How Lovely Is Your Dwelling Place

The main theme of Psalm 84 is homesickness for the presence of God. As we look at this song, we'll see the pattern it sets, how that pattern is brought to completion in Jesus, and how we should respond. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning. This sermon text reading for today is Psalm 84. You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 861. Please read or listen as I read God's word. How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty. My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young. A place near your altar, Lord Almighty, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house, for they are ever praising you. Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on your pilgrimage. As they pass through the valley of Baca, they make it a place of strength. The autumn runs also cover it with good. They go from the strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion. Hear my prayer, Lord God Almighty. Listen to me, God of Jacob. Look on our shield, O God. Look with favor on your anointed one. Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents with the wicked. For the Lord God is a son and shield. The Lord bestows favor and honor. No good things does he withhold. From those whose walk is blameless. Lord Almighty, blessed is the one who trusts in you. Here in his reading.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Hope you're doing well today. My name is John. I serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood, and especially if I have not yet met you this morning, I would love to do so sometime today. To that end, I want to tell you about something that's coming up today, right after the service. We're having our next welcome party. And the welcome party is going to take place right back in that room behind those glass doors right there. Right after the service, it's going to last about 20, maybe 25 minutes at the most. We keep it short and sweet. And the whole purpose of the welcome party is to give you a chance to connect with other people who are newer to Elmwood and to give you a space to meet our staff and some of our ministry leaders and to hear about some next steps that you can take towards getting connected, finding places to serve, finding places to grow, finding places to be in relationships with others. So if you are newer to Elmwood, uh it w maybe this is the first time you're here today and you had no idea this was happening, uh, we'd love for you to stay. If you are uh newer to Elmwood in the last just handful of weeks or handful of months, uh, even if you've been to one of these before and you just want to come again and get some cupcakes, that's fine too. Because we're gonna have cupcakes and light snacks and some things like that. So uh if you are newer to Elmwood, I want to invite you to join us uh after the service for the welcome party. Uh with that, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer, and then we will look at this psalm today. God, this morning we yearn for your presence. As we hear this psalmist longing and yearning and fainting, as we hear his heart and flesh crying out for you, God, we want what we read in this psalm to be true of us as well. We ask God that you would increase our desire to live life in your presence. We pray, God, that you would help us to see and understand what Jesus has done for us, and that as we see that, uh, that that would be the thing that compels us outward into a life of pursuing uh communion with you. So be with us now, Holy Spirit. We pray that you would guide us and teach us during this time, and that you would provide each one of us with what we need here today. We look to you for these things. And we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Each year, our family visits my wife Dina's parents who live in the state of Montana, and uh it inevitably happens that towards the end of that two-week stay in Montana that uh one of us looks at each other and says, So are you ready to go home? Even though our visits to Montana are filled with all sorts of really good things, from hiking mountains to kayaking to all sorts of different family things that are going on, uh, even though it's so full of all those good things, the Lewick House in Montana is not our home. It's not where we belong. At some point, we have all experienced a feeling of home sickness, haven't we? Maybe for you it's been while you're traveling or you're on vacation, and uh, as good as that vacation might be, you find yourself saying, Man, I miss my own bed. Or you find yourself saying, you know, uh this is so good, but the fact that our entire life routine has been thrown off and we're just in a totally different maybe time zone, different routine of life, it just leaves me longing to be back home in our normal rhythms of life, back where we belong. I feel this when I uh when I travel and I go to uh we visit other churches when we're away. And you know, I love seeing the different expressions of the body of Christ that exist in all different kinds of places around our country and around the world. And every time I visit another church, it leaves me longing to be here because this is the place where I belong. This is my home. And our church is doing well if we feel that when we can't be together here on Sundays, whether it's because of travel or because of a blizzard that comes like a few weeks ago, uh, we are doing well if we uh long to be together because this is our church home. Maybe being away at college has left you feeling homesick. Either you're in college now or you can think back to the time when you were in college, and uh maybe what happened for you is about the tenth time of sitting down with a tray of cafeteria food, you started to be really grateful for your mom's cooking, and maybe you didn't exactly appreciate it at the time, but all of a sudden you're like, man, I just wish I was home and could have a home cook meal. Or maybe you come from a smaller town, and uh the the pace of life and the scale of everything and all the traffic that you see here in the cities leaves you longing to be back home where you belong. Homesickness, we could define it as the longing to be where we belong. That's what homesickness is. It's the longing to be in the place where we know that we belong, and each one of us knows what it's like to feel homesickness. The main theme of Psalm 84 that you just heard read a few moments ago is homesickness for the presence of God. That's what we're going to be exploring during our time here today. So, as you heard Dave mention earlier, uh today's Palm Sunday, and this is uh a time of the year when churches all around the world uh celebrate that Jesus came into Jerusalem as a king, was welcomed as a king. And oftentimes churches spend time thinking about well, what does it mean that Jesus is our king? What does it mean to submit to his authority and his rule in our lives? And what I want to do today is something a little bit different. I want to come at this from a little bit of a different angle. And the reason is because on that first Palm Sunday, Jesus was entering into the city of Jerusalem along with hundreds of thousands of other people from all over the Roman world to go to the temple and to celebrate Passover. They were there to be at the temple. And Psalm 84 is one of those psalms that we find in the book of Psalms that would have shaped the people on their journey towards Jerusalem. There's lots of different psalms that were actually dedicated to uh to saying these or praying these or singing these as you went to Jerusalem. And this is one of those songs that shaped the collective people of God as they read it and over and over and over and over again. And so we're gonna spend time looking at Psalm 84 today. And as we do, uh, we're gonna see a couple different things. Number one, we're gonna see the pattern that this Psalm sets for us. We're gonna see how that pattern is uh brought to completion, how it's fulfilled in Jesus. And then thirdly, we're gonna see how do we respond to this? How are our how should our lives be different, having seen and heard the message about Jesus? So the first thing I want to look at with you today is the pattern that we see here in this psalm. And the pattern is is this the pattern is one of longing to be in the place where God dwells. That's the pattern, the overall theme of this psalm is uh is that. And we can't read this psalm, we can't hear this psalm read without uh just just feeling this overwhelming sense of the deep and heart-level longing of the psalm writer to be in the presence of God. So again, just to uh read this one more time from verse one and two, the psalm writer says, How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty. My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. So he's longing and yearning to be in the courts of the Lord, to be in the presence of God. And then later in verse 10, towards the end of the Psalm, he makes this incredible statement where in verse 10 he says, Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. Better is one day in your courts and your house than a thousand elsewhere. I want to camp on that uh that idea for a moment here. I'm pretty sure that the psalmwriter wasn't thinking about it in quite uh the the quite this literalistic of a way. But if you think about it, there's a lot that you can do and a lot that you can experience in just under three years, which is a thousand days worth of time. Many of you know that uh a couple years ago I went on a hiking trip in the Alps with some of uh my pastor friends from uh our district here in Minnesota, and I'll just tell you without question, this was the most incredible thing I've ever done in my life. Okay, of course, take getting married and having children, like those are in a separate category of awesome all by themselves. But in the other category, this was easily the most amazing thing I have ever done in my life. This group of uh pastors and I, we we hiked this, it's called the Tour de Mont Blanc, it's 110 miles through the Swiss Alps, and as we hiked each day, we were confronted over and over again with the glory of God in creation. And quite literally, every time we took a new turn, every time we came around a corner, every time you look up, every time you look down, every single time you walk into a new sort of uh piece of terrain that's different than the last one, we were just uh overwhelmed by the goodness of God, so much so that there were times where I thought to myself, I don't know if I can handle this anymore. Like this may sound crazy to you, but I almost couldn't bear the magnificence of it. It was almost too much to handle and to take in uh the glory of God in creation. And that part of the trip lasted a whopping 11 days. By day five, I'm like ready to tap out almost because it's it's it's almost too much. So think about this. There's so many good things we can see or experience over the course of three years, of a thousand days. Think of uh think of the food and the drinks with friends, think of the relationships and the sights and the experiences and all the amazing things that we could see and experience over the course of that time. And what the psalm writer here in Psalm 84 is telling us is he's saying, if you had to choose between three years worth of every day being an overflowing, full to the brim day full of wonder and awe, if you had to choose between three years of that and one day in the presence of God, you were a fool if you think that there's even a choice to be made. The obvious choice is it is better to spend one day in the presence of God than it is to spend a thousand elsewhere. Of course, the exact ratio isn't the point, you know? It's like, well, it would be worth it if it was a thousand and one days, but not if it was a thousand. You know, that's that's not the point. The point is that nothing is better than life in his presence. This is what we were made for, this is what we were designed for, and so any amount of time in his presence is worth more than anything else we could accomplish and experience anywhere else. And this is why the psalmist longs for the presence of God. This is why he longs to be in the place where God dwells. Now, one of the most important parts of this that we we have to remember and we have to see here is that this deep level heart longing that the psalmist has here is not for the building. Okay, he's not longing for the temple because the temple itself is so beautiful and it's so wonderful. It is those things, but his heart does not ache for that place. His heart aches for the one who fills that place. We see this in verse 2. He says, My heart, my soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord, my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. The living God is the one that he yearns for and the one that he longs for. That is what his heart is after. And this is the pattern that's set for us here is a deep longing to be in the place where God dwells, not to be in that building, but to be there because he is there and we desire to be with him. So this was how is this relevant for us today? Okay, this was this psalm was written maybe 2,500 years ago to people who live on the opposite side of the world who uh visited a temple that no longer exists. So, how in the world is this relevant for us today? Well, uh, this psalm takes on a new kind of relevance when we are able to see the one to whom this psalm points us. This psalm takes on a new kind of relevance when we see that it is Jesus that this psalm ultimately points us towards. So here's it, let me just share with you uh two different ways that Jesus fulfills what we see in this psalm here. Uh the first is this in Jesus, God has made himself available to us. Yet this is this is the whole point of the temple in the first place. The whole point of first the tabernacle, which was the mobile version of the temple, and then the temple when it was established and built in a permanent place, the whole purpose of the temple was to be a place where God could meet with his people. The whole point is that God made himself accessible and made himself available to his people. And the fact that the temple exists in the first place tells us something about the kind of God he is. He is the kind of God who, in spite of our sin and in spite of our idolatry and the ways that we have uh lived lives of purposeful brokenness and rebellion against him, in spite of all of that, he is the kind of God who has made himself available and has made himself accessible to us, and his accessibility to us is 100% by his grace alone. 100% by his grace and his compassion. And so, first it's through the temple, structure, and now through Jesus, God has made himself available to us. In the beginning of uh the book of John, John was one of Jesus' uh disciples, and this is what John wrote. He said, This words that may be familiar to you. He says, In the beginning the word was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Then in verse 14, he says, The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. So, what John is telling us in uh in ways that that are, you know, to the perceptive reader, uh, in ways that are obvious, what he's telling us is that Jesus is God. He's not like God adjacent, he's not similar to God, he's not like him and unlike him in some ways. Jesus is God, who is the word, and this word made his dwelling among us. And that word that's translated, made his dwelling among us, is a word that literally could be translated uh to tabernacle. It's a word that that uh is the verb form of the tabernacle temple that was in the Hebrew Bible, where God's presence dwelt. And so John is making it really clear that this that this Jesus, when he took on human flesh and came into our world, this is the presence of God who is now with us. So John is telling us that in the person of Jesus, God himself walked our planet. God himself made himself available to us. So in Jesus, God made himself available. But not only do we see this, we see Jesus uh fulfilling and bringing this psalm to completion in a different way too. Through Jesus, God now dwells in us. So in Jesus, God made himself available to us, he came near to us, and then also through Jesus, God now dwells in us. What's so surprising about this whole God being with us thing is what God did when he got here. He spent most of his life in relative obscurity for about 30 years, and then after a brief three-year public ministry that was uh oftentimes filled with contention and misunderstanding, he was condemned to die and he was executed as a criminal. Jesus is the God of Psalm 84. And the God of Psalm 84, who we're told is the Lord Almighty, which means the Lord of heaven's armies, the Lord of the hosts of heaven. He did not call down legions of angels to rescue himself at his time of greatest need, but instead he willingly gave up his life for us. The God of Psalm 84, who is a shield and a protector for his people, did not shield himself from the onslaught of evil that he experienced when he was executed as a criminal. He did not shield himself from the full weight of the justice and the judgment of God for the sin that we have committed. The God of Psalm 84, who bestows honor, he was dishonored. The one who bestows favor was despised and rejected. The God of Psalm 84 took on human flesh so that he could suffer and die for us. He came near to us. And the result of him coming near to us and going to the cross and dying for us, the result is that we get to experience the very thing that this psalm leaves us longing for, which is the presence of God in our lives. Listen to what Peter says. Peter was another one of Jesus' disciples, and he wrote a letter to the churches that were scattered all throughout the Roman Empire. And listen to what he says in 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 4, he says, As you come to him, that is Jesus, the living stone, rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. So it's really obvious that Peter is picking up on temple language here when he talks about Jesus as the cornerstone, and he talks about us being made into a spiritual house, offering sacrifices, and we are a kind of priesthood. So he's making a clear connection to the temple, and the point of what he's saying is that because of what Jesus has done for us, we are now the place where God's presence dwells. Those who belong to Jesus by faith, those whose sins have been forgiven, who have been washed clean, we are now a fitting place for the Spirit of God to dwell. And it's because of what Christ has done for us that the Spirit of God can and does dwell internally in. In us and among us as well. It's not only true that he made himself available to us, it's also true that through Jesus God also now dwells in us and he dwells with us. So the pattern that we see is one of longing to be in the place where God dwells, to be in the presence of God. And then what we see is that Jesus, through him, we have access to the very thing that Psalm 84 leaves us longing for. And the final question or the final thing we should ponder today is okay, what do we do with this? How do we respond to the good news that through Jesus we now have access to the presence of God in our lives? What do we do with this? Let me uh first invite you to ask yourself a very direct and very pointed question. Um don't get defensive. Uh just receive the question, maybe write it down, maybe screenshot it, and uh spend time uh honestly assessing this, maybe at a different time. So the question is: in what specific ways does my life reflect a sense of urgency to be with God? That's really what Psalm 84 is about. You can't get past the sense of urgency and the sense of longing and yearning to be where God dwells, to be with him. And so the question for us is does my life, does your life, reflect the longing and the urgency of Psalm 84 in any meaningful way? That's the question that we should think about. And maybe for some of us, the application today uh starts with we need to confess. We need to maybe do business with God and confess that, like, you know, if I'm honest, I really don't feel a sense of urgency. To spend time in communion with God. And so maybe the first step for you is to uh confess to God that you don't feel that sense of urgency and to ask him to stir within you a sense of longing to be in his presence. What is a growing sense of urgency when that happens inside of us? What is a growing sense of urgency to be with God look like? Let me just suggest a few different uh ways that this would look. Uh, number one, it looks like we cultivate rhythms of being with God. Okay, if you know me well, you know that I have zero interest whatsoever in providing like cliche trite answers to difficult questions. You know, like I don't often give the Sunday school answer of like, well, just read your Bible and pray. And there are times where we shouldn't uh think that we're smarter than that. Right? There's times where we shouldn't overthink it. And many times, uh the application should be that we cultivate rhythms of being with Jesus, especially through reading the Bible and prayer. We should establish rhythms of spending focused and undistracted time, and I understand that focus and undistracted for a stay-at-home mom or for a parent of small children is very different than focused and undistracted for someone who is maybe single and living alone or someone who is in a season of retirement. I get that, okay? We should spend focus and undistracted time, whatever that looks like, whatever the best you can do, in communion with Jesus through word and through prayer. And of course, this is gonna look different based on your season of life. It's gonna look different based on uh your personality and all those different things. Uh, but these are foundational rhythms, friends. Spending time in the word, spending time with Jesus through word and through prayer. These are not things we ever like move on from. We don't graduate from those things, we just move into greater depths of experiencing those things. And those are the means by which we get to experience and encounter the presence of God in our lives. And so we should be the kind of people who cultivate an awareness of God's presence through these rhythms of being together with Him. Secondly, also just this: we should cultivate an awareness of God's presence with us in all things. So there is, on the one hand, there should be like dedicated time where we give ourselves to spending time with the Lord. And on the other hand, we should learn to live with an awareness of God's presence with us in things that don't always feel that spiritual. Because most of our lives is not spent sitting in a quiet chair with a cup of coffee and our Bibles open. That's like not what life is like. Some of us can't muster 20 minutes of that a week. And so if that's the only place where God, you're present with God, then like that's bad for all of us. You know? God's presence is not just with us in those dedicated times, although He is with us in unique ways. We should learn to live with an awareness of God's presence with us in things that don't always feel that spiritual. Because the Spirit of God indwells you, if you're a follower of Jesus, the Spirit of God lives and resides inside of you. And what that means is that God is present with you everywhere you go. When you leave this place today, you're not leaving God's presence behind you. His presence is with you all throughout the week, which means that he is with you when you're folding laundry, when you're mowing the grass, when you're driving to the office or driving your kids around to activities, or when you're doing your homework, or when you're tidying the house, or when you're cooking dinner, or when you're hanging out with friends, or whatever the thing is, God is present with you in all of those things. And we should be the kind of people who can cultivate an awareness of God's presence with us in those ordinary things that don't always feel very spiritual. Now, sometimes, like when I'm hiking the mountains, you'll have a lingering sense of God's presence with you. And there may be things that you do that are nourishing to your soul, and you're like, man, when I do this or when I do that, I just I I I can I have a sense of God's presence in a way that I don't in other environments. So sometimes you'll be able to encounter him as you are doing the thing, right? Other times, because your brain is occupied and should be occupied, like if if you're driving a motor vehicle, you should be focused on driving. If you're welding, if you are cutting something with a sharp knife, you should be focused on that thing. And you'll probably find yourself being like, yeah, I wasn't thinking about God too much when I was welding, because you're trying to not burn yourself or your house or whatever, you know? Uh so because your brain is occupied, sometimes what it means is that you can only know and understand God's presence with you in that moment when you can look back. When after the fact you can look back and you can recognize, oh yeah, God was present with me in that. And here's maybe a way that at the time I didn't see it, but now I can recognize that he was. And even the act of doing that and looking back and thinking, hey, I did this thing and I'm gonna ponder the ways that God was with me in that, even doing that is an act of communion with God itself. So there's all these different things we do throughout all of life, most of which is not sitting there with the Bible open, which means we have to learn how to cultivate an awareness of God's presence with us in all of life. And so these are maybe two different ways we can go about this. We cultivate rhythms of being with him, specific dedicated time where we do the thing, and then on the other side, cultivating just a general awareness of his presence in our lives. And I'll just uh I'll just leave you with this one last thought is that this is a dynamic process. This is a dynamic process that will take you a lifetime of practice and a lifetime of experimentation, and there'll be times where you mess it up or you don't do it well. There'll be times where you feel like you maybe unlock something you've never known before and praise God for those things. But this takes a lifetime of cultivating an awareness of God's presence in our lives. And the one thing we know is as we go about trying to be the kind of people that do that, the one thing we can be sure of is that it is worth it. The Psalm 84 leads us to long for the presence of God. And as we look to Christ and see how he's made himself available to us, all these things we do to cultivate life with him or to be aware of his presence in our lives, all of these things are worth it. Because we get him in the end. We come to the communion table because of what Christ has done, and because of what he has done, we have full access to God the Father. When Jesus hung on the cross, one of the last things that he cried out was, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And it was in that moment that he lost communion with the Father. The Father turned his face away and he experienced the forsakenness and the abandonedness of life without God, life without communion with the Father. He was cut off, he was cast out, so that we could gain access to the presence of God the Father once again. And so what we do here today, as we do each Sunday, is we come forward in faith once again to receive what he's done for us, represented in the elements of the bread and the juice. But this is not only something we do looking back to what Christ has done, we also look forward. We look forward to the time when in new creation we will finally and fully experience life in his presence. And so that's what we get to do this morning as we come to the communion table. Let me leave a few moments for silence and confession, and then I will invite you to come and receive Christ at the table.