How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings

Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see all of you. I looked at the schedule and realized, as it was set up, that I would not be speaking too much in the month of December. It is December, right? So I bumped my son. He had no problems with that today and decided that I would split the time and give a message. And something was on my mind. We missed being here last week with you. We were in Akron, Ohio, and had to speak over there and enjoy that opportunity. I think you had Mr.

Evans here with you last week. I have to say, though, brethren, I was gone one week and you put up a Christmas tree. I know how Moses felt when he came down off that hill and everybody was running around in this golden calf. But I told the men, put that board up out there, put that panel up, and they'll at least block it off and hide it for a while. But I don't know if I was gone two weeks in a row, what would I find if I came back? I have to give a sermon on that subject, I guess, before the end of the month.

I was thinking this week and a hymn came to mind. I don't know if you ever have that thought, but at times, hymns that we have in our hymn came to my mind. And it was, I don't know, you have thoughts come into your head, you don't know why they'd get there. Over the years, I've come to realize that sometimes thoughts get in there that maybe God puts there. Sometimes thoughts get in your head that maybe you just put there or somebody else, so you don't test the spirits, the Scripture says.

But I started to think about a hymn that we sing, How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings. We all know that. We've had that as part of our hymn book for a number of years. And I knew that was one of the psalms, so I went to the piano in our living room and got pulled to hymn to loss and said, exactly which psalm was that? It's Psalm 84. You can go ahead and turn there because we're going to go through Psalm 84 today.

How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings. And it was some of the lines there that kind of came to my mind as I was thinking, and they encouraged me. They were what I needed at the moment as I was thinking about something, and they were very encouraging. For a number of years, I've had the thought that, you know, we sing our hymns week after week, year after year. Some of them we've been blessed and happy, is the man who does never walk astray.

And we just, we should know that's Psalm 1. But we sing these, and I've often thought, do we really stop and think about the words? Or they just become kind of a rote, you know, sing songy, same verse, same hymn, oh yeah, we've sung that one before, onward Christian soldiers. And we go through these, and the ones that are taken directly from the Psalms are very, very meaningful. And I've always thought, do we really think about what we're singing?

And I admit that I don't always think about what I'm singing, because I'm thinking about a hundred other things sometimes. Maybe I'm thinking about the sermon that's just been given, maybe I'm thinking about what we're going to do after church, what has to be done next week, just like you. But brethren, we ought to stop and think about the hymns that we sing.

That's an important thing, and what I want to do here this afternoon and this message is just walk us through one of the hymns, and through the Psalm that it comes from, and point out a few things, because it is a familiar one to us. And there are a number of hymns that I could choose, and perhaps I'll come back with some other messages that as time would present to go through.

There's one that I thought about, there's another hymn that is the most... I've already got the title for the message, The Most Misunderstood Hymn in our hymnal. What do you think that would be? The Most Misunderstood Hymn in our hymnal. That's not the one I'm giving today. I'll give that one later on. You can think about that one. But today we're going to talk about Psalm 84. So let's turn over to Psalm 84, because we need to listen to what we sing. Not just this one, but any number of the ones that we have. I have a CD of music by a man that has taken a lot of the Psalms and done his own compositions, and we've listened to that over and over and over again.

His name is Marty Goetz. He's a Jew turned Christian, kind of a messianic Jew, but he's a very good lyricist and singer and composer. He has some very good ones as well. His songs are just right out of the hymns. Psalm 84 is one that we've had in our hymnal for a number of years. I'd like to walk through it with you and just refresh our minds about some of these points here, and then we're going to sing it as the hymn after this message.

But I'm doing this with the intent to just impress this one point, nothing more really today, that we need to think about the words we sing and the hymns we sing. They have great meaning. They have great encouragement, great comfort. And at times, if God puts those in our minds and in our heart at various times, and as we're praying or thinking, we should pay attention to that. We should pay attention to those things. In Psalm 84, it says in verse 1, How lovely is your tabernacle, O Lord of Hosts! My soul longs, yes, even faints, for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

And so here it talks about God's tabernacle and His courts. We understand this to be the place where, once it was finally settled in Jerusalem, where the temple was built, the temporary tabernacle became replaced by the temple. And there were courts, and it was a very elaborate structure.

But essentially, the temple was where God lived. Remember, David had his own home built, a palace there in Jerusalem, and he said, I dwell in this nice home, and God does not have a home. And he had a desire in his heart to build a permanent tabernacle. God said, you're not going to do that. That will be for your son to do. He had many reasons why David could not and would not do that. And so it is where God lives.

Literally, during the first temple period, the presence of God was there. Not during the second temple, the one to which Christ came. But in its perfect state, the temple was where God dwelt. And you can read back there where the presence came into the Holy of Holies and all of that. But it was a physical representation of God's place and His dwelling. And that's why the psalmist here says, that is a good place.

My whole being, my desire is to be there. And I get palpitations. My heart goes a pitty-pitty path to be there. It is the emotion here of the psalmist as he says, My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. That was where you went in this system to access God and to be near God. To worship God and to make sacrifice and to, if you will, just kind of look at it. That is really the thought that is coming through here. And then in verse 3 it says, Even the sparrow has found a home, a common bird, the most common of birds, perhaps, if you want to look at it that way.

And the slalom, a nest for herself, where she may lay her young. Even the birds have a place to dwell. And that in connection with the dwelling place of God is essentially evoking from the psalmist here, and the one who sings this, a realization that that's where I want to be. I really desire to be near God. Now, we don't have a temple today. We don't need a temple to be near to God. We understand how that works. God doesn't dwell in temples made with hands, it says, in the book of Acts.

God dwells in us by His Holy Spirit. There is the historic lineage of Jerusalem and the place there. We study that. You may make a trip to Jerusalem to see it at some point in your life, to visualize the scenes of the Bible and the whole story in that sense. But we know that that's not what we need in order to be close to God. But being close to God is a very emotional, sensitive part of life, as this psalm brings out.

When he says, my heart faints and my soul longs, you have to think about what does that mean in terms of a relationship with God and a sense that we are near God and close to Him in that sense in our life. The idea here in verse 3 of the birds that have a place brings to mind the very thing that Christ pointed to over in Matthew 6.

You can just hold your place there where Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, talked about God providing for the birds and all. In Matthew 6, verse 25, He talks about the lilies of the field and Solomon. And again in verse 31, he says, Therefore do not worry, saying, What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear? After these things the Gentiles seek.

For your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. The thought that Jesus is bringing out is, don't worry. But what do we do? We worry. We worry. We spend a lot of our life worry. Worry is one of the most wasted emotions that you and I go through. It is a wasted emotion. I'm not saying we don't do it because you do and I do. We worry. And Jesus is saying here in this section, don't worry. As He talks about what God provides for the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. And going back to Psalm 84, the sparrow and the swallow, they have a nest for themselves and a place to lay their young.

Christ and the psalmist, it works together. And it drives home a major point. Do not worry. Now, that doesn't mean we don't have to provide for ourselves. Prepare for eventualities. Make a living. Get an education. That's not what Christ is talking about. We do have to do those things. We have to put in our 40 hours or 50 or 60, whatever our job requires. We have to be productive.

God just doesn't hand it to us. Even these birds have to work to build their nest. And the lilies, you know, they draw from the earth according to the genetic pattern. But they do what they are designed to do. We are designed to provide, to work with our hands.

Rest one day. Work six days, it says in Genesis. But worry is another thing. You know, when you stop and think about worry, it's so often about things that we totally cannot control. People that we can't always control, things we can't do anything about. And we don't have total control over.

And it's never about anything in the past, because that's the past. We usually worry about tomorrow. And we spend today worrying about tomorrow. So it's a big waste of emotional energy. It's a big waste of time. It really is. Because it consumes us emotionally. And it distracts us. And it takes us away from really a matter of faith, reliance, confidence, and trust in God's promises, in God's Word, and in being near to God, as Psalm 84 is talking about.

Because worry is an emotion that destroys faith. And it comes in this psalm at a very interesting point. Because it is really describing the feelings of an individual who is pouring out himself, in a sense, saying that, God, your place is where I would want to be, near you, because that's where you are. Now, back in Psalm 84, in verse 4, it says, at the end of verse 3, I didn't read all of that, it says, Even your altars, O Lord of hosts, even your altars, O Lord of hosts.

Now, the way we sing it, it says, O that I may find your altars, my Lord, my King, my God, as you will recall.

And I think that the addition of the word does help the meaning of what is implied here within the verse. Even your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God, blessed are those who dwell in your house, they will be praising you. The word selah is kind of a pause to stop and to consider what has been said.

When we go to God, when we desire to go to God's dwelling place, when we go to God in prayer, when we try to draw close to God through our own efforts in terms of our study and our prayer and our spiritual life, what we're wanting to do in reality is come up to that altar. In the tabernacle, there were two altars. There was provision made for two altars. One was an altar of sacrifice. The other was an incense altar, smaller. The altar of sacrifice was bigger and the altar of incense was smaller. Fire never went out on either one. The incense altar represents the prayers that go up before God. The other altar was where the animal would be cut and a sacrifice laid out and a burnt offering made and whatever. But it was where the priest would take something and put it up there before God and that was accepted. It's interesting just to think about that in regard to, oh, that I may find your altars, or even your altars, oh, Lord, my God and my King. When you were right at the altar, every sacrifice put on that altar represented Jesus Christ. When you understand the whole sacrificial system, and that's a study in itself, every one of the sacrifices pointed to Jesus and what He did. It's very elaborate, it's very detailed. You can go from the Old Testament to the New Back and Forth to show that. It's quite an interesting study in itself. So when you are at that altar, you're right where the sacrifice of Christ is, in essence. So if you want to find that altar, you're going to be right there thinking on and being right there where Christ is. It brings to mind any number of things about the altar and the stories around the altar, either in the Tabernacle or in the temple itself in the Old Testament. There's one that comes to my mind. When Hezekiah was confronted with the Assyrians, you recall that story? They sent this letter to him, basically, to give up, surrender. Hezekiah went into the temple and laid the letters from Sennacherib before the altar. That's all he could do. He didn't have the manpower and the wherewithal to resist the Assyrian army. They had 180,000 men and a mighty war machine. They would have crushed the kingdom of Judah. All they could do was take those letters, as they were, in whatever scroll form or whatever, and lay them before the altar, lay it out there, and kneel before God, and present what it was and beg God's intervention and mercy. You know what happened. God did intervene. He destroyed the Assyrian army. Hezekiah and the kingdom was spared at that moment.

There are many different stories regarding the altar from the Scriptures and the importance of the altar and the lessons that we learned. Just understand this within the context of this psalm. When you were at the altar, you were where Christ in a sacrifice was.

When we are thinking and singing and going through this, that is a great deal of encouragement and comfort to help alleviate the worry that we might deal with. Going on here, it says, Blessed is the man whose strength is in you, whose heart is set on pilgrimage. Now, this is a whole other study in itself, but blessed is the person whose strength is in you, whose heart is set on pilgrimage.

This brings out the idea of the highway toward Jerusalem. You and I can bring it down to our level, the highway of life. There are certain pilgrim psalms, and this is at least a reference to a pilgrimage. Anywhere in Judah that you would be and you would go to Jerusalem, you would be going up. You would be rising in elevation. From any point in Judea, to go to Jerusalem, you go up. So a pilgrim on the highway, on a pilgrimage to the temple at one of the feasts or whatever, would be going up. It would be certainly, even in their mind, thinking of going ascending to God, to His presence, to Jerusalem, to be in the temple for the festival, for the Sabbaths. Your heart is set on that pilgrimage. The pilgrimage that we have is a whole life-long endeavor. It's not just one trip. You and I will take a trip as a tourist, and we're going to go to a certain point, spend a few days, and then come back home. You're going to go to the beach, the amusement park, the state national park for a few days, see everything, tour around, but you're going to go back home. Pilgrimage is different. Pilgrimage, from the biblical perspective, and a pilgrim, is always on a journey. The journey doesn't end. That's why it says in Hebrews 11 that they travel toward a city whose builder and maker is God, not having achieved the promise yet. So, as pilgrims, we are always on a journey. Life is a highway, as the Psalm says. And that is exactly what this is bringing out here. And blessed is that person whose heart is set on pilgrimage. It talks about passing through the valley of Baka. There was an actual place on the way to Jerusalem where Baka is the word for balsam tree. A balsam tree grew in a dry, dusty place. So here was a valley of balsam trees. So it was a dry valley. And yet, the passage of the pilgrims through this rather dry place made it a spring. They make it a spring, and the rain also covers it with pools. The presence of those passing through made it a place of blessing and thoughtfulness in that way. They go from strength to strength. Each one appears before God in Zion. O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer. Give ear, O God of Jacob.

And then another pause. O God, behold our shield, and look upon the face of your anointed. For a day in your courts is better than a thousand, doing something else or someplace else. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness. A tent evokes the sense of more than just a Coleman tent that we would put up for a weekend camp out. This would be a home. And the style of living at that time, for those that lived in tents, talked about Abraham being in a tent, they were a lot more elaborate than you and I can imagine. Not that they had air conditioning, running water, central heating, or anything like that. But they were quite nice. I mean, even today, if you would look at some of the, even the Bedouin tents, especially in Jordan, they're quite elaborate. Not necessarily where you and I might want to be living a lot, but they are quite elaborate. And what he's saying here is that I would rather just be a doorkeeper, which is a servant at your house. Not living in it, just being at the door, opening it for others in a servant role than to dwell in a way of life or in an environment where wickedness prevails. For the Lord God, verse 11, is a sun and shield. A sun and shield.

This is one of the rare places in the Bible. You don't find God being referred to as the sun too often in the Bible. You know, for whatever reason, perhaps they distinctly shied away from it because the sun was an object of worship among pagan religions. But this is where it is, the Lord God is a sun and shield. The life-giving element of light, but also the protective quality of a shield.

God is our sun and our shield. That is an encouraging, comforting thought to always keep in mind. When we worry, which we're not supposed to do, according to Christ, but we do. So when we do worry, we've got to ultimately put our mind someplace else.

The Lord will give grace and glory. No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man who trusts in you. So this Psalm fits right in with the idea that Jesus expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. It's an encouraging Psalm. It's an important one. It's a well-known hymn for us in our books.

I'm going to come back to the thought for us to think about that we need to think about what we sing. Music is a very powerful force in life. We all have our playlists. We all have our favorite type of music and our favorite songs within that genre. I have my iPods, like many of you do, music, MP3, portable players, whatever we have. I've got 2800 songs on my iPod. Do I listen to all of them? No. I've got them divided up into various playlists. I have my workout list, songs that I want to listen to when I'm working out. I'll have songs of Sabbath songs. I even have my Feast of Trumpets songs. I have some that I've brought out that really have a Trumpets theme. I have some Sabbath songs. I've even created a playlist called Songs of Prayer that are basically taken right from the songs, some of them. I've got my Johnny Cash, and I've got my Bruce Springsteen. I won't tell you any more, but I've got my other list. You've got your list. Music, as we all recognize, is a powerful, powerful motivator. It's a source of encouragement. I forgot what I was watching the other day. I caught something somewhere. They were interviewing some American soldiers in Iraq. They all had their iPods. The theme of the little news piece or feature was the songs these guys listened to from their earbuds as they go into battle. They all had their playlists to get psyched up to go out on patrol. They were a lot of music that's not from my period, my time, my interest, but that was their interest. These were younger guys in their 20s. They had their songs. Probably one of the great scenes of moviedom is in Apocalypse Now where the helicopters are going in to wipe out this Vietnamese village and they're playing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyrie in there. They crank it up in the helicopters to get psyched up for battle. Music is a powerful force. When properly used, it gives comfort, solace, inspiration, motivation for all the right and valuable reasons. These songs were set to music. We've done our best in our time and place, whether it was Dwight Armstrong or subsequent people, to take themes in Psalms, biblical themes, and set them to music so that we might use them in our hymnal to worship God. They've become a part of our culture. That's why it's always been important that we have a hymnal, a standardized hymnal. You recognize the permutations we've gone through just in the United Church of God over the years. Remember, we even created our own little underground hymnal at one point here to kind of branch out a little bit. We didn't go too far beyond because we pulled in hymns from the past, but eventually we settled as a church on this. We should have had it a lot earlier, but it's important that the Church of God be unified and even in the words that it sings. Mr. Kiefer could comment on this when he gets up, but they just recently completed translating all of the UCG hymns and our hymnal into German to produce their own German language hymnal for the brethren in the German language areas of Europe.

Because that's a powerful, unifying force for God's church. But music means ultimately for us to be unified toward God, worshipping God. So, let's think about those words from time to time and begin to train ourselves into the habit of considering what we're singing and not just going through the routine motions.

Those of you that lead the songs can make and will make your particular comments from time to time. As we try to work our way through this hymnal, learning all the new songs, as we had one introduced here today, let's be thankful for that and strive to make those a part of our lexicon and our vocabulary of song and prayer because that's exactly what they are and what they should be doing, ultimately in every way to draw us close to God. Because there are times as we go through our lives, through the weeks, that we need those things. So, next time I speak on this subject, I'll give you the answer, my answer, to the most misunderstood hymn in our church hymnal.