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Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of Psalm number 84. "How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,

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where she may lay her young at thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in thy house, ever singing thy praise. Blessed are the men whose strength is in thee, in whose heart are the highways to Zion, as they go through the valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs. The early

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rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength. The God of gods will be seen in Zion. O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer. Give ear, O God of Jacob. Behold our shield, O God. Look upon the face of thine anointed. For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper

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in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness. For the Lord God is a sun and shield. He bestows favor and honor. No good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man who trusts in thee. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading

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from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. If the 23rd Psalm is the most popular of the Psalms, and if the 51st Psalm is the most penitential, then the 84th Psalm is the most plaintive. There is a soft

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radiance about it which has led some to describe it as the pearl of the Psalms. Traditionally it is believed that the Psalm was written while King David was in exile. You will remember that long before he became a king, David served King Saul, but Saul became insanely jealous of David and drove him out of the land.

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And this Psalm was sung by David during that time far from his own country. He must have felt great frustration in exile. When you love someone as he loved Saul and then find that love being resented, when you do your best to dedicate yourself to someone or something and are only despised because

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of it, when you do your uttermost and have it laid aside as being of no account, that's hard to bear. And David of course also knew separation. He was not in his homeland. He was in a place of separation and isolation and loneliness. It takes a lot to stand for something, but it's even harder to stand when no

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one salutes your flag with you. So David knew the pain of separation. He also knew irritation because he was living in the midst of a very strange and different people. Difference often leads to discomfort. I just returned from the hospital on Thursday. Hospital ways are not my ways. The saying is, "There's no

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place like home." And so when we are apart from home, the very unfamiliarity of the place leads to a kind of inner discomfort. And I think David also knew profound aggravation because he had no one with whom to talk, no one with whom to share. Conversation is a kind of ventilation. And some of the saddest

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words that I ever hear from suffering folks are these, "No one understands. No one even tries to understand." So here is David, despised in spite of his doing his best, lonely in the midst of an unfamiliar environment and with no one who can understand. His heart hurts within him. And out of that hurt, he writes

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and sings this song about joy. First of all, he rejoices in the house of the Lord. In summertime, many of us go on pilgrimages. We'll go to see the nation's capital or Yellowstone Park or the Statue of Liberty, pack up the children, or perhaps go by ourselves to see places of import in our national heritage. Well,

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in the Israel of David's day, it was common for people to make pilgrimages, but always to one place, to the center of worship. Now, this was long before the temple was built. Worship at that time centered about the tabernacle. And people would go to the tabernacle, this tent in which the worship of God was conducted.

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And thinking of those pilgrimages and of that tent, David begins his psalm, "How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the Lord." That's not true of most of us, is it? We don't long and faint for the courts of the Lord. I think that's largely true because the courts

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of the Lord are so readily available to us. As you might very well imagine, I get a lot of mail because of our tape and radio and television ministries. And I was reading the other day some of the letters that have come in in response to television just within the last two weeks. One lady named June is one of the

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oldest members of her congregation, but she's not able to get out much because of arthritis. And she writes, "I am so thankful that I can worship with you." Bob, on the other hand, is a paraplegic suffering from spinal cancer, and he writes, "I praise God for your services and I look forward to them all week." Mary

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writes that she is delighted because sometimes she sees her friends in the congregation, and "it makes me feel," she says, "as though I am right there with you." Robin wrote and told me that her father had recently suffered a stroke. Her mother has been ill for quite some time. She must stay home to take care of both

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of them, but she says, "We're still able to go to church together when we worship with you." I was intrigued by a letter from a man named Ralph. He said, "Your worship services pierce to my heart. They hit home, and I find myself, even though locked in, growing in faith." And I think my favorite was from a lady named

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Elizabeth, who said, "I am 84 years old, and I sit alone in my apartment, and I worship with you on television, and I feel God's presence. I am a Baptist, except on Sundays when I am now a Presbyterian." The note that comes through each and every one of these letters, and I could have quoted from many, many

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others, is that these people long to be able to come to the courts of the Lord. One wonders what David thought as he looked back on his experiences in the house of the Lord. There was memory, of course. The beautiful robes of the priests, the smoke of the sacrifices, the singing of the choir. We have beautiful

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memories of worship. I remember a woman who came to a Christmas candlelight service, and she went home, and six days later, very suddenly, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. And when I went to the home, one of the members of the family said to me, "All week long, Mother talked about that service. The beauty of it just

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filled her with joy." We have memories like that. And of course, David must have thought of the mental stimulation. One of the things that should happen in any meaningful act of worship is that we are challenged and stimulated to think, perhaps, thoughts that we've not thought before. That's what the worshiper on the

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tenth hole of the golf course never really experiences, the challenge to her own ideas. And then, of course, there's a certain amount of heart massage associated with a place like this. Here's where the vows of marriage were taken, or perhaps here was the place where the words of farewell were uttered. Maybe the

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son or the daughter of your heart was seen to commit himself to the Lord's service in this spot. You look at certain seats and remember where the saints have sat. There is a great deal of heart massage associated with our experiences here. Every week, someone stops to me at the door and says, "We're here celebrating

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our anniversary," or this or that, and it all began in this spot. And maybe David thought, too, about the beauty of the eye associated with the tabernacle. The entire inside of the tapernacle was a beautiful thing to see. Have you ever looked at the interesting stone animals that are carved in the tracery around the doors

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to this church? Have you stopped and studied the strong, virile strength of the Augustus and Gaudens angel on the wall over here? Have you ever studied the windows enough to discover what the biblical story is that's being told in colored glass? One man who lives in this city but is not a member of this

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congregation comes often to pray here, and he refers to this as the "stradivarius of sanctuaries." Stimulation for the eye here. Most important, of course, that which happens to the soul. David must have thought of that. So much happens to the soul in a place committed to the uplifting of the things of God.

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Think of the people who have preached from these pulpits. Evangeline Booth, Peter Marshall, Robert Speer, the greatest mission interpreter of the century, Catherine Kuhlman, Martin Niemöller, that man who stood against Hitler and his hordes. Those kinds of speakers stretch the soul, and that happens in places of

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worship. And David, thinking of this, says, "I'd like to be like a sparrow, the most restless of birds, who finds rest in the tabernacle. Or I'd like to be like a swallow who builds my nest right at the foot of the altar of God." You see, there are some people that must be pushed to praise. There are some people you almost

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have to whip to get them to come to worship. There are some people who will answer only the clamor of the calling bells. But David had bells ringing in his own brain and in his own breast. He had tasted the good things of God in worship, and he enjoyed them. And so he begins his journey back from Harthurt by reminding

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himself of this, by recalling that depression has a way of dwindling and disappearing in the house of the Lord. That kind of thing often happens right here. But David moves quickly on from thinking about the house of the Lord to thinking about the Lord of the house. He may start with memory, but he goes on to

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focus in the majority of the psalm on the reality of the presence of God. You see, his emphasis is not on what he has lost, but on what he has left. And that's always a healthy emphasis. He talks about a place called the Valley of Baca, which was a very dry and hard and unyielding place. One commentator says that the only

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plant that grew there was the tear shrub. It was a place where even nature wept. But this group of pilgrims, moving through this hard place, this heart- hurting place, they're singing songs of praise to God for the reality of his nearness. They sing, "I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than to

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dwell in the tents of wickedness." That's a very interesting figure of speech. It goes back to the early days of the tabernacle, when a man named Korah and his sons wanted the chief seats and the chief responsibilities in worship. They saw no one as being as dignified as themselves, and they wanted to take over

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the act of worship. And God forbade them to do this, but he extended to them two acts of mercy. One, he said, "You and your descendants may be the gatekeepers in the house of the Lord." And two, "You may form a choir for the singing of songs." And as you look through the book of Psalms, you will find that 11 of the 150 songs are

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specifically to be sung by the sons of Korah, by this special choir. Now the emphasis you see of these people came to be on the fact that it is better to be in the most humble place in the presence of God than to be in the most exalted place and outside of the presence of God. You don't have to crowd

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your way up to the chancel. It's enough to be sitting at the threshold, because the least place with the godly is better than the best place with the ungodly. God's worst is better than the world's best. And that's what people with heart hurt discover. They find out that money and applause, that comfort and prerogative

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and promise and congratulations and honor, these things may have about them something that soothes, but they are as nothing when matched against the experience of the living God. David describes that by saying, "The Lord God is our sun and our shield." Now the sun, you know, is the source of energy. All the

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energy that we know comes from the sun. The winds that keep the planes aloft or that move the ships along the sea. Winds come into being because of heat currents from the sun. The coal and the oil that we burn, the fire within them, the energy that's there was given to them by sun eons and eons ago. The

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animals that are about us move with muscular contraction and the energy that they have for that contraction comes from their eating the flora and the fauna of the area and it is sustained by the sun. Every time we blink an eye or move a hand or lift a foot, we are exerting energy and that energy comes

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through what we have eaten and it is put there by the sun. The sun even is the essence of nuclear energy. A nuclear explosion is in miniature what goes on in the magnificence of the sun almost endlessly. So David begins by saying, "God is our source of energy, but he is also our shield." That is, he's not only our

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power, but he's also our protector. The Bible speaks often of this, "The Lord shall preserve by going out and by coming in. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer for I have overcome the world." So we have a

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beautiful picture here in the sun and the shield. The brilliance of the sun is energy, but the shield is refreshment and encouragement and we can take it to a deeper level than that. The brilliance of the sun reveals the truth, but the comfort of the shade enables us to face the truth. God as brilliant sun shows our

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sin, but God as shield testifies to the fact that he forgives our sin. God as sun reveals our inadequacy, but God as shield reveals God's sufficiency. The sun leads us to see the weaknesses in ourselves, but God as shield leads us to see the strength in him. The sun reveals the realities of the Valley of Baca, what it

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is to be hurt in the heart, but the shield protects us and brings us through. This is a wonderful picture and promise. Linus was eating a sandwich and as he was eating his sandwich he looked at his hands and he said, "I like my hands. I have nice hands. I think my hands have a certain character about them. I'm going

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to do great things with my hands. I may build bridges or I may hit home runs or I may write soul-stirring novels or I may heal people. Why I might affect the whole course of human destiny with my hands." And Lucy looks at his hands and says, "They have jelly all over them." The sun shows us the jelly, but the shield

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shows us that God washes us, cleanses us, and empowers us and that is the great source of joy. David says, "People who have experienced God as sun and shield go forth from strength to strength." Yes, there is a Valley of Baca. Yes, we find ourselves in it. There's no use denying that there are times that are awesomely

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depressing and discouraging and defeating, but we do not have to be ruled by those times. We can rule them provided that we thirst for the living God and if we cry out to him and yield ourselves to him and to the disciplines of devotion, well then, David says, that valley becomes a place of springs covered with

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refreshing pools. We can be better after our victory in the valley. And David concludes the psalm with the beautiful affirmation, "Oh Lord of hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in thee." You know, William James, one of the great psychologists of our century, said that the greatest discovery of my generation

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is that human beings, by changing their inner attitudes, the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. Now when he says that, he is echoing the testimony of Scripture. He is echoing what this song sings. For what it says is this, "Regardless of what our hurt, no matter how crushed our heart, if

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we will within ourselves cultivate the attitude of faith, then our lives, our circumstances, will change. When you love the Lord of the house and rejoice in the presence of God that manifests itself in your loving the house of the Lord, in the disciplines of devotion, and out of that practice and out of that presence comes

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healing and joy." Alfonso was a little Cuban boy just six years old and while playing with a friend one day, an accident occurred and the friend hit Alfonso in the mouth, not on purpose. It was not a serious wound, but it became gangrenous. And it wasn't

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long before this little Cuban boy had to wear a handkerchief over the lower part of his face because his face was rotting. His lips and his cheeks and his nose were falling away and there was a terrible smell, that smell that comes with gangrene. The nuns in the school that little Alfonso attended said he

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couldn't come to school anymore and that gave Alfonso's mother, Senora Rodriguez, a real problem. She wanted him to go to school but they wouldn't accept him. The only other school was a school run by Presbyterians and she saw Presbyterians as unholy and as heretics. She didn't want to send him

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there, but it was the only school that would take him and so she did. He liked the school and the sports, but he spent most of the time in surgery. See, he was losing the ability to speak. They had to put cotton between his teeth to stop the flow of saliva and to enable him to form his words and he could no longer chew.

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They had to put wooden wedges between his jaws to pry them open and then pour the food into him through the spout of a teacup. Some Presbyterian Christians in this country heard about Alfonso Rodriguez and they brought him to this country nine summers in a row and over those nine summers he had 33 operations.

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One of those operations, they gave him back a substitute for lips and when the nurses came into his room, they found him on the floor. They thought he was in delirium, but they discovered that he was praying, "Thanks be to God for the gift of lips." They took the flesh for his nose and his cheeks and for his lips from his

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thigh and so for more than one year he could not walk. Started in a wheelchair, then eventually to crutches, and then finally to a cane. And all this time going through all of this heart hurt, his faith continued to grow. He came into a knowledge of Jesus Christ and he loved God and out of this love of God he

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wanted also to become a part of the fellowship of God's house and he told his mother he wanted to join a Presbyterian Church and his mother said, "If you do, you may never set foot in this house again." But the little boy, 14 years old, joined the Presbyterian Church and his mother did not throw him out. She

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said instead to the pastor, "I've got to find out what it is that can lead a young boy to turn away even from his home because of the joy he finds somewhere else." And three years later she joined him in belonging to that church. He was graduated from the school and immediately when he was graduated he was

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so bright that they hired him to teach the fifth grade and he went on to teach almost all the grades in the school and won every one of his little brothers to Jesus Christ so that they became a part of the house of the Lord with him. He had other educational adventures, eventually became the president of the

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Presbyterian Evangelical Seminary in Cuba and when Castro took over he was driven into exile. That's when I met him. I sat and talked with him just four blocks from where we are today. I remember his black and piercing eyes. I remember the hideous scars on his face yet transformed by his inner power. I

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remember how his lips moved hardly at all when he spoke but there was a far cry between this man of power who stood before me and that little boy hiding his rotting face behind a handkerchief, this little boy who had been in the Valley of Baca. Here was a man of faith, a man who knew God as son and as shield, a man who

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moved from strength to strength and I'll never forget what he said to me. He said, "Mine," listen to this, "Mine is a life of joy for God gave me lips to speak for him and what I tell is the joy of believing." That joy of course can belong to you. You do not have to spend your days in the Valley of Baca. Just follow the counsel

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of Gilom Apollinaire. Do you remember his words? God said, "Come to the edge." "No," we replied, "We will fall." God said, "Come to the edge." "No, we will fall." Finally, finally, we came to the edge and God pushed us and we flew.

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Pray with me. Oh God, if in thy providence thou hast brought into the hearing of these words those who are afraid to come to the edge, those who have held back lest they fall, by thy spirit lead them now to respond to the push of thy love and discover what

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it is to fly. Lead such ones into a knowledge of thy presence and lead them through this knowledge into those disciplines of devotion which will lead them to grow in wisdom and in stature and in favor with thee and with all humankind and we will give thee thanks for the victories, victories you will win

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in the lives of these ones who learn to fly, yea, verily, to mount up with wings like eagles. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. [ autistic static ]