts of God. But David says, blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust. In other words, God can speak to this man. God can lift this man or this woman out of this place and bring them into that place of stability with this new song. Nor such as turn aside to lies. Those who look maybe for an easier way forward than the way of God.

Those that look for more comforting voices, whether or not they're speaking biblical truth. David said, if we turn from these things, there's a blessing of God that comes into our lives. Now, verse 5, it gets even better. He says, many, O Lord, my God, are Your wonderful works which You have done. You think about in the past all the things that God has done throughout the world, throughout history, but also in Times Square Church itself. God's done many, many wonderful things in the past.

We're really, really thankful for those things. And Your thoughts towards us cannot be recounted to You in order. If I would declare and speak of them, they're more than can be numbered. You know, some would say this is an exaggeration, but actually it's not.

It's actually accurate. David is saying, God, You're thinking things about each of us. You're thinking things about our future, the plans that You have for each one of us. But remember, the plans of God go beyond this world and beyond this physical life we live.

They go all the way into eternity, through eternity. So there's really no end to the thoughts of God towards us and the things that we're going to do, even in heaven, in unison with Him. And then he goes on in verse 6, he says, You don't want me just doing perfunctory religious works. You don't want me just performing the same old rituals, the same old sacrifices, as wonderful as any of those things may have been in the past.

It's not Your will for me to live there anymore. But You have opened my ears. Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require. Then I said, behold, I come. In the scroll of Your book, it is written of me. So David said, You opened my ears, I heard something from You, and I moved towards the sound of Your voice.

It is written of me in Your book, I delight to do Your will, O my God, and Your law is within my heart. Here's how God took David out of this place of confusion and fear and difficulty. He opened his heart to the voice of God. He didn't try to figure it out himself. He didn't form a league with the proud who resist the ways of God.

They always have, they always will. He didn't gravitate to lies about the past, the present, or the future. But he said, God, speak to me. It was really that clear. I want to hear Your voice. Don't let me just come to You to have my own agenda verified. It's Your voice that I now want to hear. And we're living in a situation like that today in our generation. God is calling us as His people into something that He has conceived for us to do. He has a path before each of us. It's a path of strength. It's a path of stability. It's a path that carries a brand new song with it, a song of confidence in God.

And tell me, this generation surely needs to see that song again because a lot of people are losing confidence. What an opportunity, as the Apostle Peter says, to be ready to give an answer for those who will ask us in the coming days for a reason for the hope that is in us. Now, in this particular psalm, David is speaking about his particular time in his spiritual journey when he was stuck. And we all get there. We get stuck in our ways. We get stuck in a certain place. We don't see a way forward. We don't know how we're going to get out.

Now, when you picture with me where he was, now, it's imagery that he's speaking about, but in this place, he describes it as a pit. In other words, it's just walls all before you. You don't know how you're going to get out of where you are. It's too high to climb. You can't dig down and get out of it.

And beneath his feet, there's this quicksand, and he's sinking deeper and deeper into despair. And, you know, when you look at the difficulty that this society today is facing, a lot of people are actually feeling that way. As a matter of fact, you might be feeling that way, too, as well. You know, we get stuck when things don't go the way we thought that they would, or they could, or they should. You know, we all have this tendency to form a picture in our mind. This is what my life is going to look like. I've come to Christ. The promises of God are now mine. And we push aside what we consider like any negativity to the side, and we gravitate to the positive.

That's just human nature. And I'm sure David did that, didn't he? What if Samuel walked into your house and poured a horn of oil on your head and said, Thus saith the Lord, you're anointed to be the next king of Israel? In his mind, he must have thought at some point it just doesn't get any better than that. The Spirit of God came upon him. He was able to go into a battle that seasoned soldiers couldn't even fight and defeated a magnanimous enemy.

May I call it that? A magnificent enemy that stood up against the armies of Israel. And he had a worship ability that when he played before King Saul that even the devils themselves would be driven away from the mind of Saul and the life of Saul.

But suddenly everything takes a negative turn. Suddenly he's being pursued by a king that he was loyal to. Suddenly he finds himself in the wilderness. He finds himself ultimately in a cave with about 400 discontented, distressed, and in debt men gravitating to him. He's surrounded by an army that in the natural vastly outnumbers him. And in his mind maybe he just was stuck because things didn't go.

And there's people here listening. Things haven't gone the way you thought they should go. You found your niche as it is and suddenly everything is upended and you find yourself in total upheaval. And you can find yourself in that place that David described at the beginning of the Psalm. We can get stuck when we don't think that God can do any better in the future than he's done in the past.

That's problematic I think for all of us. You remember the disciples were taken by Jesus up to the Mount of Transfiguration. And it doesn't get any better, right, than that. Suddenly the Son of God is glorified. The radiance of God inside of this physical body is suddenly comes to the outside. He's transfigured before them. Moses is there.

Elijah is there. I mean it just doesn't get any better. And so Peter and the other immediate response is let's build something. Let's camp here. Let's stay here.

It just doesn't get any better than this. And we can find ourselves in a place like that where we found something of God that answered our hearts cry. We found a church that answered our hearts cry. We found worship that answered our hearts cry. We found an experience in God that answered our hearts cry. And the tendency is to want to camp there, to want to build there, to want to stay there.

You know I had a privilege in 2004. I traveled to Wales and I was speaking in Cardiff, Wales and some of the areas around there. I had an opportunity to visit the church where the Welsh Revival in 1904 actually started. And the Welsh Revival of course spread. Pentecost throughout a good part of the world and was responsible for a great in-gathering into the Kingdom of God.

And a resurgence of fervor in the Christian church. I found it so ironic because in that chapel, it's called Moriah Chapel, there's a little group of people. And they still meet and they still pray and they mourn and they grieve and they wait for God to do in that building when He did.

At that point it was a hundred years ago. I think of all the people that have been part of that little group and maybe have joined that group over the years. And have waited for God to come back and do something He did in a building a hundred years ago. And you know I think of all the people that maybe gathered there and grieved the loss of a past experience and all that they missed. Now I mean there's a lot of things that they potentially even missed. They missed the Billy Graham years when more people were preached to in the world than in the history of any other preacher in all time. They missed David Wilkerson maybe starting up Teen Challenge and the multiples of millions of people coming to Christ throughout the world. They missed so many things.

They missed Nikki Cruz coming to Christ and having traveled the world and preached to thirty million people. You see the point is we can get so stuck on the past that we lose sight of the future. We lose sight of the fact that God is thinking things about us and about the church. He has a plan for the future that's bigger than our thoughts.

He's always on the move. You think of Philip in the book of Acts. He's leading an actual revival in Samaria. An amazing revival. Devils are fleeing. People are coming to Christ. People are getting filled with the Holy Spirit.

Bodies are being healed. Suddenly God speaks to Philip and he leaves that and he goes out into the wilderness for the sake of one soul because God had a new plan and a new thought for his life. And I'm thinking of all the people that are living in the wilderness today and I hope you and I are grateful that God is giving us the opportunity to go into homes throughout the world now through the internet to reach people that will not be reached if we camp on a past experience.

And just live to see that God do something that he did gloriously years before but is probably not going to do again. We get stuck when the future looks fearful and the present, though it might be dry, is at least safer than what we perceive lies before us. And you think of the children of Israel standing at the border of this incredible promise having been taken out of captivity, led through the wilderness, brought to the border literally of a promise but it looked fearful to go in. I know a lot of people were thinking at least here we're safe.

Maybe it's a little dry but the manna is still here and we have provision. And in this place that God's wanting to lead us to there are giants that seem to be bigger than we are and fear is one of the biggest giants of all. And so they made the choice and they lived in a wilderness experience.

They lived in a place where maybe all they could talk about was that which God did throughout history and they were stuck in that situation. But God did something for David that gave him a new level of worship and it produced in him a reverence and trust in God that transmitted itself to others. As I said in the beginning, he took me out of the miry clay and out of this horrible pit, out of this place where I was stuck. He set my feet upon a rock and he established my steps. In other words, he didn't call me out just to stand in one place. No, but he laid out a pathway before me. He said, this is where I'm taking you.

This is what I want you to do. This is how my name is going to be glorified. Because remember it wasn't in David's future just to be pursued by an insane king and his army. It was in David's future to be the king of Israel. And not only to be the king of Israel but in his loins, in his actual physical loins was the DNA of the man Jesus Christ that was going to be born into this world and redeem this world through his lineate.

The point being, the plan of God is so much bigger than you and I can understand. The only way we can ever begin to lay hold of it is we allow God to lift us up. We say as David did, my ears you have opened and you put in my heart a delight to do your will.

Even when it looks to be fearful, even when I don't understand it, even when you're leading me into an unfamiliar place. God, I delight to do your will because you are thinking something about me that I've not considered yet to do. In verse 4 he says, blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust and does not respect the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.

Blessed is the man. The word in the New Testament at least is mercarios. I don't know what it is right here in the Hebrew but it means indwelt by God and fully satisfied. When I have chosen to make God my trust, there's an indwelling of God that comes into your life or my life and the promise of God is that I will be fully satisfied. It's I'm not following what I think that my life should be, I'm following what God is calling me to do. Acknowledging, as you and I both need to do, that the thoughts of God are higher than our thoughts and his ways are higher than our ways. Now, I've not been in a pit and I've not been in despair but I feel like, David, I understand what it means to be brought out of this place to stand upon a solid rock and to suddenly see a pathway open before you. This is what I have ordained for your life. And what a privilege it is for me to come into your home today and to tell you that God loves you and to tell you that God can lift you and to tell you that Jesus Christ died to save you, died to give you freedom, died to give you an eternal life and an abundant life here on this side of eternity. What a privilege it is for me to tell you it is a blessed thing to hear the voice of God and to walk with God. And I can say, like David, he's put in my heart a new song, not just a song that I sing, but it's a song that my whole body sings.

It's a song that emanates through your eyes, it comes through the touch of your hands, it comes through the intonation of your voice. The whole general being of who you are suddenly becomes a choir in the sight of people who are looking for hope, they're looking for help. David said many will see it and fear and trust in the Lord.

Many will see it and really what happens is they say, God must be real. I'm hoping that's happening to you today, that you see the blessedness of hearing the voice of God, letting Him set His pathway before us, and then you're looking and saying, God, wherever that kind of song comes from, I want to sing it. I'm tired of singing the song that I'm singing down in this pit or this sinking place. I want to sing the song of victory, the song of vision. I'm tired of my song being dictated to me by what I hear on the news or what politicians are saying or what liars and proud people are speaking.

I'm just sick of this stuff. I want the song that only comes from God. Well, if you do, then you have to open your heart to Him in the place that you are in right now.

Let Him lift you out of any place of despair you happen to be in and let Him set His pathway before you that He has for your life. You know, I'm finding it interesting that there are two places in Scripture where Jesus tells the disciples to throw out the net for a catch. It's interesting when you look at it. The first time is in Luke chapter 5 verses 3 to 5 where He asks Peter and the others to just push out the boat because there's a big crowd on the shore so He can speak to the people. So He does. And after He speaks, He says, now let out your nets for a draft. That's what it says in the King James Bible for a catch, in other words. Let out your nets for a catch. And as soon as He says it, there's a resistance, in a sense, from Peter.

Peter says, well, we fished all night and we've caught nothing. Then He says, but nevertheless, at your word, we will let down the net. So there's actually a resistance to obeying God. And when we first come to Christ, there is always a resistance to hearing His voice. It's hard to get out of old patterns of doing things. It's hard to escape beyond our own reasonings.

And this is where they were at that time. They were half listening to the voice of God and half listening to their own reasoning. That's what it's like for new believers or for those who are yet to be believers. We half hear His calling and half of us tells us, well, I would like to do it His way, but I've done it all night and I'm a fisherman.

I know how this is done. We haven't caught anything, so why would listening to Him make any difference? And some of you are right there. You hear His voice tugging at your heart, but your own reasoning comes now to fight against the voice of God and give you all the reasons why you shouldn't do this thing, why you shouldn't trust Him, why you shouldn't believe in Christ for your salvation, why the plan of God might be wonderful for other people, but maybe not for you.

So they did. They threw down the net and suddenly there's this huge draft of fish and you find Peter, of course, that famous scripture where he drops down to his knees and says, depart from me, I'm a sinful man. In essence, it's a type in a sense of a conversion moment where we begin to see that, hey, God's Word is true. God is faithful. He does give us a new heart. He does give us a new mind. He does give us a new spirit. And we bow down and we're suddenly aware of our sin. We are keenly aware of how we have lived apart from God and God's purpose and God's plan and God's salvation in our lives. So that's more or less a conversion moment. It's a nevertheless.

It's a trust, sort of. Now, in John chapter 21, I call it a post-conversion throwing of the net. Now, they are fishing in John chapter 21.

They fished all night. They've caught nothing again. And Jesus calls to them now from the shore and he says, have you caught anything?

They said, no. He said, cast the net on the right side of the boat and you shall find. In other words, the post-conversion voice of the Son of God says, do it my way.

It's strange, isn't it, that they'd fished all night and it never occurred to them to cast the net on the other side of the boat? You know, and that's what we're like. We do things over and over repetitively and we get convinced in our mind is this the only way that things can work? This is the way the church has to be. This is the way worship has to be. This is the way preaching has to be.

And we can't move out of that. But for those who are converted, for those who've had an opportunity to walk with the Son of God as these disciples had, he now tells them, cast the net on the other side of the boat. The Son of God spoke to my heart years ago that the future of the church was going to be on the internet. He actually spoke to me to my heart and said to me that there was going to be a season of turmoil coming into the nation and possibly a season where the churches couldn't meet again.

I'd shared it with many of our staff here for at least two years. And when that season came, what the Lord spoke to my heart is we have to learn to cast the net, the internet, may I call it that, on the right side of the boat. There's going to be an incredible harvest if we are willing to do it God's way.

That is really the key. Are we going to stay stuck because we don't like the way things are going? Are we going to stay stuck because we think the past or the present is better than the future?

Are we going to stay stuck because the future looks fearful and at least in the present or past we found a sense of security? Or are we actually willing to do it God's way? To cast the internet on the right side of the boat, believing that there's going to be this amazing end time harvest if we will just do it God's way. He says, You are thinking something about this moment in history. God, would you help us?

Would you help us to think the thoughts with you that you are thinking? You are thinking something about Times Square Church for the future. I believe, honestly, the greatest days for this particular church body are just ahead of us. I believe God's going to do something that we've never seen before in a way we've never seen it. I believe that God has brought in exactly what is necessary to get it done. You know, when they brought in this big harvest, they had to call for their partners to help them. And I thank God for all of the partners that have come into Times Square Church and are helping us move forward to what I believe is going to be perhaps one of the greatest harvests of souls that we will ever see in our own lifetime. And David says again in verse 6, Sacrifice in offering you did not desire. You can just see the repetitiveness in the temple. People are coming in every day, all day. They're coming in early morning, they're going out late at night, they're bringing in their lambs and their goats and their wheat and their barley and everything else and they're offering sacrifices before God.

And it became kind of repetitive. It offered a measure, of course, of security to the people of God of that time. David gets this incredible vision. He says, It's not sacrifice and offering that you require. You've opened my ears to something new, something wonderful.

Burnt offering and sin offering you did not require. Then I said, Behold, I come. In the scroll of your book it is written of me, I delight to do your will, O my God. In your book it is written of me, I delight to do your will. I guess my question to you, is it in God's book of you that you delight to do the will of God? Are you willing to be taken to a new place? There's so much more than we can understand when you and I begin to move with God. When we begin to say, Lord, your word has found a lodging place in my ears and in my heart and I delight to do your will. You've been listening to Carter Conlon from Times Square Church in New York City. For more information and resources to help you in your walk in Christ, log on to tsc.nyc. That's tsc.nyc. And be sure to be with us next week for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon.