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[ Silence ] [ Music ] Oh, they tell me of a home far beyond those skies. Oh, they tell me of a home far away.

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Oh, they tell me of a home in those time of night. ♪ O'er the land of the free ♪ ♪ And the home of the brave ♪ ♪ O'er the land of the free ♪

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♪ And the home of the brave ♪ ♪ O'er the land of the free ♪ ♪ Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise ♪ ♪ Oh, they tell me of an old cloudy day ♪

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♪ Oh, they tell me of a home where my friends have gone ♪ ♪ And they tell me that that land is far away ♪ ♪ Where the tree of life ♪ ♪ In eternal bloom ♪

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♪ Shares its fragrance ♪ ♪ Through that unclouded day ♪ ♪ And they tell me of a king ♪ ♪ In his beauty there ♪

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♪ And they tell me that mine eyes shall behold ♪ ♪ And he sits on a throne that is whiter than snow ♪ ♪ In that city that is made of gold ♪ ♪ And they tell me that he smiles on his children there ♪

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♪ And his smile drives their sorrows all away ♪ ♪ And they tell me that no tears will ever come again ♪ ♪ In that lovely land of that uncloudy day ♪ ♪ Oh, the land of cloudless day ♪

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♪ Oh, the land of that uncloudy day ♪ ♪ Of an open cloudy day ♪ ♪ Oh they tell me of a home ♪ ♪ Where no people storm clouds rise ♪

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♪ Oh they tell me of an open cloudy day ♪ ♪ For the land of cloudless day ♪ ♪ From an unclouded day ♪ ♪ Oh, they tell me of a home ♪

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♪ Where no storm clouds rise ♪ ♪ Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day ♪ - Amen. Let's all say Amen.

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Our scripture today, Psalm 24, verses 7 through 10, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in."

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Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, even lift them up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.

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Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the King of glory. The subject of the message, the King of Glory.

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The King of Glory. Deep in the heart of every person is the desire for glory. We want honor, power, wealth, blessing, and pride of achievement. European settlers who came to this country, among other things, were seeking glory.

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They wanted to make a name for themselves. The glory of this world is being in the bright lights, basking in the sparkling, dazzling brilliance of success. In ancient times, the glory was identified with the king.

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The glory is the majesty, the heaviness, the weightiness, the radiance, identified with royalty. It is that brightness that surrounds the royal throne. And one of the signs of the glory is the peacock's feathers, their lovely colors.

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The feathers personify beauty and attractiveness. In a worldly sense, the glory is possessed, is being possessed by pride. It's being able to strut your stuff. Psalm 24 is the celebration of a royal procession.

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celebrates the pomp and power of the King of Kings. It's a march by pilgrims to the temple with two choirs singing antiphonally, one answering the other. Choir number one addresses the gates,

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telling them to let the King of Glory in. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.

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Choir number two asks, who is this King of glory? And choir number one answers, the Lord strong and mighty. the Lord mighty in battle. And choir number one then loudly commands, lift up your heads,

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O ye gates. Even lift them up, ye everlasting doors. And the King of glory shall come in. And choir number two puts the question again,

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who is this King of glory? Then the whole concourse of priests and people respond with a shout of acclamation and adoration. The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.

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There are three areas in this psalm that deal with the function or the attributes of the king of glory. The king whose glory is celebrated is not an earthly monarch whose tenure is terminus and temporary.

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He is the eternal monarch. First of all, the King's glory is revealed through creation. The King is eternal. He's the supreme sovereign of the universe.

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He reveals himself in creation. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. The world and they that dwell therein. This is God's world.

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He created it. It's fashioned according to his design. This is a wonderful world. God has placed us in the beautiful garden of possibility.

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The created order testifies concerning God's glory, His power, His majesty, His wisdom, His blessing, all tell us of His greatness and His glory. For the heavens above declare the glory of God. Not only do we have the testimony coming from the heavens,

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but here is the affirmation of faith expressed in this song that the earth is the Lord's, the ground, the very ground on which we stand, the very foundation of our existence.

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As one notable theologian, Paul Tillich, expresses it, "He is the ground of our being. We are his servants, his subjects. We are the members of his kingdom.

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We are accountable to God for who we are. In him we live, move, and have being. We are the sheep of his pasture. We must account to God for what we do in his world and with his world.

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The earth is the Lord's, the world and they that dwell therein. Satan tempts Jesus by offering him the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them if he would bow down and worship him. You see, Satan is trying to play God, trying to give away something that does not belong

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to him. He tries to get the Creator to be subject to his creation. Satan wants us to be possessed by our possessions rather than to possess our possessions. And oh, what fools we mortals be when we worship the works of our own hands.

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Oh, what fools we mortals be when we seek for ourselves the glory that belongs only to the eternal. Many people seem to think that heaven belongs to the Lord and this earth belongs to the devil.

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soul. This is God's world. He created it, He sustains it, He rules it. Now Satan has power, he's the prince of this world, but God is king. The Lord God Almighty is the King of Glory. In Isaiah the prophet is caught up in the Spirit and he receives a vision and he cries out that the whole earth is full of his glory, full of his

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power, full of his work. For you see he says, "Mine eyes have seen the King." eyes have seen the king. Now you see he was familiar with a king, Isaiah was familiar with Uzziah, he knew about Uzziah's reign, in fact he was identified with the royal court of Uzziah. He was identified with a king but he says my eyes have

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seen the king, the king of kings and the Lord of Lords. The world around us belongs to God, rocks and reels, woods and templed hills. He has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the floods. This world is established by His Word and it is the work of His hands. We must be careful about how we treat God

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world, how we care for the soil, must be careful about polluting the streams, but this is God's world. God is the king of creation and everything in this world is the result of his creative genius. He has created it. He's the source of what was, what is, what will be, all of it is a revelation of the King of glory. So the

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glory of the Lord is in the world around us whether we recognize it or not it's here. We see it in the sun, that blazing ball that's set out there in the heavens, that's a reflection of the glory of God. We see it in the moon and the stars as they shine in their sockets, all of it a reflection of the glory of God.

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The cattle of a thousand hills and every human being has a spark of divinity. That is a reflection of the glory of God, no matter how we may try to cover it up. It's there, it's there in the hut as well as in the castle. It's the Lord's, a revelation of God's glory. So God's glory is around us. Sometimes we don't recognize it, sometimes we're like Isaiah. He had been in the presence of the glory all of the time, but when he had the vision he cries out, "The whole earth is full of his glory." He came to recognize it. So the glory of the Lord is around us. It's in the world without, that's outside us.

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And then secondly, the glory of the Lord is within. So the psalmist you see here turns the spotlight on the worship experience. He asks the question, who shall ascend

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unto the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? Who is prepared to pay homage to the King? Who's ready for that?

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Are we really ready this morning to come face to face with the King of Kings? That's what the worship experience is all about. Well, I remember several years ago,

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I was invited to a meeting in Waco to meet the Prime Minister of Guyana. And I was in a hurry to get to the meeting, the time was about out.

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And I went out there to the Air Force base where the meeting was to be held. And I was rushing in just about a minute or two before the service was to begin.

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And I went in one door, and I don't know, I guess it must have been the wrong door, but when I came in, I found myself face to face with the Prime Minister and his guards.

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And I think I was as shocked as they were, too. And we just stood facing each other, and I didn't know what to say, they didn't know what to say. I just smiled and they went on and I went on.

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What happens when we find ourselves face to face with the King? The Lord of Lords, the one who made us and the one who knows all about us, who knows us through and through. How do we react? Well the psalmist says, "Now who shall ascend? Who really is prepared for the worship experience this morning?" King of Glory

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the one who is our creator, the one who not only is the Lord of creation but this one who is our creator is our Redeemer. He has brought us into existence and you see he alone is worthy of our supreme allegiance. Only God. Oh we give a whole lot of allegiance to a whole lot of things and sometimes we put

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him far down the ladder in our scale of priorities. But God, God alone is worthy of our supreme allegiance, our highest loyalty. And you see our worship ought to be with our heads. You certainly ought to think about God. And that's why we're here this morning. We thought about And we thought about how God has brought us and we thought about how God has prepared

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us in so many instances and we thought about his goodness. And we need to worship, we need to think. You see there, we ought to use our minds and we ought to have certain rational considerations in our worship, yes?

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We ought to think about the fact that this world is not an accident, it's not here by happenstance, that we are not accidents and somehow we are in the divine plan of God. God somehow is responsible for our being here. And as we think about it, as the psalmist says, we ought to think about his goodness.

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Think about his goodness to you. So worship ought to involve the head, but also involves the hand, our works. "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean hands."

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Clean hands. In other words, you can do a lot of good things, but do you do them for the right reasons? For the right reasons. A lot of hands are stained with blood.

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Sometimes we've done everything we could to dig a ditch for somebody else. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter about how we may come to the house of God, that somehow as we come to the house of God, he asks us, "Let me see your hands." Look at your hands.

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He that hath clean hands, not only are the hands to be clean, but he said a pure heart. We worship God with head, hand, and heart, pure heart. Our motives need to be pure. And you see that there's only one person who knows that, and that's God.

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Nobody else knows. Nobody knows really why we're here but God. Only God really understands. He looks in the heart and he sees there's nothing hidden from him. There are no secrets hidden from him. The person who's sincere. That's the only person that can really worship God. sincerity. In other words, you know what that word means? Without wax. They used to,

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in ancient times, they'd take and when they were making furniture, there's some faulty place in the lumber, some hole here and there, they'd cover that up with wax. And sincerity means without wax. No wax. Just be who you are and say, "Lord, here I am!" without wax. Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord, he that has clean hands and

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a pure heart who has not lifted up his soul unto vanity and now sworn deceitfully because we can't fool God, we can't fool him. This is a generation, the generation of those who have been born again, born of his spirit, a new preacher, born with the blood of the Lamb of Calvary. This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face,

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O Jacob. Our forefathers used to say in their prayers many times that I want to see God's face in peace. Many times we talk about God showing us a kindly face, kindly face. Does God smile on us or does he frown on our actions? This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob. That's what it

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means to ascend to the hill of the Lord to worship him? Is the service over? A worshiper said to another as he met him at the door of the sanctuary, and the answer is the worship is over, but service is just beginning. Worship, you see, is the authentic experience of God with head, hand, and heart.

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For you see, the glory of the Lord rules the total being. Lastly, not only do we consider the world without and the world within, we consider the fact that the King of glory is the victorious warrior.

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Who is this King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. For you see, the King in ancient times was known by the troops that he commands. The larger the army, the greater the King.

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So the kings of this world seek to seize the glory through the exercise of might and power, spoils of war, but not so with the King of kings. He does not seek to seize the glory. God doesn't take us by force. He doesn't force us to serve him. He's the Lord of hosts, but the kind of armies he commands are different from the armies

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of this world. For he says, "Not by might, not by power, but by my spirit," "Saith the Lord of hosts, the King of glory is a mighty warrior. He is known by the troops under his command because he's the king of everything. His power is not measured, as I said, by military might.

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Those who conquer by military might seek to seize the glory. The glory of the Lord cannot be forcibly seized. He's the king. He rules by permitting himself to be made a fool of.

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He embraces that which is absurd and he conquers by doing so. He permits himself to be made fun of. You know, God takes a lot off of us. Oh, he lets us make fun of him.

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He lets us talk about people who are sincere in serving him. God lets us many times, no matter how sincere we are, suffer embarrassment and ridicule, and God himself does that. God does that. And look, look, look if you will, and look at the cross, for the one who is the King of Glory is the one who goes to the cross.

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The one who is the King of Glory travels with us. He walks in our shoes. He walks right where we are, and he walks with us, and he fights our battles. If you ever had any battles that God has fought for you, battles that you know that you could not have won all by yourself, that God somehow steps in and takes over. It is said that even the stars in their courses fought against Cicero.

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That somehow God has control of the sun, God has control of the wind, God has control of the sea, God controls this world. of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain, his blood-red banner streams afar. Who follows in his train?

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He who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain. He who patient bears his cross below, he follows in his train. God is the King of glory. He's the King.

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Whatever honor there is in your life, give it to Him. Whatever have been your blessings in His life, use them for His glory, because He is the King of glory. Oh, I know sometimes it looks like that God

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isn't in control of things, but He is. Oh, I know sometimes it seems that the sun is hidden by darkness, but the sun is still there. God is the King.

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He's King of Glory. He is the King. And somehow, as we look in our lives, we look all around us and look inside of us

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and look at the battles that we've encountered, that there's something that cries out in us that He's the King of Glory. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

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He's trapping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed his fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on.

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Glory! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

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His truth is marching on, for he's King. He's Lord of Lords. And he asks us this morning to crown him in our heart of hearts as King of our lives. The door is open now, the invitation is extended, as we invite you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord of your life.

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He's coming now! He's walking with us! [MUSIC] ♪ Let heaven's angels ♪ ♪ Hear my humble cry ♪

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♪ All the world is now a glory ♪ ♪ To the cross be divine ♪ ♪ Savior, Savior ♪ ♪ Hear my humble cry ♪

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♪ While the mountains loud ♪ ♪ Were calling ♪ ♪ To the first ♪ ♪ Beginning light ♪

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♪ But behind the clouds ♪ ♪ Hail, all ye citizens of the land ♪ ♪ Of the free and the home of the brave ♪ ♪ Hail, all ye citizens of the land ♪

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♪ Of the free and the home of the brave ♪ ♪ Hail, all ye citizens of the land ♪ ♪ The home of the brave ♪ ♪ Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave ♪

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♪ O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave ♪ [Music] [ Silence ]