Psalm 84 - Living a Blessed Life

Well, my favorite Christmas movie is It's A Wonderful Life. I know you thought I was going to say something like Elf, or something like that. No, it's not. I love the old classic. It's A Wonderful Life. Just a great story. A story of George Bailey in a no dead end town kind of situation. Dreaming of traveling all over the world, but he watches as his brother and his friends go off to exciting careers, military, college, and he's stuck in old Bedford Falls taking care of the savings and loan company started by his dad. Where there comes a day where there's a very important deposit from the savings and building a loan that has to be made to the bank and Uncle Billy loses the deposit. And it really means that the building and loans are going to go under. They can't survive without that regular income. And so in a fit of anger and despair, George finally decides there's nothing to do, but just throws life away and he goes to the bridge and decides to jump into the river and commit suicide. That's when God sends his guardian angel, Clarence. Remember Clarence? To let him know that life would not be the same without George Bailey. In fact, Bedford Falls would not be the same without George Bailey. And George Bailey is given the wonderful insight as to what life would have been like without him if he had never been born. For one thing, his kid brother, who was a military hero, never would have been saved from drowning when he was a little boy. The woman he married would have ended up the old made librarian in town. And of course, he never would have had those children. And old Mr. Potter would have corrupted the whole town because all along, if it weren't for the building and loan and George Bailey helping people get their own place, Potter would have corrupted the whole place. So he had an opportunity to see what life would be like without him if he had never been born. You remember this final scene? Who could ever forget that scene? When he runs home after he's seen this vision of what it would be like without him in life, the impact he's had on so many people and he runs home to gather his family and his arms as the whole town comes in to give him money to replace that lost deposit. And he finds out, yes, indeed, it's a wonderful life. Well, there's a Psalm that tells us the very same thing, a little different wording, but the same thing, it's a wonderful life. In fact, the word that the Psalm uses we're going to look at today is the word blessed. That's a good Bible word other than wonderful. It's a blessed life. And it is if we live the kind of life that invites God's blessing. Psalm 84 is the Psalm we're talking about and I invite your attention to that Psalm today, which tells us what it means to live a blessed life. Now if you have your Bible open there, you see in the introduction to the Psalm, the heading of the Psalm, it's written by the sons of Korah. The sons of Korah were a family of singers that led worship in the temple. And this is a worship song. It was composed for use in worship in the temple. In fact, true to its nature, this song has been put to music throughout the centuries. At least a couple of old hymns were based on this song, one of them written by Isaac Watts. None of those hymns, neither of those hymns are in our modern day hymnols, but they were sung by the church for a long time. And there are a couple of praise and worship choruses and songs that are based on this Psalm today, one of which we're saying this morning, better is one day based on verse 10 of this Psalm. So it's a true singers' Psalm. It expresses the longing to worship God in the temple. And it was probably written for those who were on their way to Jerusalem to worship in the temple at one of the feasts. And so it was kind of like a traveling song that you would sing for people who were coming to Jerusalem to worship God in the temple. Now God himself outlines the Psalm for us by a couple of musical notations and a repetition of a refrain, if you will. It's a true song. You notice at the end of verse 4 is the word sailor, and at the end of verse 8 is the word sailor. That actually is a musical notation. It means rest. For us who are meditating or reading on the book of Psalms, it can simply mean stop for a moment and think about what you've just read. But it really is a musical rest. And so the idea is this is the end of a verse. Now stop for a moment and think about what you've just sung before you go to verse 2. So the Psalm divides itself into three equal stanzas of this hymn, if you will, of four verses each. And in each of those standards is the word blessed. At the end of the first stanza, in verse 4, you see, blessed are those who dwell in your house. At the beginning of the second stanza, in verse 5, blessed are those whose strength is in you. And at the end of the third stanza, in verse 12, blessed is the man who trusts in you. So God outlines the Psalm for us. There you have it, we can go home, right? Now we're going to take a little time to look at it, actually, and see what it says. But God himself tells us what this is all about. It's about blessing. It's about how to live in blessing, how to experience the blessing of God. And each of the three stanzas gives us one of the elements of God's blessing. What does it mean to live a blessed life? First stanza. Blessed life is maintaining fellowship with God. Now, I want to explain what I mean by fellowship with God first before we actually jump into the verses here. If you know Jesus Christ as your Savior, if you've ever trusted Him as your Savior, knowing that He died for your sins on the cross, you've placed your faith in what He did on the cross to save you, you have a relationship with God. You're a part of His family. You're a child of God. You're brought into relationship with God through faith in Christ. Now once you have that relationship with God, once you're a child of God, there's the necessity to maintain kind of family fellowship with God. And by fellowship, we're talking about an experience of closeness in your life to the Lord. We're talking about being joyful in His presence, having regular communion with Him and experiencing the blessings of that. That's fellowship with God. You can never live a blessed life if you're not maintaining fellowship with God. Now the sons of Korah and their hymn give us several things about fellowship that we need to see. We're talking about being fellowship with God. First of all, in verse 1, they tell us about the place of fellowship. The place of fellowship. Verse 1, how lovely is your dwelling place? Oh Lord Almighty. Now what is this dwelling place? Well it's clear from the next few verses that He's talking about the temple. In verse 2, He talks about the courts of the Lord. Verse 3, He talks about the altar. Verse 4, He talks about it as your house. It's very clear He's talking about the temple, the dwelling place of God. Now there was no building, including God's temple that could contain God. When Solomon dedicated the temple, He said, Lord, in His prayer, He said, Lord, the heavens cannot contain you, much less this building that I've made. So there's no building that can contain God. But this building, in a sense, represented the presence of God. This was the place where God made known His presence to His people and where they gathered to worship Him. The Psalmist says, how lovely is that place where we gather to worship you? The word literally means how lovable it's not lovely because it looks nice. Oh boy, fresh coat of paint over here. That looks great over there. That's not what He's talking about. He's talking about the delight of being there and the desire to be there. How lovable I'm in love with your place, oh God, with the place where you manifest your presence. What He's talking about is the delight of going to the temple to worship with others, the desire to be in God's presence to hear His word, to worship Him to sense that we are in His presence, the desire and delight to do that. In our day, we would say that's talking about the church. You're dwelling place, the place where God's people gather to worship you, to delight in you, to hear your word, to pray to you, that's the church. So we're talking about a desire to be in the place where God's people congregate to worship. The place of fellowship begins in the church. The church is the place where we gather with God's people to be in the presence of God, to worship Him, to fellowship with Him, to learn from His word, to hear Him speak. The problem is that quite often today we are, we live in a culture where we are seduced by many things that keep us from congregating or keep us from the focus on the church, the place where we want to meet with God. We are seduced by the individualism of our age. I can do this on my own. I can live the Christian life. I'd go out in the woods, take my Bible and just worship God all by myself. Some people think. The Bible is far from that as to what it teaches about worship. Yes, worship is an individual daily responsibility and privilege, but it is also heightened and elevated when we come together with God's people and lift up our praises and our prayers as we did this morning as we're doing now. We live in a culture that seduces us with mobility and leisure and yes, a lack of commitment to the point that I'm not sure we have the same passion, desire, how lovable, how eager I am, how desirous I am, how I delight in your place, oh God, the place of fellowship, place where God's people congregate together. But the psalmist goes on to tell us in verse two about the passion of this fellowship. Notice how passionate his desire is to come to church, to come to the temple in his day and to worship God. He says, my soul yearns, even thanks for the courts of the Lord, my heart and my flesh, cry out for the living God. There's passion in these words. This fellowship with God was a passionate desire of the psalmist. You can see it in the verbs, my soul yearns, that expresses a deep and intense longing. Even to the point he says, I almost faint thinking about being there in your presence, my soul yearns, my soul even faint, and then he says, my flesh cries out. The word there literally means a desperate, loud cry, not a little feeble cry, but a cry of desperation. I mean, it's as though he is desperate to be in the presence of God. Now I recognize this is poetry. And sometimes when we write poetry, you know, poetry is a very eloquent, flowery way of expressing ourselves and sometimes uses intentional exaggeration. He even talks about his soul, his heart and his flesh yearning and crying out. Everything that is in him, and I recognize that poetry can sometimes be somewhat exaggerated on purpose, not in a bad way, in a good way. You remember the first time you fell in love and you became a poet. Remember that? Some of you do. Some of you have never fallen in love before. You don't know what I'm talking about. Some of you remember that time when you start writing poetry, you start writing all kinds of love letters and you know, the sky's blue and I love you and all that kind of poetry kind of stuff. You know, and just kind of float out of you. You were very creative and you were expressing the yearning and desire of your heart as you, and some of you have long forgotten what that's like. But even though this is poetry, it's true, it's real, and I don't think we really grasp today the passion of this kind of delight in and desire to be in the presence of God. There is a sense in which when we come into God's presence, we simply lose ourselves in worship, if you will, as we focus on him. That's the kind of passion to maintain this fellowship with God that the psalmist is talking about. But he not only describes for us the passion of this fellowship, he describes the person of this fellowship. Look at verse two again. He says, my soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord, my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. The person of this fellowship is God himself. God is the focus of our worship and our fellowship. He's the focus of the longing. It's not just the place, it's God that is the focus of his longing. He loves the house of God because of whose house it is. It's not just the building, it's whose house it is that attracts him to that place. It's not like, you know, I long for the courts of the Lord. It's like I long for the courts of the Lord. It is the living God who is the source of my passion, who is the object of this passionate desire. We need to be careful not to elevate the place above the person. Now the place is important because it's a tool that enables us to gather together and express our worship together. But we need to be careful never to elevate the place above the person. The reason we're here is because of the person, not because of the place, not the building. It's the person that draws us together in worship. So we dare not elevate the place above the person. We don't worship a place, we don't worship certain furniture, we worship God. I remember when we were introducing our contemporary service and we did some surveys to get feedback and we did them anonymously so that we would not know, you know, people would feel free to give honest feedback and we would not know who they are. So I don't know who made this comment, I'm not picking on anybody. If I look at you while I'm telling this little story, I don't know it was you, okay? I'm just telling the story. In fact, I'll look this way if you want me to. But we got one comment back that at that time before we had this nice stand, we were using just a music stand. And we got one comment back that said, the pastor should always be behind the sacred desk. And I assumed that meant the huge wood pulp that we had. And we were moving furniture off the platform every week to try to set up for the contemporary service and a couple of our guys were getting hernias and strained backs and all that and trying to move that thing. So we decided we just needed something a little more mobile. But someone said the pastor should always be behind the sacred desk. And I found myself wondering what is a sacred desk? There is no such thing as a sacred piece of furniture. Piece of furniture or a building is just a tool that we use to allow us to come into God's presence. Anytime we get the focus on the furniture or the building, we are off focus. We've lost our focus on God. He is the object of our worship. Mission trips do a great service in helping us to understand that. You go to other places in the world. They don't have the stuff we do. Many places don't. In Ukraine, I have preached from sitting in a chair in someone's living room. I have preached in an open yard at a camp. In Hungary, I preached in a public school full of kids who were taking English as a second language. School auditorium, you know, preaching to these public school kids in Brazil that a storefront church in Natal, Brazil. And I preached behind a meat counter of all things. I don't know if there was anything sacred about that or not. But it was just a piece of furniture. Just a meat counter. And I stood behind that and preached to people. In Trinidad, the first time I went to Trinidad in 1995, I preached in a tent. It was a holy tent. We found out when it started raining. It was a holy tent. Huge old tent and it's open sides and so we have a great congregation of people, including a few chickens and dogs that wandered in during the service, you know. And I'm preaching and there's a little stand up there and all of a sudden they had one of these torrential downpours that they have in the Caribbean. And rain was coming through every hole in that tent. And one place it was dripping was right on that little platform. So I kind of gathered up my notes and biomed just stood off to the side. A couple guys jump up off the front pew and move the thing over. And we spent the rest of the service, you know, playing musical pulpit with that thing, trying to dodge the raindrops. There's no such thing as a sacred piece of furniture. There's a sacred God and we use buildings and furniture to be able to allow us to come into his presence. But any time we get the focus on the place, rather than the person we've lost, the real focus of worship and fellowship. The person is what's important. That's God. The psalmist goes on in verse three to give us the provision for fellowship. This is wonderful. The provision for fellowship. Just listen to his heart as he cries out in verse three. Even the sparrow has found a home and the swallow a nest for herself where she may have her young a place near your altar. Old Lord Almighty, my king and my God. The psalmist here is expressing his envy of the birds. You see, the outer courts of the temple were open air. And so birds could come in, fly around, they made their nests in the temple. But it's interesting to me that he says, you know, I, even the sparrow, the bird has found a nest near your altar. Now there are two altars in the temple. One of them is inside would not be accessible to the birds. The other is outside and would be accessible to the birds. That's the one he's talking about. You know what one that is? It's the brazen altar or the bronze altar where animals were killed and their blood was drained, sacrifice was made for the sins of the people. An innocent, an innocent substitute was giving its life for the sins of people who were guilty. That's what was happening at that altar. There's a sense in which the psalmist is saying, I envy the birds who are able to constantly be in that place where they can be reminded, if they were thinking like us, where they could be reminded of what it takes to have a relationship with God. And the provision for our fellowship with him is the blood of the innocent Lamb of God, Jesus Christ himself, who came to give his life for our sins. That's the only way you can have a relationship with God that makes it possible for you to maintain fellowship with him is through the blood of Jesus Christ who died as the Lamb of God slain on the altar of the cross for your sins. And the psalmist says, I wish I could be like the birds that are constantly in that presence and remembering what happens at that altar. The provision for fellowship, the only way that you can have the kind of relationship with God that then we're required to maintain through fellowship with him. The only way that can happen is through the blood of Jesus Christ as he was shed that blood on the cross. John says it this way in 1 John 1 and verse 7 when he says, but if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. I think he's talking there about fellowship with God primarily. He's just talked about that in verses 4 and 5. Fellowship with God and the blood of Jesus his son purifies us from all sin. You see it is the blood of Christ that cleanses us from sin that makes it possible for us to have fellowship with God. So the provision for fellowship is the blood of Christ. And there's a sense in which the psalmist is saying, man, I just wish I was one of those birds that could always be reminded, even bring her young up near that altar to be reminded the provision of blood of an instant sacrifice. Then he goes on in verse 4 to talk about the praise of this fellowship. He says, blessed are those who dwell in your house. They are ever praising you. This is a public, fervent praise of God. It's literally being lost in the wonder of God as you praise him. That's what he's talking about there. The praise of this fellowship, when you walk in fellowship with God, it overflows into praise, kind of being lost in the wonder of who he is and worshipping him. So what does it mean to live a blessed life? This is the only way to have a blessed life. Maintain fellowship with God. You cannot have a blessed life, wonderful life without fellowship with God. And I would just challenge you here this morning if you have never recognized that Jesus Christ died for your sins on the cross. And if you've never realized that's the only way you can get to heaven, you've placed your faith in Him as your Savior. If you've never done that, that's the place for you to start. You need to do that today. And then your life in Christ begins. You begin as a child of God. You're a newborn baby in Christ. You have eternal life from that moment on. Then you begin to grow in your fellowship with Him, maintaining that daily, constant communion with Him and the peace and joy of knowing that He's in your life. There's nothing that compares to that. You can look all over this world and you can get everything this world has to offer by way of thrills, by way of job opportunities, by way of income and material possessions. You can get everything this world has to offer and it will leave you empty. There is nothing like fellowship with the eternal God. And so blessed life, yeah, blessed life starts with maintaining fellowship with God. But it moves on from there. And so, blessed life is marked by finding strength in God. He talks about that in verses 5 through 8. And he begins by reminding us of the origin of strength. Blessed are those whose strength is in you. Who have set their hearts on pilgrimage. Set their hearts on you. Set their hearts on their strength is in you. They've set their hearts on pilgrimage. The idea is that the origin of our strength is in God. That's where we find our strength. These people who have set their hearts on pilgrimage and he's talking about the journey up to the temple to worship God. People who know the Lord and who desire and delight to be in His presence and will make every effort possible to get there, these people, the Bible says, find their strength in God. If you have your affections in the right place, if you have your heart set on walking with God through this life and fellowshiping with Him, He will give you the strength you need for whatever life throws at you. The origin of our strength is in God, it's in the Lord Himself. But notice what he says in verse 6 about the need for strength. This is when you need it the most and it'll be there if you're walking with God. Verse 6. He says, as they pass through the valley of Baka, they make it a place of springs. The autumn rains also cover it with pools. Valley of Baka, the word Baka comes from a Hebrew word for balsam trees. And these balsam trees were little shrub-like trees that only grew in desert areas, very arid, dry areas of Israel. Now what he's saying is that sometimes when you're making this pilgrimage that he's just talked about to the temple, you're making this journey to the temple, the going gets rough. You pass through some desert territory, you pass through some place where there doesn't appear to be water. But you know what you have to do and you get to a place like that? He says they make it a place of springs. You have to dig a little deeper, you have to hunt a little harder to find some water or a spring. And then there are occasionally those times, like he says at the end of the verse in the autumn, the rainy season, when God gives one of those showers and just gives you water out of heaven and fills little pools around you to draw from. Now he's talking about, in literal terms, that journey to Jerusalem and finding water in a parched, dry, barren desert type area. But you know there's a great application to our lives here. Because all of us are on pilgrimage, if you will, if we know Jesus as our Savior, we're walking through life with Him and sometimes as we walk through life, the going gets rough, doesn't it? You go through some dry times, you go through some desert times, you go through some parched times in your life where you're not sure you're going to have the refreshing strength you need to get to the next day. And when that happens, my friend, what he's talking about here is that you can find water in those dry times in your life. Oh, you may have to dig a little deeper, you may have to look a little harder in your word. There may be some days when you don't find it. So as you search, as you dig for those springs, God will show you springs of living water to sustain you and keep you going through those difficult steps of your journey. And then there are those times when He just opens heaven and pours down a rain shower of blessing. And that's such an encouraging and refreshing time. The need for strength, the strength of God is when we go through those difficult times of life, when we go through those desert parched times when it seems like we're not going to make it to the next day. That's the need for strength. But if you're finding that strength in a daily walk with God, then notice what verse seven says about the growth of strength. Your strength will be growing. He says they, speaking of these people who make these desert areas, pools of water, places of springs, they go from strength to strength till each appears before God in Zion. Now the idea here again, thinking of their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, is that the closer they get to Jerusalem, the more eager they are to get there, the stronger they become in their journey because they're looking forward so much to getting to God's temple to worship Him. So they go from strength to strength. Their strength grows as they go. You know what it's like when you're going away to visit family, maybe at Christmas time or some other time and you haven't seen them in a long time and it seems like the trip to see them goes so fast because the closer you get, the more you want to get there and the more eager you are to get there and just, wow, I just can't wait to get there and then the trip home is kind of a dud. You know, it just takes so long to get back. But to see those people you haven't seen for a while, your strength, your eagerness, your anticipation grows the closer you get. Let's see idea here. And the same thing is true in the Christian life, my friend. If you're maintaining close fellowship with God, you will find that as you go through life's pilgrimage, life's journey, that you will grow in your strength. The older you get, the longer and more you walk with God, the more you will find your strength growing to handle the adversities of life. And the more you walk with God on a daily basis, you will find that you're going from strength to strength. Your strength is growing in Christ. Years and years ago there was a great comedy team. There's Burns and Gracie Allen. They were in the early years of television, but their greatest years of comedy were back on these radio back long before my time. Back in those years they had a great comedy show. And from what I hear, there was a husband and wife team. They kind of played off of her ditsiness, you know, her being so naive. And there's an episode that they had on the radio where she had just bought an electric clock. And she got frustrated because it kept losing time. And so she called a repairman to come look at her electric clock. And of course when he walked in, took one look at it, he knew immediately what the problem was. She didn't have it plugged in. He said, oh, you got to just plug this thing. And she said, oh, I know it's an electric clock, but I didn't want to waste electricity. So I only plugged it in when I wanted to find out what time it was. It doesn't work that way with electric clocks. It doesn't work that way with God. You know, there are a lot of Christians who go through life just kind of on their own, giving God no mind day to day. And when they get in trouble, they want to plug into the power source. They find their strength as weak. When you're walking with God daily, when you're maintaining fellowship with Him, when you're drawing strength from Him daily, you find yourself going from strength to strength to strength to strength. Your strength is growing. And when the needs come at a day's time, it's not like, oh, I'm going to plug in the clock over here. It's not like that's the power. No, you're already there. You're already set. And God's flowing that strength into you, if you will. The growth of strength. Notice if you will. In verse 8, the source of strength, how do you get this kind of strength? It's through prayer. He says, hear my prayer, O Lord, God Almighty, listen to me, O God of Jacob. See. We received the strength of God through prayer. That is the source of strength. Unless you are maintaining some kind of regular prayer life. I'm not talking about three hours a day necessarily. Great. If you can do that, I'm not talking about that necessarily, but unless you're developing some kind of regular prayer time relationship with God, you're not going to find the strength you need for life's battles. Because the source of strength comes through our communion with God, our communication with Him through prayer. That's the source. So finding strength in God is one of the elements of a blessed life. But it's not the last one. The last one. It's not that. He describes, first of all, the expression of faith in verse 9. Again, he's still in prayer. And the way our faith is best expressed is in prayer. Notice what he prays in verse 9. He says, look upon our shield, O God. Look with favor on your anointed one. Most Bible commentators who write on the Psalms tend to think that this is describing the person as he's actually gotten to Jerusalem and he's walked into the temple and it begins his worship. And the first thing he prays for is the king. When he talks about our shield and the anointed one, he's talking about the king. You see, in the Old Testament, if the king was wicked, the country suffered. Book of Proverbs talks about that. If the king's righteous, then God blesses the nation. And so what they're praying for is their shield, their king, the one who protects them, who shields them from harm and danger and cause them the anointed one, the one who was initiated into that office through the anointing oil of a prophet or whatever. But the idea is here, prayer. He's praying for the king, but the expression of faith comes in prayer. I love what A.W. Tozer had to say in one of his fine books on the Christian life when he talked about Christians and the fact that prayer is such an expression, the ultimate expression of faith. Listen to what he said. He said, a real Christian is an odd number anyway. He feels supreme love for one whom he has never seen, talks familiarly every day to someone he cannot see, expects to go to heaven on the virtue of another, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong so he can be declared right, goes down in order to get up, is strongest when he's weakest, richest when he's poorest, happiest when he is feeling the worst. He dies so he can live for sakes in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible and knows that which passes knowledge. That's a great description of the Christian life because it has a lot to do with faith. And the ultimate expression of faith is praying to one that we've never seen and trusting that God is there and that he will hear and answer our prayers. The ultimate expression of faith is prayer. But he goes on to describe the enthusiasm for faith in verse 10. I love this verse. This is the one we sang earlier today. 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 of the wicked. What he's saying is there's absolutely no comparison between this life of blessedness, this life of walking with God, this life of trusting in him, this life of faith. There's no comparison between that and a life lived outside of a relationship with God or even as a Christian, a life of rebellion against God. There's no comparison between the two. He says, I'd rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than to have an honored seat among the wicked. And that makes even more sense. It has more punch when you realize that a doorkeeper was not an official position in the temple. It was not like an usher. You know the guy that opens the door for you and greets you and hand you a bulletin when you come in, not like that. A doorkeeper is just someone who kind of got there late and there's standing room only. He kind of squeezes just inside the door. So when anybody comes, he's the one who's got to open it or they run over him. That's a doorkeeper. He's kind of stuck away in the back in a crowded assembly. He says, man, I'd rather be there than to have an honored seat among the wicked. There is no comparison. And it is just this outburst of expressing the enthusiasm for his faith. You'd rather be in your house one day than a thousand days anywhere else. Enthusiasm of faith. Notice the essence of faith in verse 11. For the Lord God is a sun and shield. The Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does He withhold from those whose walk is blameless. The essence of our faith is a focus on God. The essence of our faith is not in us. It's not in the size of our faith, the amount of our faith. The essence and focus of our faith is the object of our faith. Our faith is no good unless the object of our faith is good. You know, in some of these cold mornings when you go out to start your car and your battery groans and says, what are you doing to me? And it won't start. Maybe you got a dead battery. Now, you can have all the faith in the world in that battery. If it's dead, your car is not going to start. You know why? Your faith is no better than the object of your faith. And so faith is no good unless the object of the faith is good. That's why he focuses on the essence of our faith which is God. He's the object of our faith, both who he is and what he does. The verse talks about it. The Lord God is a sun and shield. He provides for us like the sun does. He shields us from harm like a literal shield does. He does all that for us. He provides bestows, favor and honor it says. And then it goes on to say no good thing does he withhold from those who walk as blameless. Notice it doesn't say no thing will he withhold but no good thing. And God knows what is good. He alone is the best determiner of what is good. He knows what's good for us. He knows that sometimes even trouble and difficulty are good for us. He's not saying that I'm going to give you an easy road in life and take away all your problems when you get saved. He's not saying that but he's saying I will not withhold from you anything that will advance you in your growth and becoming more like me. No good thing will I withhold from those whose heart is blameless. Literally an undivided heart one that's focused on the Lord experiences those good things. But I want you to see how he closes out the psalm in verse 12. The evidence of faith is in verse 12. Oh Lord Almighty, blessed is the man who trusts in you. You know how to know whether or not you're trusting God. You know what the evidence of faith really is. The word trust here is a word that comes from a Hebrew word that literally means to lie down. That's what trust is. Trust means you roll all of your care over on him knowing that he cares for you and you can lie down and be at peace with whatever happens. That is trust. Now if the anxiety and the worry is gone and you're lying down in peace and at rest, you're trusting. The evidence of trust is the absence of worry and anxiety knowing that you have rolled everything over on the Lord and you literally do trust him to take care of it. That's the evidence of trust. Well folks there is no other way to live than this. This is the blessed life. This is really in a biblical sense of the term what it means to have a wonderful life. To maintain fellowship with God, to know first of all that you know him as your Savior, and to have such a passionate longing to be in his presence that you hunger and thirst and desire to be with God's people and to grow in Christ, that's a wonderful way to live. And then to find your strength in the Lord even through the difficult times to be maintaining that daily fellowship so that you can grow in your strength and have what you need to meet the difficult times, there's no other way to live. And then to exercise your faith in him to literally trust him, to roll your problems and cares over on him and be at rest. There is no better way to live. You can choose any other lifestyle you want. Nothing will measure up to this. This really is a wonderful life. It's a blessed life. Would you pray with me please? Father, we want to thank you today for the life you offer in Christ, the blessed life, to know what it means, to know you, to walk in fellowship with you, to be able to trust you with our needs and our problems and difficult times. We thank you that we can do that by your grace. Lord, I pray if there are those here that have decisions they need to make in response to your Word that today those commitments to you would be made, or we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.