Psalm 53
This is some of my sermon for our church’s 53rd anniversary. There is something quietly remarkable about a group of ordinary people deciding to do something extraordinary for God. No fanfare. No guarantee of success. Just a handful of men and women gathering in a county labor building in the summer of 1973, convinced that their community needed a church and that God would honor their obedience. They could not see the decades stretching out ahead of them. They could not know about the fire that would one day reduce their building to ash, or the missionaries who would one day carry the gospel to Ireland, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Mexico. They simply started, and then they kept going.
That kind of faithfulness deserves to be reflected on carefully. Not because the people themselves were exceptional, but because the God who sustained them is.
The World They Were Up Against
Psalm 53 opens with a sobering declaration. The fool, the psalmist writes, has said in his heart that there is no God. From there, the passage describes a world largely turned away from its Creator, a world where corruption spreads and where genuine seekers of God are difficult to find. God himself is portrayed as looking down from heaven, scanning the landscape of humanity, searching for anyone who understands, anyone who is reaching toward him.
It is a striking image. The God of the universe, peering into the noise and chaos of human life, looking for the few who are genuinely oriented toward him.
That image is not merely ancient history. It describes our world today with uncomfortable accuracy. We live in a culture that increasingly acts as though God does not exist, or if he does, that his existence carries no practical weight. Ethics drift. Morality shifts. Violence fills the headlines. And even among those who would claim to believe in God, there is often a wide gap between that belief and the way daily life is actually lived.
And yet, in every generation, there are a few people who turn toward God rather than away from him. A few who decide that they will not simply go along with the current. A few who gather together, open the scriptures, and say, we want to seek after God. That decision, repeated week after week across decades, is how a church survives. Not through clever programming or cultural relevance alone, but through a stubborn, persistent orientation toward the living God.
When Everything Burns Down
There is a particular kind of faith that only gets revealed in crisis. Anyone can trust God when things are going smoothly. But what happens when the building burns to the ground on Christmas Eve? What happens when you wake up in the middle of the night to flames shooting from the roof of everything your community has built together?
That is exactly what happened thirty years ago. A Christmas Eve communion service ended peacefully. Families went home. Children went to bed. And then, in the dark hours of Christmas morning, a fire tore through the building and by sunrise, it was gone.
What happened next is a portrait of God’s faithfulness. Without the expertise, without the funds, without any roadmap for what came next, a congregation pulled together. Other churches gave generously. A foundation provided significant financial support. And in less than ten months, a new building stood in place of the old one, with double the capacity of what had been lost.
That is not a story about human resilience, though there was certainly resilience involved. That is a story about a God who, as Psalm 53 puts it, scatters the enemies of his people and puts shame on those who oppose them. The fire looked like an ending. God turned it into a beginning.
The Ripple Effect of Faithful Giving
One of the most humbling realities of long-term ministry is that you rarely get to see the full picture of what your faithfulness produces. A dollar placed in a missions envelope. A Bible folded, stapled, boxed, and shipped to a foreign country. A child taught a memory verse on a Tuesday afternoon. These things seem small in the moment. Their impact is anything but.
Consider what faithful, consistent missions giving actually accomplishes. Missionaries in Mexico leading children to faith in Christ. A church in Taiwan now being led by a man who did not even know he was not yet a Christian until a gospel conversation changed everything. And in Manila, a single Friend Day event at a network of churches resulted in nearly nine thousand people trusting Jesus Christ as their Savior in a single month.
Nine thousand people. Because churches gave faithfully. Because missionaries went. Because someone decided that the gospel was worth funding.
This is the nature of the kingdom of God. You plant. Someone else waters. God gives the growth. And the harvest often comes in places you will never visit, among faces you will never see, until eternity.
Looking Forward Without Letting Go
Anniversaries have a way of pulling our eyes backward, and there is real value in that. Remembering where you came from builds gratitude. It also builds courage for what lies ahead.
But the final note of Psalm 53 is not backward-looking. The psalmist ends with a forward gaze, longing for the day when God’s salvation will come in full, when his people will rejoice and be glad. There is an expectation embedded in those final words. A confidence that God is not finished. That the story is still being written.
The children sitting in classrooms right now, hearing about Jesus for the first time, are that forward gaze made flesh. The teenagers being challenged with the truth of God’s word are the next chapter. The gospel does not retire. It simply passes to the next set of hands willing to carry it.
So the question worth sitting with today is not what has God done, though that is worth celebrating deeply. The better question is this: what is God going to do, and are you willing to be part of it?
Seek after him. Trust his faithfulness. And carry the gospel forward. The next generation is counting on it.