you can return in your Bibles
to Psalm 84. I especially like that hymn that
we just sang. Probably don't think of it often
enough, or we don't sing it often enough. a short hymn full of
so much truth, but I particularly like that last stanza. Not only full of truth, but because
of the nature of the English language, with should, could,
and would all rhyming, it just fits so well. Then we shall be where we would
be. I suppose of all the places on
earth I want to be, right here is as good as it's going to get
with you. But there's a better place yet. And then we'll be what we should
be. We're not that now, are we? And things that are not now nor
even could be. You know, it's easy for me anyway
to get discouraged. To get discouraged regarding
myself, regarding the church. Easy to be discouraged because
in the heart and mind of a believer is an understanding of what perfection
is. And we long for it. And it's easy to get discouraged
when we don't see it. But that's one of those things
that are not now, nor could be. We must never look for perfection
in this world. Not out of ourselves, not out
of one another. But thanks be to God. They can't
be here, but they will be there. And that kind of segues nicely
into the reason I'm preaching from Psalm 84. Brother Don Fortner
has written a book called Going Home. And I recommend it. Well, I recommend you get it
and read it. It was recommended to me by several people. And
anybody that knows me knows I'm not a big reader. I start to read and I go to sleep
most of the time. And theological books are the
hardest of all to read because generally speaking there's not
a narrative to get a hold of your mind, you know. And there's
very few, very few religious books that I have enjoyed reading. That may sound strange to you
because I go into other pastors' libraries, and they've got books
everywhere, and I assume they've read most of them. Well, I have
very few books, and I've not read very many of them. But I'm
enjoying this one, and I look forward to each morning's coffee
time. I sit out there on my back porch,
weather permitting, and start out drinking a cup of coffee
and reading a chapter a day. I've read only two chapters so
far, but boy, what a blessing they've already been. was about,
actually he used as his scripture the last phrase in verse nine.
I'm sorry. Let me find it here. Well, it says he gives grace
and glory. I think ours says favor and honor.
There you go, middle of verse 11. The Lord bestows favor and
honor. And his point in that particular
chapter, and of course he was using the King James, so it said
grace and glory, that God gives us grace and glory, but in that
order. He has given us grace, and in
time he will give us glory. And that's what we're looking
for. That's what he made us for, to be glorified like Jesus Christ. But I'm not gonna spend, this
message this morning is not just on that subject. When I read
that, I picked up my Bible and read this, and then started looking
at the context, and it just was such a blessing to me. I wanna
look at the entire psalm, and of course, we can only hit the
high points, on the subject of the glory of God's dwelling place. The glory of God's dwelling place. It says in verse one, how lovely
is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty. Now, we know the scriptures
say that God dwells in a light to which no man can approach.
And my belief or understanding of that scripture is that God,
and I have no other way to describe it than this, God in his absolute
essence, God as he has always been, God as he exists outside
of our creation of time and space, God like that, he's unapproachable
to us. We can't even begin to fathom
a being who exists outside of the bounds of time and space
like we do. We're bound here, and we always
will be. We'll always be creatures of
time and space. But I believe what this, well,
I'm quite certain that what the psalmist is speaking of here
is not God's dwelling place outside of our creation, but his dwelling
place in this creation. For there is a place where God
dwells. Now, you say, well, God's everywhere.
That's true. God's everywhere. But there are places where his
gracious throne is known and experienced. And how lovely that place is.
And I can think of two things the scriptures refer to as God's
dwelling place. on earth. Actually, I can think
of three. Because the one that the psalmist
was writing about at this time, his immediate application, was
to the temple. Because it said the Lord sits
enthroned between the cherubim, meaning he was enthroned between
those cherubim that were on the Ark of the Covenant. But we're not going to look at
this with Old Testament eyes. Because the Old Testament Those
scriptures written during the old covenant days described new
covenant things in old covenant terms. So we're just going to
look, what is this saying about you and me? And the present day,
there is a dwelling place of God in this world. And two things
come to my mind. First of all, the scriptures
say regarding Christ in him dwells all the fullness of God in a
bodily form. God dwells in Christ. In fact, it says of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and it was calling Him the Word, and I find this
in John chapter 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God. And then you skip down to verse
14 in John chapter 1 it says, and the word was made flesh and
made his dwelling among us. Now think about that if you can. Try to wrap your mind around
that timeless, spaceless, eternal, unfathomable God who dwells in
a light to which no man can approach but he He humbled himself. Isn't that something? You and I won't humble ourselves,
will we? We're always defending ourselves. We're always trying
to make ourselves out to be better than we are. We hide those things
we think people would be disgusted with about us and show them only
those things we think might gain their favor. And if anybody says
something demeaning about us, we get upset. Like what Brother
Spurgeon said, he said, if anybody spreads a false tale on you,
don't try to correct it because the truth's even worse. Oh, we're so full of pride, aren't
we? And so resistant to being humbled. But God, who has nothing
to be humble about, humbled himself. He emptied himself, the way the
scriptures put it, strictly speaking, made himself of no reputation
and made his dwelling among human beings as one of them. And how lovely is that dwelling
place to God's people. You know, everything in this
world is disappointing, isn't it? We spend our lives chasing after
the things of the world. It's written in our flesh. We
can't hardly help it. And we see what we want and we
go for what we want. And once we get it, it's never
as satisfying as we thought it would be. And sometimes it becomes
nothing but trouble. We're not satisfied with ourselves,
are we? Now, a worldling may be satisfied
with himself, but not a believer. He can be content to be as he
presently is until such time as God calls him home, knowing,
as the hymn said, things that are not now nor could be. We
realize, but still, we're disappointed. We certainly wish we did better,
and probably at one time had a hope that we would do better. But there's one who's never disappointed
me, who has always been more than
I thought, and that's God in Christ. He has always showed me a gracious
face. He has always been lovely to
look upon, spiritually speaking. We rarely preach from the Song
of Solomon, and if you read it, you'll know why. I think it was
meant more for reading than preaching on. But in that book, there's
a section where the woman, is describing her beloved. And I
mean she goes into detail about his eyes, like dove's eyes, and
his hair is dark like a raven. Beautiful teeth. I think back
then it wasn't so common for people to have good teeth, so
that was a thing people often mentioned. If you made it to
middle age with all your teeth, you were doing real good. talk
about his strong arms and legs and finally she gets to the end
of describing him and she said he's altogether lovely. Now you who know him, is that
not true? Have you ever found anything
about the Lord Jesus Christ that you would change? Has he ever treated you with
anything other than the sweetest of love and
mercy and grace? When we have felt ourselves estranged
from him, it was not because he turned his face from us. It's because we turned our face
from him. When I was a teenager, I've been
telling the kids, I told them to vacation Bible school, and
I said, when I was your age, and that's the year the last
dinosaur died, when I was a teenager, that was the beginning of what
we might call bumper sticker Christianity, when they were
appealing to people with posters and bumper stickers with short
sayings, most of them awful. But there was one I remember
from, I saw it during my first year of college, and I thought
it was so good. It said, if you don't feel close to God, guess
who moved? He says, I am the Lord, I change
not. Therefore, you sons of Jacob
are not consumed. But we sons of Jacob, boy, we
change. But how lovely is that dwelling
place, the Lord Jesus Christ. That's why we feel here that
preaching Christ and Him crucified, we're resolved to do that, not
because we find that a burden, but because we find that a delight.
I mean, once you've preached on that, why would you go anywhere
else? Once you have seen God's glory
in the face of Jesus Christ, why would you ever want anything
else? That's why the face we present
the world is what Paul mentions in 2 Corinthians 3, that we all
with unveiled faces reflect the glory of God. Well, where do
we see that glory? Well, a few verses later, Paul
says that God has caused his light to shine into our hearts
to give us a knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ. Now, I enjoy being among you,
and if folks were talking about our church or wanted to know
about our church, I would say it's a group of good people in
the human sense of the word. You know what I mean? Faithful
people. I mean, some of you have been
here as long as I, well, longer than I have, because you were
meeting together before I ever got here. And as you, looking on a human
scale, faithful, believing people. But you know something? We are
not the reason for anyone to come here to this church. There's only one face we present
to the world, and that's Christ. Because his face reveals the
glory of God. And we believe that the glory
of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ is a light that
will shine into the hearts of all of God's sheep, enlighten
them, deliver them from darkness, and will bring them and will
keep them. And they're really not going to be crying for anything
else. But then there's a second place
the scriptures call God's dwelling place. It says the church of
the Lord Jesus is the temple of God. And he dwells in us by
his spirit. Each of us, as it were, are a
small temple of God. When I say each of us, I'm addressing
those who are believers. The Bible says Christ in you
is the hope of glory. Now Christ can be in your brain,
That is, you can have the intellectual or mental understanding of who
he was, or at least who he claimed to be, and what he did. You can know those doctrines
about him and have no real hope of glory and have no right to claim a
hope in glory. For it is not Christ in doctrine
or Christ in the mouth It's Christ in you, living. Now, I don't know how to tell
you to figure out whether that's true of you, except say, well,
is your hope in him? Is your trust in him? But I know
this, Christ is in every believer. Christ is in his church. He says,
where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I
am. And I don't suppose that he would
make a promise concerning the gathering of two or three or
more people in his name. He'd never make a promise about
that if there wasn't something special about the gathering of
God's people, a presence of our Lord and our God, which is there, but not at other times. I know that for me, there is
no more enjoyable time in the whole week than this time. Because here is where I gather
with those who believe like I do, and here is where my God dwells
in a special presence. I don't know how to describe
it, but I imagine all you believers know what I'm talking about by
experience. It's when we gather and hear
his word preached. And that's how you know you're
gathered in his name, when his word's being declared. If there's any time you're going
to sense his nearness, it'll be then. And the church, when she's doing
the thing she was sent to do, is a lovely place. There's nobody
I'd rather meet in all the world than another brother or sister
in Christ. Have you ever been somewhere where you were the
only one you knew? Like when you're traveling or
something like that. And then you find someone who
knows the Lord. Well, that's like finding an
oasis in the middle of a desert. I had not been off of this continent
in only a little ways into Canada. Maybe just a little bit down
the Caribbean, but you know, I was not what you call an international
traveler until I went to India last November. What a blessing
to go on the other side of the world and there you find people
that believe the same thing you do. Worship the same Lord you
worship. Delight in the same truth you
delight. What a lovely place is the church
of the Lord Jesus in this world. And the writer goes on to say,
my soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart
and my flesh cry out for the living God. When Becky Coffey was near death,
and that's Henry Mahan's daughter, last three weeks of her life,
she could not attend church. Just too sick. And it was reported to me her
comment was, why live if you can't go to church? Now think of that. Why live if
you can't go to church? We get distracted by the world,
that's true. None of us ever is the perfection
of anything found in the scriptures. But I know that God's people
love God's church. And in their heart of hearts,
there's no place they'd rather be. And that's why we don't make
a big deal out of telling people they ought to come to church.
It's not an ought-to thing. It's a want-to thing. We may
have to silence our fleshes. Our flesh will resist it. But I tell you, our spirit wants
to be with those of kindred spirit and hear the gospel preached
so that the spirit, as Paul says, the spirit will testify to our
spirit or with our spirits that we are the sons of God. Even the sparrow has found a
home in a swallow, a nest for herself, where she may lay her
young, a place near your altar. Now, we don't have an altar in
this building. We don't even have a table down
front. You know, many churches have a table where they put the
communion set up, and that's fine. But a lot of them will
call that the altar, you know. We don't have an altar. Or maybe I should put it the
way the writer of Hebrews does. We have an altar. that others
have no right to participate in. They have no place there. But
it's not an altar you can see. It's not an altar made of wood
or stone or anything like that. This altar, this altar of God
is, once again, the Lord Jesus Christ. When you looked at that
temple, in the Old Covenant temple, everything in there pointed to
Christ. The priest was a picture of Christ. The sacrifice was a picture of
Christ. The altar on which it was offered
was a picture of Christ. The big basin full of water where
they would wash their hands to purify them, a picture of Christ. The candlesticks in the holy
place, Christ, the light of the world. Everything's Christ. And the altar, our altar, is
Christ. Oh, I want a place near there. I want to be near that altar,
don't you? That's the only altar that ever
has existed where God and men can meet in peace. The scriptures say we are justified
by His blood. and that we experience that justification
through faith. And then it says, being justified
by faith, we have peace with God. Where can God, the holy,
righteous, unapproachable God, meet with wretched, sinful people
like us in peace? Only one place, and that's at
the cross. Only one place, Christ and him
crucified. Oh, Lord Almighty, my King and
my God, blessed are those who dwell in your house. They are
ever praising you. Now, it's a blessing to be in
his house, to be part of that temple, which is the temple of
God in this world. But you know, I read this and
I think what he's saying is this, blessed are those who dwell in
your house. Why? Because they can praise
you. Those outside of his house can't praise him. They don't
have anything to praise him for. He's not done anything for them. Several years ago I heard that
rather famous song entitled Hallelujah. The lyric and music was written
by Leonard Cohen. A horrible song. Beautiful but horrible. because
it takes this glorious word hallelujah and applies it in situations
where it doesn't belong. That word hallelujah means praise
Jehovah. It's a command or a call. In
the King James it's praise ye the Lord is how it's generally
translated. And I remember as I heard that
song and I really liked the music But I was listening to the words,
and I said, this is awful. And it occurred to me that there's
only one kind of person who knows what the word hallelujah means.
And that's someone who has been saved by the grace of God, Jehovah. Praise YAH. YAH is a short version
of Jehovah. We praise Him because of what
He's done for us. He's forgiven our sins. Think
of that. All of them. If you dwell in His dwelling
place, there is no sin on you because He has forgiven you all
your sins and cleansed you from all unrighteousness. And if that doesn't make you
say hallelujah, then don't ever say it. Because there's nothing
else in all the world worthy of hallelujah other than the
praise of God for His grace. We can praise Him. Blessed are
those whose strength is in you who have set their hearts on
pilgrimage Oh, cursed are those whose strength
is in themselves. People say, you know, I'm making
my way to God. Oh boy, and you're in trouble. You're in trouble. Because any
way you make is going to be the wrong way. It may get you to
God, but not the way you want to meet him. As we make our way through this
world in hope of the world to come, we do so not in our own
strength, but in His. The moment we rely on our strength,
we fail. The arm of the flesh, our natural
selves, will always fail us. It cannot help us in our pilgrimage. Now, the pilgrimage the psalmist
was speaking of was when each one would, during the required
times, go to the temple. Well, I apply this here. We're
going through this live on a pilgrimage where we're making our way to
the perfection of God's temple. How are we doing this? Well,
not in our strength, that's for sure, in His. And he goes on
in the next verses to describe that, and it says in verse seven,
they go from strength to strength, till each appears before God
and Zion. And we got folks all ages here
who are, have set their hearts on pilgrimage. We don't count
this world to be our home. We're just passing through it
as pilgrims. And every one of God's people,
though weak in themselves, go from strength to strength in
God, ever increasing strength, spiritual strength. Paul says, even as our outward
form is wasting away, Inwardly, we are being renewed day by day. I posted a picture on Facebook,
I think it was the church's Facebook page, of me and my parents standing
right down there about 30 years ago. Well, a couple of people commented
on the changes that have occurred in my appearance since that time,
since I had pretty dark brown hair and quite a head full of
it. A couple of comments like that,
and Jean-Claude said, I won't say anything. And as time goes by, we go from
strength to strength, And one by one, all of God's people appear
before God in Zion. Now, we don't know when we're
going to take that last step and no longer be on pilgrimage,
but be home. But know this child of God. you will not fail to get there.
Because it is not by your strength you make your pilgrimage. It
is by his strength and his arm, his legs, they never fail. And one day you'll take that
last step out of this world into that one. And you will appear
in the presence of God full of joy, without fault. Hear my prayer, O Lord, God Almighty. Listen to me, O God of Jacob.
Then we see that word Selah. And no one knows for sure exactly
what that means, but some say that it was just, it's put there
to make you pause and consider either what's just been said
or in anticipation of what is about to be said. And I think
this particular Selah is looking forward because he says, hear
my prayer, listen to me, and then here is the prayer. Look
upon our shield, oh God, look with favor on your anointed one. You know what that word anointed
one is? In English, we pronounce it Messiah. In the New Testament,
it's Christ. Look upon our shield. We're getting
bombarded. I don't know about you, I am. The world, the devil, our flesh,
bombardment just constantly. Things coming at us to distract
us, to draw us away from Christ, all of this. Many things which
are too much for us. But we have a shield. Now shields
are in front of you. They face the enemy and come
between you and the enemy. And if you have a good shield,
you survive because the enemy's danger can't get past the shield.
And therefore it says, it says, look upon our shield, meaning
look upon our shield with favor and then look with favor on your
Christ. God's Christ is our shield. You say, well, isn't he our Christ?
Well, yes, in a sense, but it's more important to understand
this. That's God's Christ. There was a lot of people rose
up and called themselves the Messiah, said they were the Christ. There's only one who actually
was, and it's the Lord's Christ. It says in the book of Revelation,
the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord
and of his Christ. Our shield, God looks with favor
on him, and inasmuch as he has the full favor of God, and we
are shielded by him, we are safe. Now, we might say to the Lord,
look with favor on us. And that's fine. Nothing wrong
with that. But when we do so, let us understand
this. that the more important issue
is that He look with favor upon Him who is our shield, the Lord
Jesus Christ. How do we know that God looked
on Him with favor? Because He raised Him from the
dead. God said, I approve of Him. And I know this, if God looks
with Christ or looks on Christ with favor and I'm in Christ,
He looks on me with favor. All right, now, verse 11. For the Lord God is a sun and
shield, which shows us also that this Messiah who is our shield
is also the Lord God. He is Jehovah God. The Lord bestows favor and honor,
grace and glory. On whom did he first bestow it?
Christ. It says that Christ grew in favor,
and that's the Greek words, the same is normally translated grace.
He grew in grace with God and men. God looked at Christ and
liked what he saw. And therefore he glorified him.
Our Lord prayed, Father, glorify me now with the glory I had with
you before the world began. And God has glorified him to
his right hand and said, sit here till I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet. But because he has given grace
and glory to Christ, we know this, he's given grace and glory
to all of us who are in Christ. that the favor, the grace with
which God looked upon His Son in the days of His flesh and
even now looks upon Him, with that same grace He looks on every
one of you in Christ. And that means that in days to
come He will glorify us with the same
glory with which He glorified His Son. No good thing does he withhold
from those whose walk is blameless. Well, there's only one of those.
That's the Lord Jesus Christ. But if we're in him, then in
the sight of God, our walk is blameless. Oh, Lord Almighty, blessed is
the man whose trust is in you. And I don't have to preach on
that. You who trust him know what that means. May God's name
be honored.