This is the Day the Lord Has Made!

Dr. Larry Thorson*
April 11, 2010

Psalm 118

1 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever. 2 Let Israel say: "His love endures forever." 3 Let the house of Aaron say: "His love endures forever." 4 Let those who fear the LORD say: "His love endures forever." 5 When hard pressed, I cried to the LORD; he brought me into a spacious place. 6 The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can human beings do to me? 7 The LORD is with me; he is my helper. I look in triumph on my enemies. 8 It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in human beings. 9 It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes. 10 All the nations surrounded me, but in the name of the LORD I cut them down. 11 They surrounded me on every side, but in the name of the LORD I cut them down. 12 They swarmed around me like bees, but they were consumed as quickly as burning thorns;
in the name of the LORD I cut them down.

13 I was pushed back and about to fall, but the LORD helped me. 14 The LORD is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation. 15 Shouts of joy and victory
resound in the tents of the righteous: "The LORD's right hand has done mighty things! 16 The LORD's right hand is lifted high; the LORD's right hand has done mighty things!" 17 I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the LORD has done.

18 The LORD has chastened me severely, but he has not given me over to death. 19 Open for me the gates of the righteous; I will enter and give thanks to the LORD. 20 This is the gate of the LORD through which the righteous may enter.

21 I will give you thanks, for you answered me; you have become my salvation. 22 The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; 23 the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes. 24 The LORD has done it this very day; let us rejoice today and be glad. 25 LORD, save us! LORD, grant us success!

26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD. From the house of the LORD we bless you. 27 The LORD is God, and he has made his light shine on us.
With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession up to the horns of the altar. 28 You are my God, and I will praise you; you are my God, and I will exalt you. 29 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.

I want to begin with a suggestion. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, I want you to stand up tall in front of your bathroom mirror, give yourself a big smile and declare with great gusto that wonderful verse from Psalms, “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it!” Bio-feedback experts suggest that this single act can do wonders for our mental state.

The relation between our body and our mind is an interesting one. We don’t smile because we feel great, these experts tell us; we feel great because we smile. William James, often referred to as the father of American psychology, once put it this way, “I don’t sing because I’m happy, I’m happy because I sing.” The way we feel is a direct result of our actions. Psychologist William Glasser advises: “If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior.”

Comedian Steve Martin once said that he gets his laughter juices going each morning by looking at himself in the mirror when he first gets out of bed. This act, he says, is good for about three or four minutes of hilarity. How we start our day can make a difference! Stand tall, give yourself a big smile, and declare for all the world to hear, “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it!”

Former San Francisco 49er football coach Bill Walsh was recognized as having one of the best minds in professional football. He was the originator of the famous West Coast offense. In his book, Building a Champion Walsh says that when a wildebeest or zebra is trapped by a lion, the trapped animal will submit to the inevitable. Its head drops, its eyes glaze over, and it stands motionless and accepts its fate.

Walsh notes that people, in the face of adversity, adopt this same behavior. He calls it the posture of defeat with chin down, head dropped, shoulders slumped, arms hung limply. This posture, he notes, is often visible as players leave the field in the later stages of a game when things are going against them. He often brought this to the attention of his players using this example from nature. As a team they became very sensitive to it. Walsh told his team never to allow this to occur to them. He said, “Even in the most impossible situations, stand tall, keep [your] heads up, shoulders back, keep moving, running, looking up, demonstrating [your] pride, dignity, and defiance.”[i]

Posture produces performance. You can affect your attitude by the way you stand. If you slump your shoulders and look at the floor long enough, you will get depressed. Fred Chisolm, a dynamic salesman, wrote a book a few years ago in which he said that if you keep your eyes above shoulder level, you will never get depressed. [You’ll trip over a few things, but you won’t get depressed.]

Posture produces performance. So, this is my suggestion. Each morning look in a mirror, smile, throw you shoulders back and cite this ancient promise of Scripture, “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it!” You’ll feel better if you do this. If you’re a little self-conscious, you might try doing it when you are alone.

“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!” That one verse has gladdened countless hearts through the generations. It is found in Psalm 118, one of the hallel Psalms associated with the great festivals of Israel. We are told that at Passover, Psalms 113 and 114 were sung before the meal. Psalms 115 through 118 were sung after the meal. It has been suggested that Psalm 118, the Psalm chosen for our lesson of the day, was the last hymn sung together by Jesus and the disciples at the Last Supper (Matt 26:30). Why is this important?

Consider the two verses which immediately precede the one telling us that “this is the day the Lord has made, rejoice and be glad in it,” then think about Christ and his disciples singing it after their last meal before his crucifixion. The two verses preceding this affirmation go like this: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” Then and only then do we read, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Who or what is the chief cornerstone that was rejected? It is Christ himself. No wonder this Old Testament verse became exceedingly important to the New Testament community. Why can we rejoice daily? It is because the stone which was rejected, Christ, has become the Cornerstone of our lives. This IS the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes. Therefore we say with thankful hearts, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

These verses may grow out of an ancient Jewish legend that when they were building the temple in Jerusalem one of the large stones selected for building the temple was the wrong shape and size. They threw it away. Later, it came time to lay the cornerstone, an essential part of the building process. The cornerstone was chosen with great care. Its position at a critical corner of the building meant that it was foundational to the integrity of the walls. If it was faulty, the building itself would be unsound.

To the surprise of the builders they discovered that this very stone which they initially threw away was the perfect fit. As the verse says, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”

No wonder the New Testament church counted this as one of the messianic prophecies. It reminded them of Isaiah’s words of hope: “Behold I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone” (Isa. 28:16). In other words, that which had been rejected has now become the glue that holds the whole structure together. This is what Christ does. This is who Christ is. He is the cornerstone. Five times in the New Testament this verse from Psalm 118 is cited as a witness to God’s work in Jesus Christ (Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10, Luke 20:17, Acts 4:11, 1 Peter 2:7).

What does this mean for our lives and why should it bring us great joy? God takes that which is ugly and rejected and makes it into something treasured and beautiful. The ugliness and sorrow of Good Friday becomes the beauty and joy of Easter.

Writer Philip Yancey once told a wonderful story about Dr. Paul Brand, an American physician who worked with lepers in the town of Vellore, India. Brand worked in an isolated colony for people with this dread disease people who were shut off and quarantined from the outside world.

One day, says Yancey, the patients were holding a worship service. Dr. Brand came in late and sat in the back. They insisted he speak. He stood silent for a moment, looking at the patients assembled there. He began to look at their hands. Many of them had “claw hands” from their leprosy. Some of them had no fingers, just twisted, deformed stumps where their hands once had been. Many of them sat on their hands or, in some other manner, hid them from view.

Dr. Brand said simply. “I am a hand surgeon, so, when I first meet people, I can’t help but look at their hands. I can tell what trade you were in by the position of your calluses and the condition of your nails. I can tell you something about your character. “I love hands,” he continued. “I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to meet Christ and study his hands. There were the hands of Christ the carpenter, rough and bruised from working with saw and hammer. There were the hands of Christ the healer, radiating sensitivity and compassion. Then there were his crucified hands. It hurts me to think about the soldiers driving nails through his hands because I know what would happen to the nerves and tendons. His healing hands became crippled and gnarled, twisted shut on the cross.

“Finally,” the doctor continued, “there were his resurrected hands. You and I think of Paradise as a place of perfection, but when Jesus was raised up from the dead, he still had his earthly wounds and he showed them to his disciples.”

When Brand finished speaking, says Yancey, “the effect on the audience of lepers was electric: ‘Christ had crippled, claw-like hands like mine? Christ showed His hands to His disciples when He was raised from the dead?’ Suddenly,” says Yancey,” this whole room full of lepers began pulling their hands out of their pockets and holding them up in the air. They knew Christ as one of them; they recognized him in their midst, and he lifted them out of their shame.”[ii]

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes,” says the Psalmist. He is saying that this is who God is and what God does. God takes that which is ugly and rejected in the world’s eyes and turns it into something beautiful and treasured. God transforms both people and events.

Life is sometimes very difficult. Sometimes events occur that seem unbearable. Some of you have been there. The loss of a child, a traumatic diagnosis by a doctor, loss of a job or even a home never are we promised that life will be easy. But we are promised that God is in control. And God can take that which is broken and make it whole once more.

A few years ago Pastor Anne Robertson was away from home teaching a Lay Speaking class. During the morning she got pulled out of the class because a woman had walked in off of the street and needed to talk to a pastor. Leaving the class, Robertson spent about 45 minutes with this young woman whose life had hit bottom. The woman’s sister told her she should go to a church. She tried three churches before she found a door that was open.

There was nothing in this woman’s situation, says Robertson, that she could fix. “Her life was a mess, largely because of choices she had made. All of her 31 years she had been dancing around the altar of Baal. Her immediate cause of grief was a broken relationship, which was a result of her own unfaithfulness.” Robertson listened to her story and they prayed together. The woman then went home and Robertson returned to her class.

About two weeks later Robertson got a phone call. It was this woman whose life had been such a wreck. She told Robertson that she had not been home 20 minutes that afternoon when things began to change. The boyfriend who would not speak to her called and they were now back together. She had managed to stay away from the alcohol that so often had been her downfall. “I’ve always believed in God,” she told me, “but this was the first time in my life that God actually did anything.” She thought maybe she was crazy because she felt so good and she hadn’t been able to stop crying tears of joy this time. God was giving her direction. She needed more. “I want to do things for people, now,” she said. “I’ve got to find a place where I can do some service. It’s just what I want to do . . . to give back. What is happening to me?”[iii] What was happening was that God was fulfilling God’s promise. God can take that which was broken and make it whole.

A few years ago engineers in Switzerland created a prototype for a car that runs on garbage. They discovered that leftover food scraps can be fermented into a usable fuel that produces less pollution than regular gasoline. Today there are hundreds of these vehicles on the road that run on this biodiesel fuel that is, fuel made out of leftover food grease. Restaurants take their old grease and sell it to biogas manufacturers, who turn it into biodiesel fuel, which has a much cleaner burn than regular diesel.[iv] Garbage into fuel.

Well, God can do better than that. God can take the garbage of our lives and create something beautiful, something positive, something lasting.

How does such a miracle occur? Our lives are transformed by faith in Jesus Christ. When we turn our lives over to him, we find what’s been missing in our lives. The stone that was rejected becomes the cornerstone of our lives.

Pastor David Holwicke tells about a shocking scene that occurred on the television show “Hill Street Blues” years ago. Those of you who remember Hill Street Blues remember that it was known for shocking and sometimes offensive scenes. But this one was truly unforgettable.

In this episode, the precinct sergeant hears that a vicious criminal has been released from prison. This criminal had been serving a long sentence for attempting to murder this sergeant. No one knows where the criminal is now, but he has put out word that he is looking for the sergeant.

All through the program, the sergeant is looking over his back and wondering what will happen to him. In the final scene, they confront each other in a dark alley. The ex-con approaches hesitantly, and haltingly says these shocking words. “When you met me,” he says to the sergeant, “I was a violent man. But now I am different because I have repented of my sins. Jesus Christ has made me clean. I am sorry for what happened. This is all I own, and I want you to have it.” He hands the disbelieving sergeant a tattered Bible and disappears into the darkness. Astounded, the sergeant stares down at the Bible as the screen fades out.

Friends, that is what can happen when we make the stone that was rejected the Cornerstone of our lives. Christ has given his life that we may have life. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” In light of this truth, I want us to make a new start together. I want us to stand and put a big smile on our lips, pump our fists in the air and declare together. “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it!”

*This sermon is adapted from a sermon by King Duncan in www.esermons.com - Dynamic Preaching Sermons Second Quarter 2010, King Duncan, ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., 2010