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[MUSIC] ♪ For the Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ Oh yes he did ♪ ♪ Yes he did ♪

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♪ The Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ Thank the Lord Jesus ♪ ♪ For the Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ The Lord lifted me ♪

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♪ Oh yes he did ♪ ♪ The Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ When I was in deep despair ♪ ♪ Well, there was no one, no one to really care ♪

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♪ But the Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ Oh, yes, he did ♪ ♪ The Lord, the Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ Thank God for Jesus ♪

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♪ The Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ The Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ Oh yes he did ♪ ♪ The Lord ♪

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♪ The Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ When I was in despair ♪ ♪ Well there was no one ♪ ♪ No one to really care ♪

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♪ But the Lord lifted me ♪ ♪ Oh yes he did ♪ ♪ Church, the Lord ♪ ♪ The Lord lifted me ♪

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♪ Thank God for Jesus ♪ me. me. Thank you.

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♪ Lifted me ♪ ♪ Thank God for Jesus ♪ ♪ Lord, Lord, Lord ♪ ♪ Lifted me ♪

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(congregation cheering) - Amen. [ Pause ] I'll lift up several verses out of the scripture lesson passage recorded in Exodus, the 19th

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chapter verses 9, 18, and 19. Exodus chapter 19 verses 9, 18, and 19. And the Lord said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud, that the people may here when I speak with thee and believe thee forever."

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Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire and the The smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice."

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subject of the message, the mystery of his presence. The mystery of his presence. God is the tremendum mysterium, the tremendous mystery, to use the language of Rudolf Otto. The greatest of all mysteries is the revelation of the Lord in the flesh, the disclosure of

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divine in the human. During this particular season on our Christian calendar, we celebrate the coming of the Lord. We call it the Advent season. underscores the mysterious divine presence in the human situation. God

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comes to his own. He walks in the garden in the cool of the evening and engages in dialogue with Adam and Eve. The coming of the Lord has to do with his presence and it also makes us aware of his absence.

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And the mystery of it all is that God is both hidden and revealed. He's hidden in the human situation. That's why many times we don't recognize his presence. And then he reveals himself so that we become increasingly aware of his presence.

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And see, one of the things that is happening to our society and to our world is that we We have what is called a secular society, and secularism is an attempt on the part of man to live as if God does not exist. We ignore him and act as if what he says does not matter.

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And we ridicule people many times who believe in him. This is the growing spirit of our age, secularism. But God is present. And the question for us is, how do we celebrate

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the mystery of his presence? How do we celebrate the mystery of his presence? There are times when we are uncertain about his presence. And sometimes when we wonder where is the Lord?

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And we ask the question, Lord, are you with me now? And Malcolm Boyd puts it another way when he says, are you running with me, Jesus? The predicament is very real.

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In Israel's pilgrimage toward Canaan, she seeks assurances of the divine presence. And God manifests his mysterious presence in the cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He gives Israel concrete evidence of his presence.

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He gives them that which they can relate to, something that they can see. And many months later, as they continued on their journey, they come to Mount Sinai.

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And again, God reveals himself in a rather unique way. The people gather around the mountain. God descends and he wraps himself in a thick cloud, a dark cloud, thick cloud. That's the mystery of his presence.

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want to see the Lord. And they begin really to question whether God is present. Moses has been going up to the mountain talking with God and coming back down the mountain telling the people what God says. And there were some leaders among the people who didn't believe Moses. Abiram and Dathan were

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according to tradition leading the people to think, now look Moses isn't talking with God, those are just his words and there are always those who would ridicule that God's messenger who will say that that he has no word from the Lord and they said now Moses we want you to have God to come and speak to us

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himself we don't want a mediator we want you to have him to come speak himself and we want to hear his voice. And Moses tells God what the people said and the Lord said, "All right Moses you have the people to prepare for my coming." In other words if we if we would recognize, if we would be aware, if we would have that

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but awareness of the mystery of his presence, we've got to prepare for it. Now you, it's possible for you to sit in this worship service for this hour and a half or so

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that we're going to be here and never be aware of the mystery of the Lord's presence. You'll hear all of the songs and you'll hear the scripture passages read

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and all of the things in which we engage in. And you'll be just thinking about other things, how their robes looked and how this looked and how this other sounded and why this wasn't arranged

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this way and why the pews weren't as comfortable and the lights and the this and the that. And you'll get caught up in all of that and completely miss experiencing the mystery

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of his presence. And so one of the things in worship is cultivating, cultivating you see this awareness so that we can be aware and you have to have special preparation for that.

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You just can't act any kind of way and rattle off and do this and do that and really experience the mystery of his presence. You have to have special preparation.

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The Lord said, "Now look, Moses, you have them to wash their clothes. I'm going to come down and I'm going to descend up from the mount, but I want you to have them to wash their clothes, get cleaned up. If they are to experience the mystery of my presence, they must go to some special preparation.

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aware of the greatness and the goodness and the mercy of God and his presence with us. That's where we get the idea of Sunday clothes. You know, some people don't really understand, but really where we get the idea of Sunday clothes, in other words, if we're going to celebrate the one who is the highest and the greatest and the one who is the best, we ought

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to wear our best. Some people say, well, you can worship God in overall, well, you can, but the symbolic significance of it is that when you really wanna get dressed up and go out,

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you're with your wife all the time, but when you wanna celebrate her anniversary or something like that and you wanna go out and really celebrate, you sort of get dressed up.

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You don't go out there in your work clothes. So really what we're talking about is getting dressed up and getting your clothes washed and gather around the mountain, wait some three days and gather around the mountain and I'm going to come down and I'm going to talk with them.

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I want them to wait on me and listen. You know we feel somewhat uneasy when we want to wait on the Lord. I notice in most services when we want to just wait and have not a minute of silence but just 30 seconds, people get uneasy.

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Many times they want to have something going. It must be the organ or the piano or humming or something. Just don't be quiet and listen to what the Lord has to say. But sometimes we need to be quiet.

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You know, you don't even do your greatest thoughts when your mouth is just running all the time, you know. You really don't. When your mouth, you should have, you're most of the time expressing something, or you should

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be something you've already thought about. But your deepest thoughts many times come when you engage in quietness and meditation and you wait on him. And so the mystery of his presence here is that he reveals himself from this mountain.

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Mount Sinai is a great mountain. And they stay around that mountain for almost a year, around this mountain. Mountain suggests majesty. And it's unique among all of the mountains in the land of Palestine.

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Mount Sinai. There are many beautiful mountains that are situated elsewhere, but Mount Sinai is different because you see it's out there in the desert. God somehow is hidden, his presence is hidden as he appears in a thick cloud over this mountain,

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a dark cloud. You know when we see dark clouds most of the time we get afraid. We wonder what's about to happen. It really captivates our attention.

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But we ought to stand in awe before God. There ought to be a spirit of reverence, of holiness, and standing in his presence recognizing that God is so great and we are so small in comparison. Standing in his presence with a sense of awe.

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Standing dark thick cloud. God wraps himself in a dark thick cloud. And the people stand there and this cloud you see is a manifestation of the fact that God is veiled in mystery.

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God has wrapped himself in human flesh. He's wrapped himself in the black experience, the black experience. And for many people that's a dark cloud. Being black is a dark cloud.

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Black experience. And yet somehow God has wrapped himself in the black experience all through history. And some people don't really understand that. We talk about black theology.

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Black theology? People say, "Oh no, don't know such thing as black theology." is just really God-taught, having to do with one's experience of God. And we don't get upset when you say German theology.

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We don't get upset when you say Swiss theology. We don't get upset when we talk about English theology. But you see, not only the Swiss, not only the Germans, but also the blacks, all of us, experience of God, that God has somehow wrapped himself in the human experience

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and that God is real to all of his children. So it's a dark cloud, dark cloud, dark cloud. He wraps himself in a thick cloud and many of the many of the clouds that we encounter in life today, God is hidden in the cloud. You have any clouds in your life? Any dark foreboding clouds that somehow hover over your life? God is

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wrapped in that cloud. Sometimes this may be something that you dread, something that you're afraid of, you don't want to face it, but God's really in the cloud. He's in the cloud. That song God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders too profound. He plants his footsteps on the sea and rides upon the stone. It goes on

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to say, "Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take the clouds you so much dread, are big with mercy and shall break in blessings over your head. You see the rain that comes from the clouds, a blessing. So that God's in somehow wrapping himself in the dark clouds that surround our lives, that he has a blessing for us and he is revealing himself through

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the clouds. The hidden God is being manifested through the clouds. The mystery of his presence. My wife said to me, she said, "You know, when you are away from home, it looks like I hear more noises. But when you hear, I don't hear all that. Well that's the way it is with the Lord. When it seems that the Lord is away from you, a whole lot of the

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tumult that's going on all around you that shakes you up and causes us to become hysterical, when the Lord is present, those things don't disturb you. They don't understand the mystery of his presence. A whole lot of us get all caught up with a lot of things people do and we worry about that but the main thing is to have

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the presence of the Lord. The main thing is to somehow be assured that as we walk along this way that God walks with us and that God talks with us and no matter how dark the clouds may be to have the abiding assurance that he's in the clouds. And you see the mystery of it is that God reveals himself with the dark clouds

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around the mountain, then there's the lightning, zigzag lightning, and the thunder rolls, and the mountain quakes, and then they hear the voice of God speaks through a voice to Moses. Mystery of his presence. Someone who sort of caught the meaning of that said in the language of the song that we've just sung that

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I've seen the lightning flashing. If you've been on this journey in a period of time you've been in a storm. You've had some storms along the way and And you can say it as you look back across the years, over the miles that you've traveled,

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you can say, I've seen the lightning flashing. And I've heard the thunder roll. But I've also felt sin's breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul.

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But I've heard the voice of Jesus telling me still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. So you see the mystery of his presence is there,

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not only guiding us, he not only goes before us, but he is behind us. And the strange thing about it is so often we don't know it. You know, we're not even aware that he's there.

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That's the strange thing. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.

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Dark clouds, lightning, fire, thunder, earthquake, all of that, the mystery of his presence. And oh, how wonderful and how glorious it is when you can practice the mystery of his presence.

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It's a wonderful experience. You know, I've had experiences where a dear lady who was up in years, some 80 years of age, would call and say, sir, Reverend, I'm just so happy.

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I've been talking with the Lord this morning. You know, some people would think that that's foolish. But that's something about the mystery of his presence. And it's not just when things are going well with you.

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When things are going well in whatever you're doing, you can just be riding along in your car. - Yes, sir. - And as you ride along, you know,

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I can just talk with the Lord. And sometimes I talk out loud with him. - Yes, sir. - That's the mystery of his presence.

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I'm sure he's there. - Tell him that. - And I talk to him about me and about the problems I face.

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Don't you do that? The mystery of his presence. - Yes, sir. And you do that somehow when you have met him,

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when you've met him. The word is I met God one morning. It's always morning when you need him. He brings light into your darkness.

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But my day was at its best, and his presence came like sunrise, like a glory in my breast. All day long the presence lingered, all day long he stayed with me and we sailed with

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perfect calmness o'er a very fitful sea. Other ships were blown and battered, other ships were so distressed, but the wind that seemed to drive them brought to us a peace and rest. So I think I know the secret.

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Learned from many a troubled way, you must meet him in the morning if you want him through the day. The mystery of his presence.

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Not some picture on the wall, not just some words in a book, but we ought to feel his living presence with us every day and every experience.

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When you go, if you've been practicing the mystery of his presence, when you go into the sick room and the relatives say goodbye to you as you go into surgery and the like,

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when you go in there, you have a confidence, a strong confidence because you know the mystery of his presence, that he's there. - Yeah.

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- That he doesn't leave us. The man who lived in this life, a good life, as a pilgrim, he finished his journey, And the story goes he went on to heaven.

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And he went to heaven and he met the Lord. And he was talking with the Lord about his struggles. And he had a flashback. And he and the Lord looked at the flashback

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of how he made it along life's way. And he saw, as he looked, he saw his footprints. He saw some more footprints, two other prints. And he said, "Well, who was that?"

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He said, "The Lord said I was there with you. "Those are mine. "I was there." And then as he kept on looking and he got to one place,

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he only saw one set of footprints. And he said, "Well, what happened here?" He said, "Well, you were too weak to make it, "and I carried you."

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- All right now. - I was carrying you. - Yes, sir. - And there have been experiences all along the way

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where he's carried us. - Yes, sir. - We've fallen and we've faded by the wayside, But the Lord has carried us.

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He's carried us over the hills and through the valleys. He has walked with us. And he has promised never to leave us alone. That's the mystery of his presence.

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And you know, if you are aware of the mystery of his presence, that's not something you celebrate just once a year. That's not something you celebrate just once a week. It's something you celebrate day by day.

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because you need him with you every day. When you wake up in the morning, it's good to talk with him and thank him for having kept you through the night

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and ask him to go with you through the day. The mystery of his presence. We invite you now to accept this God who has revealed himself to us through Jesus Christ.

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You can meet him. And you just celebrate that meeting all the time, that you met him somewhere, some point in your life. (piano music)

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♪ If you seek God in the morning ♪ ♪ He'll be with you ♪ ♪ All through the day ♪ ♪ If you ask him ♪

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♪ To go with you ♪ ♪ He'll be with you ♪ ♪ All the way ♪ ♪ You must give him all your joy ♪

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♪ At his feet your burden's laid ♪ ♪ Ride and slide ♪ ♪ If you seek God ♪ ♪ In the morning ♪

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♪ He'll be with you ♪ ♪ All of the way ♪ ♪ If you seek God ♪ ♪ In the morning ♪

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♪ He'll be with you ♪ ♪ All through the day ♪ ♪ If you ask Him ♪ ♪ To go with you ♪

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♪ He'll be with you ♪ ♪ All of the while ♪ ♪ You must give Him all your trials ♪ ♪ Pull your trios ♪

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♪ At his feet ♪ ♪ Your burdens rest ♪ ♪ If you seek God ♪ ♪ In the morning ♪

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♪ He'll be with you ♪ ♪ All of the while ♪ ♪ You must give ♪ ♪ And hold your trials ♪

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♪ At his feet ♪ ♪ Your burdens rise ♪ ♪ And in spite ♪ ♪ If you seek God ♪

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♪ In the morning ♪ ♪ He'll be with you ♪ ♪ All through the day ♪ You ask, He says go.

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To go where? He says to go with you. He'll be with you. He'll go with you.

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All through the day. (singer vocalizing) (music fades) [BLANK_AUDIO]