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Tucked away in the pages of the Old Testament is a beautiful song book called The Psalms. And these were actually sung as words of praise. We don't have all of the instrumentation keys and guidelines, and yet we have these beautiful lyrics that have retained the anointing of the Holy Spirit that was there centuries ago. And even when we read them today, we read things like, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the we read all of the results of these statements. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of waters that bringeth forth its fruit in season. This leaf shall not wither, but whatsoever he does it will prosper. And these were words from a long, long time ago. And one of them I want to share with you today is Psalm 42. It's kind of well known because the first part of it is something that you're very familiar with. As the deer pats for our flowing streams, so my soul for you, O God. There's a beautiful song that we sang today about that. Being written by a man who was actually running for his life, once again, King David was being threatened. He could have lost everything. His own son had turned against him. And in the words of the the uh writer of 2 Samuel, was he said he turned the hearts of the men of Israel against David. He pulled the rug out from under him, and he was on his way with an army and an entourage to remove David from being king and uh in worst-case scenario, get rid of him and set up his own kingdom. After all the things that had happened in his life, David finds himself in this strange place. Fleeing Jerusalem was enough of a journey with all of those people and family and loved ones to protect, to wear him down a little bit. And then when he came into the beautiful northern plains leading to the Hermon Mountains with Mount Hermon there and the rivers and the streams, uh he must have been exhausted, exhausted when he looked up and saw a deer in a flowing stream. And the deer who also was having to watch for predators that might have been chasing him to that place. And he takes a drink of water, and then David can say, just like that deer, tired and weary, looking for that drink of water, that's what my soul feels. I need a touch of God in my life right now. I am thirsty for that. Jesus said, if anyone thirsts, let him come unto me. And he said, Out of his, he that believes on me, as the scripture has said, out of his innermost being, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. He's saying, Come and be refreshed, come and be blessed. And this is this is the uh background of that psalm, that song, and how it relates to you and me. Let's look further. Let's just read this little psalm. Uh When shall I come before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, where is your God? I had to read that a few times and say, who said that? The tears. It's as if his tears, his sorrow, his grief, were saying to me and whispering to me, saying, David, where's God in all this? And then let's continue to uh to read. David, David had the answer, but he's holding back a little bit to let us let all of this sink in. My tears have been my food day and night, he said. So he was just fasting, praying, believing. These things I remember as I pour out my soul. So when he's pouring out his soul, he's just he's come to the end of his rope and he's praying and saying, God, here I am again, fleeing for my life after all of the things that we've been through. And then suddenly he remembers some of those blessings of God. These things I remember as I pour out my soul, how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude-keeping festival. In other words, I'm remembering the good times and how great this was. I know, I know what the blessing of the Lord feels like. I know what it feels like for the Holy Spirit to just come and transform me. But right now I'm really thirsty. My soul is cast down within me, therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon and Mount Mizar. Uh it's kind of interesting. He was he was talking about, I've been here before. I remember how God had touched me before. In another Psalm, he says, I will lift up my eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help. And it was not just beautiful scenery that he was talking about, it was the experiences that happened in those hills when King Saul was hunting him, and when he had his band of men that were living in caves. And later on, this shepherd boy would be king, but not before a lot of problems, a lot of trouble that he had. Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls. All your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me. A prayer to the God of my life. He's saying, I know the depth of a relationship with God. Did you ever think about how the Holy Spirit transfers a lot of these Old Testament Psalms and feelings like this into the New Testament? And it begins to express itself through the power of the Holy Spirit upon bad situations to turn them into good results. And one way to condense it is have you have you ever thought that relationships have always been more important than religion, in the view of Jesus? That's why when someone asks him, What is the greatest commandment of all, remember what he said? To love the Lord God with all your soul, heart, mind, and strength. And second, and then comma, and like unto it, is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. And then he goes on, in case somebody in the background didn't get it, you know, he went on to say, all of the laws and the prophets hang on this. Everything, no matter how complicated, how difficult it might be for some people to comprehend. You don't have to comprehend all of it to the greatest extent. If you know, if you love the Lord with all your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you love your neighbor. In fact, if you do, when the Holy Spirit responds to your love and begins to bless you and love you, you love the other people. You love people other than just yourself. Let's let him finish the song. Even after deep calls to deepen him, remembering all those things, still he's at the place to say, I say to God, my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As with deadly, a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all day long, Where is your God? And then he goes back to the verse of this sad song. Why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. When I was a younger man, if I would have died and gone to heaven and I was going to talk to David about this psalm, I would have said, Why did you write such a sad song? And I think his answer would be because so many people relate to it. There's a country music singer named George Jones, and he sang a lot of funny font songs, a lot of fast songs, a lot of sad songs. If you like country, that means that you are well on your way to being a wonderful, decent human being. But anyway, uh as he got older, he said to his producers and different people who worked with him, I need a really good song. Because I don't know how long I'm gonna keep on singing, but I need a really it's been a while since I've had a real hit. And then people would sing these songs for him, and he said, They're all so sad. I need something that's a little upbeat, you know, they're all so sad. And and one of his people said, but this one song, I know it's sad, but it's just, man, it's an awesome song. And George, I don't think anybody can sing this song the way you could. And he wasn't just talking about his voice, he's talking about you've been some places in your life. So he sang a song called He Stopped Loving Her Today, probably the saddest country song ever written, and also one of the most popular, just number one in so many areas and remaining through the years, but it was so sad. But it was the reason if it was so true. There were so many people in our society that could relate to heartbreaking things like this. And if I was saying to David, why did you write something so sad? I think he would he would say, because this is where a lot of people are or have been. And there is a, and then I would say, but why didn't you put a good ending on it? Like they taught me in in Bible college when I was planning on being a preacher. Where are the three points in a poem and a little happy thing at the at the end? I don't see it in there. And he would say, Well, this because you didn't see it, but it's in there. And if you look more carefully, you think, and he repeated it. And it's it's uh look at if you look at verse 11, there, the last verse. Why are you cast down on my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? My soul is in turmoil. And he says, Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. That was the solution. And here it is. God has placed in you, in your spiritual DNA, there is a seed of faith. The Holy Spirit is living within you. The answer to where are you, God, is right here. He doesn't leave you. The Spirit of the Lord doesn't say, I can't take this anymore. I'm out of here. This is the most discouraging life I've ever been a part of. This heart is so mixed up and in such turmoil, I don't want to live here anymore. That's not what happens. Instead, he waits. And the key, the connection is you have the Holy Spirit from God residing in you even when you're going through a trial, even when it seems like every door is shutting and there's no hope, it's there. And what you do about it is when you begin to praise God. Now, some of you are gonna think that's too simple. You know, I want you to come up with a deeper thought for me. I'm too intelligent, I'm too sophisticated to accept this as being a solution. But you know what? It is. Because when the spirit within you, the Holy Spirit, begins to worship God, his Holy Spirit makes a connection with your spirit. And something begins to change on the inside, and you set up an attitude of miracles. The presence of God, the way the psalmist said it is the Lord, Almighty God, is enthroned in the praises of his people. There is something that people experience when they are worshiping God that is divine. I remember the first time I thought about preaching this message, I remembered back to my time. I guess it wasn't anything like David went through. But I had just graduated from Bible college, and I was young and full of energy, and uh I I charged off to save the world. I I didn't even go home. I went to another state. I had been able to line up uh, this is a whole different era for some of you, it'd be hard to understand, but but there were a lot of churches had a lot of revivals and meetings, and and I had lined up youth revivals for a whole summer after I got out of school. Some of my friends said, Wow, how did you do that? I mean, how did you make this connection? You got it booked for the whole summer. And I did, but what I didn't fully understand is I had some people who loved me that were trying too hard to help me. I overheard one conversation and he said, I don't care, my friend talking to another pastor, he said, I don't care how small your church is, I don't care if you don't have enough money for him. He's not in it for the money. He just wants a place to preach. I if you don't, if you can't afford to take him out to eat, he'll eat beans or whatever you're eating. If you don't have the money to pay him, he doesn't care. We'll give him a little stipend or something. I didn't know all those conversations were going on. I thought they were saying, we got this great young guy that we want to come preach a revival to your youth. So anyway, the way that summer ended, sparing you all those details. I stayed in basements, I stayed in cheap hotels, I stayed in people's spare bedroom, sometimes with a couple of their children. I stayed in the saddest situations. Uh I sat at the dining room table and heard pastors weeping and their wives weeping even more about how hard things were that they were going through. And by the time I got to late August and was really ready to move on, they had put me in an old, and I mean old, trailer house. It's what we call it then trailer house, in an old, in an old manufactured home uh that was rusting. And it was in uh eastern Arkansas in the middle of a huge cotton field. There was this, as far as you could see, cotton field, no trees, no nothing, except that little trailer. And it was hot, and I was miserable, and I didn't have anybody to talk to, and I was single. I go to church and everybody's fellowshipping and happy, and then I come back home, and there's the sound of silence, the emptiness of it all. And I stood outside that trailer and looking across that cotton field, thinking, what in the world have I gotten myself into? I didn't know it was going to be like this. And on the way home, I felt so defeated and driving across that state, pulled into a place and thought, maybe a chicken fried steak would make me feel a whole lot better. And I was sitting there and this guy came in and he had from Texas, had on a big cowboy hat, big belt buckle, and he just kept staring at me. And I started to go and the the waitress said, uh, somebody took care of your meal. I said, right? And the guy walks over and he says, Boy, I don't know what's wrong with you, but do you need some money? Do you do you need some help in some way? Do you need a doctor? Because and I says, no. I mean, he said, Well, what what do you do? I'm a preacher. He said, Well, you're that your face is the saddest face I have ever seen in my life. The reason I'm telling you this, that trailer house in that cotton field with no friends, feeling like I was going out of my mind, I experienced I experienced God in a way that I had never experienced him before. It changed my life. I found intimacy with God. I learned how to pray in the spirit. I learned that sometimes when I was crying, it just wasn't because I was sad, it was because I was sensing another realm of God in my life, and I and things were not the way they used to be. I had been just stripped of everything till I felt like an absolute failure, and that's when all heaven rushed in and said, Now I can really use you. It marked my life, it caused me to see things as they really are. God has never been about make religion even more religious, make preaching even more powerful, make churches even bigger, even though that's a good thing, and the Holy Spirit will do that. But God's always been about you and you and you and you and you and what you're going through in your life. And if that same spirit that that seeks for you is not here, and what comes out of my mouth, as far as God is concerned, it's just words. But if the Holy Spirit begins to stir up the truth within you, you're gonna walk out of here different than you came in. Here is what people don't understand, and I'm gonna explain it as I can in about two minutes. When you worship God, you are not participating in something that religious people invented so you can really be like a Christian. It is not liturgical, it is life-giving. And what God wants to pour out upon you through his Holy Spirit is the knowledge that when you come against a trial, and you will, there are people here today, you're going through some things. I know you you must be, and that happens to all of us. But when you begin to praise God with an empty trailer house and a cotton field and nobody to talk to, something happens in the spirit realm, and God says, I will make up the difference. I will provide the difference. I will see that you get the money, I will see that you get your healing, I will see that you get an understanding that you didn't have before. The Holy Spirit will do all of these things, but it's David was giving us the answer when he said, What am I gonna do? I'm gonna praise God. I'm gonna worship him. And what happens is you're standing in church and people begin to worship God, and you're saying, That's nice, but I don't feel like it. Boy. I don't even know why I came today, man. I my back hurts, you know, I'm worried about so-and-so, I'm in a bad mood. A guy almost ran over me in the parking lot, and I just, you know, sing on, children, but not me. And you're just refusing to let God answer the needs that your soul is just crying out for. Your soul is saying, we need affirmation, we need significance, we need to be recognized. People in this church are such snobs, I can't believe it. I walked up, nobody asked me to go to dinner, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're just you are shooting yourself in the foot spiritually, because if you would just worship, and I'm telling you, I've been there, folks. I'm standing there and I'm saying, I don't want to lift my hands. My shoulders kind of sore. I didn't sleep in real life. But more than that, I just think I don't do that. It was one time I thought, I don't do that. And I and I remember one time a guy was standing next to me, he was my friend, he lifted both hands and started worshiping God. And I thought, man, I wish I wouldn't have said by him. Because I don't do that. God has to come to me intellectually, you know, on my own terms. Not to be condescending. And let me explain to you what condescending means. That kind of thing. So when God pulls the rug out from under you, and truth gets in your heart, and you begin to worship him with everything that's within you, and you leave everything else aside, you're going to begin to see miracles happen in your life. Right now, you are sitting in a church, this sometimes we smilingly talk about the Magnolia miracle, because there are so many things that happened here that don't happen when a church starts like ours did and what it's grown to be. And you could be sitting in the midst of a miracle and have no idea. And get up and walk out and think, you know, however you want to evaluate what happened to you. But when you worship him, and it can, it doesn't have to even be out loud, but when your heart changes and you and your lips want to say those words, and your hands want to go up, and you begin to worship him, God begins to act on your behalf, influencing other people, changing situations, and you begin to say, I cannot believe how God provided, I cannot believe how God healed, how God did this, and he did that, and it's wonderful. And I want you to have the fullness of that. The other thing is, when a when a big percentage of us all begin to worship God at the same time, in the upper rim of the day of Pentecost, they were in one mind and one accord, and they were worshiping God, and suddenly the Holy Spirit just came like a rushing mighty wind and it swept across them. That still happens today when you reach that critical mass of people who are willing to just maybe someone's weeping, someone's praising, someone's laughing, someone is worshiping however you want to worship, but they're in one mind and one accord. The power of God comes. And those people who don't understand that, some of you may be here today and say, I have no idea what you're talking about. People who don't understand this will say, I don't know what it was, but I just felt something I never felt before in that church. I want to know more about this. The gospel begins to happen because of your worship. I'm gonna give you just because it just hit me right now. Maybe the Lord wanted me to say this to you. When I was working in a retail industry and uh years ago, there was a lady who was a lot of people thought was the meanest woman in the whole company. She was one of those classic women that intimidated the strongest men. And uh she had a way she could dress you down with a look. She could say one sentence and and you would feel like, oh my god. And people just kind of uh avoided her. She was a vice president, she had a she wielded a lot of power, and she was loud and she was brash, and she was from New York. Did I say I was in the retailing industry? Anyway, I went to this church and they were worshiping, like what I just said. I'd heard they were having a revival or something. I went to the church, and everybody was just worshiping. They had their hands lifted, they were praising God, and it was just like you could just feel the presence of the Lord sweeping across the congregation. And you talk to somebody later and they'd say, Well, I was healed, you know, I I received a whole new touch of God in my spirit. I I began to worship God in a whole new way, and all of these things. And I was just thinking, isn't this wonderful? Surely God is in this place. And I looked, and people were praying and I looked and I thought, it's her. She's standing there in the middle. Oh my God, this is a miracle. I cannot believe. When did this happen? How did she change? How is this going to affect people, the company where I worked? Wow. So I could hardly wait. And I was going to go talk to the lady who had barely even talked to me back at work. And I came up and I said, her first name is Maxine. I said, Maxine, I cannot believe that you're here. Is this your church? And she said, Oh, James, I don't know. No, it's not my church. I don't even really know what this is all about. And I don't understand most of the things that they're saying. But I've been coming here for, you know, a few nights in a row. And I thought, and she had her hands raised up and she said, and she said, uh, I said, What you had your hands raised, you know, worshiping God. She said, Well, that's what they do here. That's that's what they do. And I said, Well, what why did you come? And she said, you know, I have a hard job, and when I come in here, I feel peace, I feel love. I just feel I'm not a religious person, but I just love the way I feel when I come in here. And I tell you the truth, I don't have a clue even what they believe. Isn't that a wonderful testimony? That'll come later, but God reaches out through his spirit to you. We're gonna sing a song before we go, and uh just we'll let you go here in just a second, but we're gonna sing a song. And I want you to be a part of this. This is kind of like we're gonna have the end of this sermon. Uh the illustration is you, and I'm gonna ask you while we sing this one last song. Do something you don't usually do. If you just kind of, you know, people lift their hands, oh, you're just kind of like this, lift them like this. If you're kind of like that, we'll lift them like that. I don't care. But just just do something, just don't stand there with your hands in your pocket, because that makes demons dance. Don't stand there with your hands in your pocket. Find some, at least express yourself. Even if you just say, I love if you whisper, I love you, Jesus. Whatever you want to do. And I'm telling you, when you do that sincerely, you're gonna feel something from your head to your feet. And some of you are gonna walk out of here knowing things that you didn't know when you came in. God's giving you direction, feeling healing that that's gonna manifest in your life. Uh dealing with some issues in your heart that need to be straightened out. God's gonna work, you're gonna have your miracle before you leave. And this is what you call like a two-minute miracle. It's gonna not gonna be all that long. I want you to let the Lord touch you when you do that. And then uh our wonderful jazz will uh will dismiss you, and we will have people here at the front that you can come if you want to come and have further prayers. Somebody to take your hand and say, you know, let me pray with you about this. They'll be here for you too.

unknown 29:31

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