What is My Working Relationship with God? (Psalm 127) 07.12.26

Intro:

So we are back again in our sermon series through the Psalms of Ascent. Continuing to follow the path of Israel’s pilgrimage up the mountain to Jerusalem to worship God. And each week so far we have seen how God has given his people songs that frame their mindsets, shape their desires, and prepare their hearts for worshiping him together as his people once they get there.

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This week we have Psalm 127 - which is the source of several familiar verses to many of us, I’m sure. But when it comes to wisdom literature, I think we tend to prefer our proverbs in fortune cookie chunks rather than long form. So this Psalm is not usually taken as a whole - we usually chop it up and take the bits we like. Some of it we put in our modern worship songs, like All Glory Be To Christ. Some of it we put on like a nice throw pillow or piece of script art on our bedside table reminding us not to stay up late but to get some rest. And then some parts are used to start fundamentalist movements aimed at out-breeding other religious groups by filling our quivers with kids. To each his own.

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Of course, when we do that, we set ourselves up for confusion on the rare occasions that we actually have to read this thing. Because what do all these things have to do with one another? What possessed this Psalmist to put together a Psalm about building houses, work/life balance, and having lots of kids? And why would Israelites be singing this song specifically on the way up to the Temple three times each year?

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Well, at a basic level, I think it’s because God is showing his people a truth applies to every sphere of life. In case you missed it, the author of this Psalm is Solomon. So a Psalm written by Solomon starts out saying “unless the Lord builds the house…” (1) Well, what house was Solomon famous for building? The Temple. (2) So this Psalm starts with the temple, and moves out into other spheres of life to the security of the city, the security of individual vocation, and the security of family. Solomon is talking about building a “house” in every possible sense of the word. In every sphere, from religion to politics to work to family life, you have no security apart from the work and will of God. Blessing, safety, success, sleep, and children all come from God - our work does not guarantee any of them.  Your building, your watching, your work, all depend on God’s building, God’s watching, and God’s work.

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If you were here for our Ecclesiastes series in the first half of the summer, (3) I’m willing to bet you also noticed those three back-to-back “Vanities” in the first 2 verses. Sounds kinda familiar, eh? Remember, Solomon’s whole thing is wisdom that explains the world. Not just part of it - all of it. Something that makes sense of it all. Because without that unifying principle, everything is vanity. In Ecclesiastes Solomon looked out over all of creation and searched for answers that would make sense of the inconsistencies that he saw in the world. And in the end he said the only thing that makes sense of all of it is the worship of the Lord.

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So here he is - the great Sage-King himself, helping to prepare his people to worship the Lord. And he’s reminding them as they go up that the Lord is the only thing standing between you and vanity in every sphere of your life. He’s helping them to see that value of the worship they are about to undertake by reminding them of the vanity that awaits them apart from it.

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He also talks about two very personal and valuable things - sleep and children as being gifts of God also. Two things that we tend to think of as things we can easily produce for ourselves… until we can’t. Even things as desirable and natural as sleep and children are also ultimately dependent upon God. If you hadn’t noticed, this Psalm starts off looking like a bowl of delicious candy, inviting you to take your favorite and leave the rest, but it can quickly become a bottle of tough pills to swallow.

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I mean, Solomon you say he gives sleep to those he loves, but I can’t sleep. So what does that say about me? You say children are a reward, so what did someone with an unwanted pregnancy do to deserve that reward that I haven’t done? What about the things I was watching over carefully that fell apart anyway – was God asleep? And if my work is vanity unless it’s duplicated by God, why should I even bother?  

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I don’t want to pretend like those questions are easy enough to do justice in a 30 minute sermon. But I’d be a pretty dishonest preacher if I pretended they aren’t looming in the background. The good news is that I think this Psalm provides us with some clues and principles that point towards genuinely helpful answers. The bad news is, in order to see what this Psalm is actually saying, we need to clean some of the gunk out of our ears that makes it hard to hear it for what it is.

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As we talked about last week - the culture we live in is continually shaping us. It’s always shaping the way we think and feel about stuff. So often times, in order to see what Scripture is really saying, we need to clear out some of the crud that builds up from walking around in those influences day in and day out. We rarely realize the ways that they have shaped our thinking until we clear them out. It’s like not realizing how dirty your windshield was until you clean it. (4) The big question I want to answer today is, “What’s my working relationship with God?” And I also hope to show you that this bigger question is actually underneath all the other hard and painful questions we looked at a minute ago.

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But in order to get at that bigger question, we will first have to consider three subconscious but false mindsets that keep us from understanding this Psalm rightly. Then, once we get those out of the way, we’ll hopefully have a clear enough view to see what we need to see here. (5) So we’ll start with three subconscious but false mindsets.

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Point 1: Three False Mindsets

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Up front, let me just tell you that these three mindsets feel pretty different but actually have a lot in common. First off, as I’ve said, they are all usually subconscious. I fully expect that most of you will hear a brief description of it and think “oh yeah that’s ridiculous I’d never think that.” These are assumptions about God that are shaped by the culture and the world, not by Scripture, but they are so down deep that we often have no idea we are operating off them until somebody points it out.

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Second, all of these assumptions are just different ways of giving default answers to a question we don’t know we should be asking. (6) That question is, “who is actually doing the work?” Or as I said earlier, what’s my working relationship with God? When a house (or a Temple) gets built, when a city is protected, when I go to work, when I go to sleep, when I have kids, who is really doing the work? We often times forget to really ponder that question, and instead we assume the answer in whatever way is easiest and move on. And that ends up usually looking like one of these three working relationships. And let me also just say these are not examples of healthy working relationships by any means. But these are working relationships that will probably feel somewhat familiar to many of us. Starting with the most basic: (7) a coworker.

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1.a. First Working Relationship: The Coworker

In the coworker mindset, God is my coworker. My colleague. My life is really a team effort between me and God. We each have our own areas of responsibility. We can help one another out sometimes, but we always go back to some basic division of labor. Some things are his to work out, some things are mine... We even collaborate on decisions. Sure, few of us would every consciously think of it that way, but at the end of the day, he can tell me to do stuff and I can say “no.” And I can ask him for stuff and he can say no. So decision-making ends up functionally being a negotiation. Sometimes I do things for him so he’ll be more willing to help me out in the future.

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There’s a couple of big giveaways that this is the functional working relationship between you and God. (8) It tends to come out in subtle phrases. Like when I say, “God if you could just give me this one thing then I could handle it from there.” And when my life gets really hard and painful, especially in ways that are outside of my control, I get frustrated because it means one of us isn’t doing their job. If we were both working on our own stuff my life would go well. So if it’s not going well, either I dropped the ball or He did. And when we get to things that feel impossible for us - we are quick to pass the responsibility on. “That’s his area - not my problem.”

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1.b. (9) Second Working Relationship: The Boss

Under the Boss framework, God is effectively my supervisor, and I’m his direct report. He assigns and evaluates my work from above, but when it comes to actual execution, that’s on me. For example, he tells me that I have to love my neighbor as myself, honor my father and mother, treat my spouse and kids with kindness, etc. But when I walk through the door at home, that basic instruction is functionally all the help I should expect. He told me what to do, now I just have to do it. And if I make a mess of it that’s on me to fix and clean up. In any case, I have to try my best because eventually he’ll be expecting a report on his desk. Again, not talking about a healthy working relationship with a boss here, but probably one that’s familiar to some of us all the same.

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But speaking of reports, one of the hallmarks of this mindset is its impact on your prayer life. If going to God in prayer feels hard or scary, there’s a good chance this model is somewhere in the mix. After all, any time you talk to a boss, there’s always a risk they’ll ask for an update on that project. If you messed up the project, they are the last person in the office you’ll want to see until you fix it. When you approach your boss you want to have solutions to propose, not just problems. You want progress to show. You need a way to remind him or her of your value to the organization. In this mindset, you feel like you are basically on your own to produce the results, mistakes will cost you dearly, and the Boss is mainly concerned with the broader organization - not the quality of your personal life.

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(10) Another common tell of this mindset is shame and resentment towards God in the face of hardship.  If you have to ask for help, it just means you couldn’t hack it. And that can also produce defensiveness… When the work gets hard, or it just doesn’t pan out, or the circumstances get unfair and impossible… why didn’t he resource you better? Why didn’t he give you the training, the team, the funding, the tools that you needed to handle this? This is clearly above my pay grade, why am I being expected to handle something like this?

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And what’s one thing that both the coworker and the boss mindsets have in common? When I do manage to do well, I don’t just feel healthy pride. I feel like I earned my place here. Like they are lucky to have me. Like I deserve a raise. Like now I ought to have a seat at the table. At least until the next project goes south…. Because in both the boss and the coworker mindset, you’re only as good as your most recent results.

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1.c. (11)Third Working Relationship: The Replacement

The last false mindset I want to look at today is the replacement mindset. This is the idea that becoming a Christian, or at least becoming more mature as a Christian, basically means handing off more and more of the work to him and just stepping off to the side. This is more of that “Jesus take the wheel” approach where we hand it over to him and are just along for the ride as long as he’ll have us. This one probably feels the best up front, but like the others, it can have some pretty nasty side effects. If this is your mindset, (12) there will likely be a few tells.

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For one, when your friends or family come to you with very serious concerns or problems in their lives, your responses may sound like they come from a Christian hallmark card. “Just let go and let God.” Basically you take on the attitude of a coworker who already gave their 2 weeks notice and is just hanging around to collect that last paycheck. Something goes wrong, even in your own life, and the attitude is “Not my problem anymore!”

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The result of this mindset is that we never feel any meaningful sense of ownership or agency in life. Why should we bother putting in the effort on anything if everything in my life is ultimately up to him to work out? If I can’t build a house, protect my city, go to sleep, or build my family without him doing it more, why am I needed at all? Hey, he’s better at the job than I am anyway, so I should just let him handle it. He probably doesn’t even need or want my help. Opportunities and threats that come along are treated with similar apathy. “That’s not my problem anymore,” and “he probably doesn’t care to hear from me anyway.”

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And of course, like all the other views, this one really struggles with suffering. The “not my problem” casual approach works up to a point. But eventually it very unavoidably becomes your problem. Then it feels more like, “Hey God, aren’t you going to handle this??” The lack of agency quickly turns to helpless and despair. There’s nothing we can do about it at this point but wait it out until our “2 weeks” are up. (13) So that’s the three views. The coworker, the boss, and the replacement. I don’t know about you, but none of them sound good to me.

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(14) Let’s look at a better option in Psalm 127.

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Point 2: A Biblical Working Relationship with God

Psalm 127 presents on of the best pictures in Scripture of a (15) non-competitive working relationship with God. By which I do not mean that you and God are are like competing for business or something in the other views… I mean all the previous three models view you and God as competing for space in your work. Basically, the other models make God out to be like a created thing, so that we have to partner with him the same way we partner with other created things. But that’s not true at all.

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(16) Look at the first two verses.. Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. And Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. First time you skim that it looks like, “ok, if God has to build and watch, otherwise my building and watching is worthless, why not just let him build and watch?” Why do I have to do anything? But “unless” is a conditional word. So it means “If God doesn’t work, then all my working will be in vain. It doesn’t mean, “because God works, your work is in vain.” That would actually literally be the opposite of what it says. So if you look at this and wonder, “in light of God’s sovereignty, why do I even bother?” You are quite literally reading this backwards.

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“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders work in vain” is another way of saying “If the Lord builds, then your building matters.” So far from God’s participation canceling out yours, it is the very thing that gives your work meaning.

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The problem we run into is, humans understand things by putting them in categories. We match things to other things. So when we meet a new thing, we ask, what else is this thing like? When you meet God, you ask, “what else is this thing like?” And in truth, the answer should be “NOTHING!” Who is like the Lord? Nobody! But that’s not what we do. We think, ok, God and i are both working here… so we are working together… we must be coworkers of some sort. Which of my coworking relationships applies here? But every other relationship you have ever seen or conceived of has been between two created things. There’s a category distinction here between Creature and Creator that makes all the difference.

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(17) Here’s why. Broadly speaking, all created things compete for space. We all have what’s called “competitive existence.” Stay with me. What I mean is, if I’m sitting in a chair, nobody else can take up that space without removing me. I have to get up for somebody else to have this chair. Even if they sat in my lap they still wouldn’t be sitting in this chair, they’d be sitting in my lap. That’s because all humans exist in the same way. With me so far?

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Now. God isn’t like that. He doesn’t relate to us like that. And you and I *think* we know what that means but we rarely do. We say “well God works through me” but we really just mean that one of us - either me or God - is using the other to accomplish something. Either God is the acting agent and he’s using my body to do something, or I’m the acting agent and I’m using his power to do something. But basically it’s one of those three working relationships from before. Either one of us is the boss telling the other what to do, or we have to negotiate and come to an agreement. (18) These are all just different versions of what I call the “Coke bottle in the pool” way of thinking.

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Basically, imagine you take a sealed bottle of coke and chuck it in a swimming pool. Is the coke in the pool? Yes. Is the pool in the coke? No. We read verses in the bible like “in him we live and move and have our being” and I think we think “Coke bottle in a pool.” I’m in God, but basically I’m displacing God. Where I am, technically God is not. He’s all around me, but technically my existence opens up a little bit of space in his existence. I’m the coke bottle, he’s the pool.

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And when we think of being filled with the Spirit I think we think of opening the lid and letting the pool water basically drive out and dilute or remove the coke and replace it inside the bottle. And even if we get to the point of thinking we don’t physically compete with God for space, I bet we still think our will competes with his for space. Like, we think that God’s will somehow drive out or override our will, or vice versa. That, if we are living according to God’s will, we must necessarily suppressing our own will. So we think about stuff like God being sovereign over human salvation and we quickly start asking silly questions like “well doesn’t that make us robots?” Because when we make stuff, the only way for our will to be carried out in it is via programming - because we are not God. Both we and the things that we make are created things - so our existence competes with the existence of anything we make. So when we try to make a thinking thing, it comes out as a robot.

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So coke bottle in the pool is a no-go. (19) Let me propose a different analogy: Clocks. Analog clocks in particular. So-named because they are, themselves, analogies. Clocks are funny things, though. We think of them as measuring time, but they don’t. At least not directly. Clocks are not like thermometers for time. They don’t directly measure time like a thermometer measures heat. That’s why clocks can so easily be wrong. Their movement is only analogous to time - it’s not directly connected to it. They are, essentially, physical analogies of time because their movement is kind of similar to time. But on the other hand (hah), clocks are also nothing like time because time doesn’t have gears and time doesn’t tick and time isn’t physical. So point is, clocks and time exist very differently. They don’t compete for space.

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(20) For this reason, clocks do not contain and dispense time like a soda fountain. And they don’t displace time like a coke bottle displaces pool water if you were to ever throw one into a pool for some non-sermon related reason. There are not little atoms of time in between each molecule of clock either. The clock exists in time, but it does not compete with time for space - rather, clocks depend on time for their purpose, and their purpose is to model time by visibly participating in its rhythm. We do not compete with God for space, rather we exist to model God by visibly participating in his work.

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Our work is analogous to his. Our work and our will, when properly calibrated, can represent his work and his will without competing with it. And far from invalidating our work and will, it is his work and will that gives meaning to ours. (21) Unless time moves, the clock ticks in vain. Unless the Lord is working, our work is in vain. But if God is working in and through us, then our work matters more than it ever could have otherwise. Because the purpose of our work is to represent and model his. We are His Image bearers by which I mean we are analogous to him. Emphatically not the same, but similar in some very meaningful ways.

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Conclusion:

At the beginning I said the big question looming over this Psalm is “what is our working relationship to God?” (22) And the theological answer is, “not competitive. His will and his work are in and through our willing and our working.” But that really kind of raises a more relational question… “why?” In every sphere of life, our work clearly depends on his. So even if you acknowledge along with the Psalmist that our work is real and meaningful because of God’s work, you still would not be able to say our work is necessary. God could do it by himself. So why choose to partner with creatures he doesn’t need, to do work he could do better on his own? And according to Psalm 127 the answer is because he loves us. He does not resent the limits of our ability, he actually gave us those limits as gifts.

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(23) Look at verse 2 again. Sleep is a gift. He gives it. Not to his “tolerated.” To his “beloved.” Now that word “Beloved” is pretty special. It’s “Yadid” in Hebrew. Which is the first half of the name “Yadidiah.” (24) Which we would pronounce “Jedidiah” in English. When Solomon was born, David gave him a second name. It says in 2nd Samuel 12 that when Solomon was born, the Lord loved him. So David also called him “Jedidiah,” because of the Lord. Jedidiah, which means beloved. This Psalm was personal for Solomon. He put his own, personal name in there.

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But that doesn’t mean this Psalm was only for Solomon. He wrote it for the people to sing as a song of Ascent on the way up to the temple. Solomon is teaching the people something that is true for his life - that God wants those he loves to work with him, in a posture of both active participation and dependence, because God loves them. And he’s saying this is a principle that has proven true for me, and I want my people to know and sing it as well. God wants you to work with him because he loves you. Then, at the end of the day, God wants you to stop working - and to stop worrying about working, and go to sleep. Because he loves you. That’s the clear message of the Psalm. But if we keep digging I think there’s just a little more here.

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What principle could explain God’s disposition towards us? Why would God love us in this way? Why would God love us in a way that he would want us to join in his work, to represent him in the way that we work, but to still be dependant upon him in our work? Why would he love not just the fact that we can work with him, but also give us rest as a gift for working with him? I’ll tell you why, it’s sonship. (25) God chose Solomon to build his house because he had first chosen him to be his son. Good Fathers love sons. Good fathers love working with their sons. Good Fathers love watching their sons sleep after a long day. There’s the principle that makes sense of all of it. God’s not a coworker, He’s not a boss, He’s not a replacement. He’s a good Father.

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So right after Solomon finishes talking about how we are to be like children to God - building his house, but trusting him to make the labor meaningful. Not staying awake worrying about the work, but trusting our Father enough to see bedtime as his gift to us as his beloved children, after all of that, he seems to pivot to talking about how children are a blessing. And if you missed the theme in the first half that feels like a subject change but it’s not. Solomon is giving the reader a key to understanding how God feels about them. You want to see how God feels about you? You want to understand why he wants to work with you? Why he wants you to help even though he doesn’t need you to help? Why your work doesn’t compete with his, but rather represents it and is enabled by it? If you want to understand that more clearly, think about how a good Father feels about his children. Far from seeing them as a hindrance, he views them as a blessing, an honor, and a delight.

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Fatherhood is the missing conceptual piece that makes sense of the first part of the Psalm. (26) It fills in the gaps in the other metaphors. The coworker mindset doesn’t account for the fact that God is intimately involved in every part of our work, and invites us into much of his. The boss mindset doesn’t get that God delights to hear our prayers and to enter into our work, and that our work is based on his love not the other way around. And the replacement mindset doesn’t understand that his work doesn’t negate ours, it is what gives it meaning. (27) Fatherhood completes all of that and more. Fatherhood accounts for the fact that there really are some things that are just God’s to carry. That he is in charge. And that sleep and rest are actually times when we do need to let go and let him take over for a while.

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(28) And the good news of the gospel is that this working relationship with God - working in and with him as a beloved child, is exactly what is offered to you in Christ. Not just in one or two places, over and over again throughout the New Testament. The gospel is this: you can have a relationship with God that gives your work more meaning than you ever could have imagined. Because if you are in Christ, your work is now a part of the family business. It matters. (29) And it is not in vain.  

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