All right.
Morning, brothers and sisters. It’s good to be in the land of the living. It’s good to be out of the house. I tell you, it’s wonderful.
Let’s go ahead. I’m going to read some Scriptures, and then we’ll pray, and we’ll get on with these things. I want to read from three different Psalms.
Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee,
In whose heart are the highways to Zion.
Passing through the valley of Baca they make it a place of springs;
The rain also filleth the pools.
They go from strength to strength;
Every one of them appeareth before God in Zion.
In my distress I cried unto the Lord,
And He answered me.
Woe is me, that I sojourn in Meshech,
That I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:
From whence shall my help come?
My help cometh from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
The Lord will keep thy going out and thy coming in
From this time forth and for evermore.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank You that You are reigning in this time, and You have a word for us for this time. Lord, that’s what we’re grateful for. You do not just limit Yourself to doctrines and teachings, but You are the living God.
We are asking today for a living word—a word that speaks to us in our world right now. Lord, only You can speak; only You can do this. I am of no help to You at all. But we thank You that we rely not on me, but on the Holy Spirit and Your Word. From this, we ask that You speak to us. In Jesus’ name, amen.
This is the weirdest time I have ever lived in. I do not know about you. I think there are some people, like my parents’ age—incidentally, tomorrow would have been my dad’s birthday, and he would have been one hundred years old—who have gone through troubling times like this.
Those who lived through the Great Depression or World War II went through troubling times, but this is something really weird for some of us.
Out of these Psalms, I believe the Lord is doing something in this time. He is doing something, but I think He is doing something for Himself. It is not just that He is doing something for us.
I think we look at things in a very us-centric way. We look at it and say, “The Lord is doing this for me because I am in this kind of situation.” But it is important for us to realize that the Lord is doing something for Himself, for His own name’s sake, during this time.
Out of these Psalms, I want to share three things that I think are happening during this time:
The Lord is uncovering something. The Lord is discovering something to us; in other words, He is opening it up so we can see. And I also think that the Lord is recovering something for Himself.
Let us start with the Lord’s uncovering something. When I say He is uncovering something, I do not mean that He is exposing something.
In Joshua 7, Achan’s sin was exposed. Everybody knew that Achan had done something he was not supposed to do, and it affected the whole congregation. But this is not what I mean by uncovering.
It is like Genesis 26, the story of Isaac. Isaac was told to stay in the land, and while he was there, he began to re-dig the wells of Abraham because an enemy had filled them up.
That is what I mean by the Lord uncovering something. The Lord is uncovering something that He has already put in place. When Isaac re-dug the wells, the wells were already there, but they had been filled in by an enemy.
The Lord is uncovering something that He put in us when we were born again. When we were first born again, He put something in us, and it has been covered up.
I believe what the Lord is uncovering at this time is what we find in Psalm 84: a heart set on pilgrimage.
There are a number of translations for this verse, but two really stood out to me. The New King James Version says, “Whose heart is set on pilgrimage.” One of the New American Standard translations says, “In whose heart are the highways to Zion.”
The Lord has given us His heart with highways in it. These highways are desires that find their way through to their goal. He has put desires in our hearts that, if we follow them—those highways—will lead us straight through to the goal He has for us.
This idea of being set on pilgrimage is not merely that we have desires, or that the Lord has given us a heart that desires Him and wants to pursue Him. Our hearts are being moved to pursue Him, moved to go after Him. It is an action of the will.
This is within the new heart. When we talk about the heart, we are not talking about the organ that beats, although its beating is vital to us. This is something vital to our walk with the Lord and to all that the Lord has for us.
When we talk about the heart, we are speaking of the entirety of our soul. The soul is made up of three things:
But this heart is not merely the entirety of the soul. It is the entirety of the soul—our intellect, emotions, and will—being led by the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus, and being led to God’s end.
This is actually the very heart of Jesus that has been given to us: the heart that was in Jesus of Nazareth, the heart that was so in tune with the Father and so desirous of pleasing the Father. This is the very heart God gave to us when we were born again.
We have that very heart. And I think that in this time, one of the things the Lord is doing is uncovering this heart.
He is taking out the things that have been blocking the progress: the highways in this heart, the pilgrimage, the will to go on, the will to keep moving. These things have blocked this heart from being known to us.
When I say “known to us,” I do not mean that we possess doctrinal knowledge of this heart. I am not merely saying that we know we have the life of Christ in us. I mean that the heart has been unknown to us in its functioning way and in what it is supposed to do.
This heart is the very impetus of our walk with God and our knowing God. It is to move us. This heart is to move us to pursue, but there have been things in the way.
I do not know what is in the way of your hearts, but I will tell you: being sequestered has been an education to me. Man, that has been an education to me.
I see the things that have stood in the way of my relationship with the Lord. Let me make a confession. Those of us who stand up here are not bronze statues for you to worship. We are men with feet of clay.
One of the most wonderful things that has happened is that there are no sports. You know, there have been no sports.
This is baseball season, right? I love baseball. I have MLB.com; I could check all the scores and everything. Out of service. What do I do with all this time?
Well, I will tell you, there are some things I have done. I have been reading a lot more—reading a lot more—and it has been good. I am grateful for that.
How about television? Think about this. I do not know how many of you have cable or things like that, but on cable channels it is the same movie over and over and over again.
You can only watch The Shawshank Redemption so many times and get something out of it. There is nothing new. It is all replayed and replayed and replayed.
So what do you do? There is nothing that is stimulating or drawing you in. All of a sudden, you read. You read, and reading moves you to praying. Then you find yourself alone with the Lord.
What I am saying is that the Lord is uncovering it. He is taking things out and saying, “These things have stopped up everything.”
Some stones are big stones; some are little stones. It is dirty; it is filled with dirt. He is saying, “I just want to get to the bottom.”
He is not saying, “I am searching you out to say, ‘This is wrong with you, and this is wrong with you.’” He is bringing these things out so that He can get to what He put there—what He put there that pleases Him.
This is what I think the Lord is uncovering for many Christians during this time. He has taken away the things that have occupied us and put us in a place where we have to look and say, “Lord, what is this all about?”
There is also something being discovered. Notice that Psalms 120 and 121 are at the beginning of the Psalms of Ascent.
G. Campbell Morgan said they are pilgrim Psalms. They are for the pilgrim, which is one of the things spoken of in Psalm 84: “Their hearts are set on pilgrimage.”
These Psalms are saying, “We are going to the temple. We are going back to the place where we are called to be.” All the men in Israel were called to go to Jerusalem three times a year. That was where they were called to be, and we are called to be in relationship with the Lord.
The Lord is uncovering what He has put in us. Again, He is not uncovering the bad stuff. He is going down deep and saying, “There, that heart is. Here is the heart that pleases Me. This is what I am after.”
Do not get that mixed up with thinking, “This is wrong with you, and this is wrong with you.” He is uncovering the heart.
I have found this in going back to reading more. I have been reading biographies, reading the Word, and things like that. I have been finding out how wonderful the Lord is, and all of a sudden my heart is being drawn toward Him.
That is what is being uncovered. When we were born again, He put in us that which draws us to Him. The unredeemed man has no such draw. He is not drawn to God.
So, what is being discovered? The first thing, in Psalm 120, is that all of a sudden there is an epiphany about ourselves.
Now, epiphany—sorry, that is a big word, isn’t it? It is very Catholic. Saint Edward of Epiphany. But an epiphany is simply seeing things as they are.
Some people would call it a revelation. Revelation shows you things as they are. When John had the revelation of Jesus Christ, it showed Him as He is.
The Lord is showing things as they are, things of which we have been unaware. We have been unaware because the heart the Lord put in us has been covered.
The Psalm mentions two places: Meshech and Kedar. There is nothing special about these places except that they were not in the land. One was far north, near Babylon; one was far south, in Arabia. The point is that they were not where Israel was supposed to be.
Here is the epiphany: “Oh my gosh, I am dwelling in Kedar, and I did not even realize that.”
Dwelling means that I have stopped going on. I have set up my tent. I am stopping here.
A lot of times we do not even realize it. It is like Lot. Remember, Lot set his tent outside of Sodom, but before you know it, years go on, and he is no longer outside Sodom—he is in Sodom.
For me, this whole idea is that I find myself in Kedar. In other words, I am occupied with Kedar. I am occupied in its business, its pleasures, and the directions of everything that is there in Kedar.
But it is not just that I am in it. All of a sudden, I find out that it is occupying me. It occupies my thoughts, my plans, my values, my rest, and my life.
Remember when we started studying 1 Corinthians? One of the things about 1 Corinthians was that all these Christians were living in Corinth. Living in Corinth was not really the problem. The problem was that Corinth was living in them.
That is the whole thing. I find myself saying, “My gosh, I am a Corinthian,” and I am shocked by it. In being shocked—which is a good thing—I find myself crying out to the Lord.
In my distress I cried unto the Lord.
I have been dwelling in Kedar. I have been dwelling in Meshech, and I have been unaware of it. I have been like that frog in the pan slowly heating up. I have not even realized it.
As the Lord uncovers that heart, there is suddenly an epiphany. There is a sensitivity that says, “Oh my gosh, look where I am. I did not even realize it.”
I am going to church. I go to Bible studies and things like this, but I have not realized that I have stopped, and I am living here.
Another thing discovered during this time is this: Who is going to help me?
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:
From whence shall my help come?
Some people say the hills are the difficulties you have in trying to get out of Kedar. Others say the hills are the things that help you get out of it. But the hills are not going to help me.
I lift my eyes up to the hills: “From whence comes my help?” Does it come from these things?
Sometimes, when we find ourselves falling away, do you know where I find myself going? I try to go to higher teaching. “If I could only get some more higher teaching, that is going to help me out.”
It is not teaching that helps you; it is God. There may be teaching that helps me, but the whole thing is, Who is behind these things? God is my help.
First of all, the Psalm says, “My help comes from the Lord.” We read “Lord,” and it just passes by as though it were simply His title.
But notice in your Bible that LORD is capitalized: capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. That is really the name of the Lord: Yahweh, or Jehovah. That is why I mentioned it while reading:
My help cometh from the Lord.
This is not a generic thing. This is the God who says, “This is My name, and I am God alone. I am your help.”
I remember when I was first really following the Lord. We go through pits and valleys, and I was going through a valley because at that time I was trying to return to the Catholic Church.
The charismatic movement was going on. My younger brother, whom I felt was much more spiritual than I was, was involved in it, and he urged me to come.
So I tried. I started going back to catechism and learning the teachings of the church, but I had no peace. I thought, “I cannot swallow this,” because I had been reading and things like that.
I went to my mentor at that time, Floyd Police. I remember it was summer, it was hot, and he did not have air conditioning in his house. Here he was in his Godfather T-shirt, meeting me at the door and doing his lesson plans for summer school.
I said, “Floyd, I have got to talk to you. I just do not know what I am doing. I just do not know where I am at.”
Floyd simply said, “I have been waiting for you. I have been waiting for this.” I realized he had been praying for it, but he was not going to buttonhole me or anything. He had just been waiting for me to have that epiphany.
I remember we prayed, and then I said, “Floyd, what should I do?” As if Floyd had the answers. Floyd had the answers to everything, as far as I was concerned.
He did not say, “Well, this is what you should do, Jim.” He basically said this: “Jim, just start going to a church that teaches the Bible.”
“Because if you hear the Word of God, you are going to find the Lord, and the Lord will direct you.” That was it. He did not give me anything else.
It is like Paul in Romans 7:
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
What is the method? Jesus Christ. It is hard to understand, but the epiphany is that God is my help.
God wants this heart, again, to turn us back to Him and say, “I am your source. I am the source that leads you to where I want you to go.”
We have this verse:
The Lord will keep thy going out and thy coming in
From this time forth and for evermore.
This Hebrew word that is translated preserve, and that some people translate keep, has the idea of attending to.
The Lord will attend to your going out and your coming in. Now, attend to does not mean that He is merely in attendance, watching you as a spectator: “Yeah, okay, he is coming out. Oh yeah, he is coming in.”
To attend to has this meaning: I am present to assist.
Have you ever attended to a problem? What does that mean? It means you physically go there, right? You are there to assist in the problem and in the solution to the problem.
The Lord is saying, “I will assist you coming out. I am present with you to assist your coming all the way through. I am your help.”
“I am not leaving throughout the thing. I do not slumber. I am with you all the way. I am going to make sure your foot does not slip.” The whole thing is: He is there.
As Psalm 46 says, He is a very present help in time of trouble.
These things are discovered. Now, what is recovered?
I do not want to say that the pilgrimage itself is recovered, because something else is recovered in the pilgrimage. Yes, the heart is set right now. The heart is set on the road to pilgrimage. But something is recovered during this.
If we turn to Psalm 23 for just a smidge, Psalm 23 is a great picture of pilgrimage. I do not know whether you have ever thought of it that way.
The first three verses say:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
This is communion—the communion of the pilgrim with his God. This is where we are refreshed. This is where we find the Lord. This is where our souls are put at rest.
We begin to know Him as the Shepherd; therefore, we do not have to want. We have our God. It is communion. It is what feeds us.
The soul is restored. The intellect, emotions, and will are restored by the Spirit to their proper place, where the Spirit is leading these things.
This is our closet ministry. This is the ministry we so often forego and take up the corporate instead.
How many of us—and I confess—will pray at a prayer meeting, but what about our prayer life at home? What about our closet thing? This is a big thing.
This is the closet ministry of that heart that has been restored, that heart that has been uncovered.
What is the closet ministry for? So that it can face the reality of the pilgrimage.
Verse 4 really is the pilgrimage:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For Thou art with me.
That is our pilgrimage. It is through this. We walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
It does not say we walk through death; it says the shadow of death. The shadow of death is uncertainty. Something is clouding certainty. Things are unclear. We do not know what the end of things will be.
As Christians, we are not exempt from the problems of life. A lot of us take this individually. You may have to go through the loss of a parent or a child. You may have a disease, lose a job, or face something else. We go through times when things are clouded.
But we have never gone through the valley of the shadow of death as a nation. I am not saying that our nation has never gone through it, but I am saying us. We have never gone through the valley of the shadow of death as a nation.
These times now are uncertain. There is nothing to say that things will be restored. That is a hard thing to think about, because it makes us lose our peace. “What is going to happen?”
I am not saying it is not rightfully so, but we have never gone through this as a nation.
Even for us as a church, we have never gone through this. I will tell you something: the churches in Africa have. The churches in Asia have. The churches in the Middle East, even the churches in South America—but not us.
This is new. These are things that are really being shaken. The foundations of our nation are being shaken.
We are going through the valley of the shadow of death. A shadow can be frightening. If it is five o’clock in the afternoon, your shadow can be really long.
Sometimes, when we have been out walking during our sequestration, the sun is behind you. I like to swing my arms, and my shadow looks like a monster—with big hanging arms and things like that. It looks worse than I am, if you can imagine that.
It can be really, really scary. But in the pilgrimage, it says:
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil.
That does not mean, “I hope that if I ever go through it…” No, though means it is happening. It does not say that evil will not befall me. It says, “I will not fear evil.”
These times are looking really, really hard, and they are scary. You may be living in areas where things are going bad, where people are destroying things and things like that. But the Psalm says, “I will not have to fear the evil.”
That does not mean evil is going to go around the block because I am a Christian.
One of the books I have been reading, incidentally, is a biography of Anthony Norris Groves. He was a missionary. He started the faith missions. It is really convicting, but really, really good too.
He went to Baghdad without a mission board or anything like that because he felt the Lord had him there. Then a plague hit Baghdad.
For most of the plague, nothing touched his family. He said he noticed that during that time, those whom he called Mohammedans—whom we would call Muslims—resented them because nothing was happening to them.
But then his wife got the plague and passed away. This opened up a whole door of people who were open to the Lord, because he had to go through something they were going through.
It was amazing. Throughout the book, many things happened that he had to go through. But one thing about this man was that there was not the fear of evil.
It was coming; it was happening. But he did not fear it.
Here, then, is what is recovered:
I will fear no evil;
For Thou art with me.
Brothers and sisters, what is being recovered here is the Lord’s witness—the Lord’s witness in a people who will fear no evil.
They do not fear evil because it will bypass them. They do not fear it because He is with them. This whole thing of knowing that the Lord is with you—this whole awareness of His presence—is being recovered.
It might not be in a conscious feeling, as though I am feeling tingly or something like that. But my faith has laid hold of Him in such a way that I know He is with me.
Even if I cannot feel it, I know He is there because He said He is with me:
I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.
The world sees this, and other members of the church see it in a time like this. They see a person who fears no evil because he knows God is with him.
There is peace in his life even though everything is going haywire all over the place. He is going through the valley with everyone else. They are all going through this valley of the shadow of death.
It is not that we are not affected. We are affected. But we are affected in a way in which we know that God is with us.
This is what God is recovering: the understanding that it does not matter what the outside looks like—God is with us. That is His promise for us.
There is fruit from that witness.
Though they go through the valley called Baca—some say it means weeping, and some say it means balsam trees, but most say it means weeping—they make it a spring.
They go through the valley of weeping. It does not necessarily mean it is their weeping; it is weeping because it is a hard time. But all of a sudden, it says they make it a spring, a pool.
A pool is still water—not stagnant water. The pools spoken of here come from the rain. The rain comes, and all of a sudden you have still water.
You do not want to drink from a rushing torrent. You want to drink from water that is still. You lead sheep beside still water so they can drink.
What is the Lord doing in this? He is making it so people can have a taste of that still water, because your heart is still through all of this. Your heart is still.
This is what has been recovered: this testimony, this witness of who God is in this.
The last thing I want to say is that He is doing it for His name’s sake. He is doing it for His name’s sake.
There is a verse in Ezekiel. It is in the same chapter that speaks about the new covenant and giving you a new heart. But before it gets to the new heart, the Lord is speaking to His people in captivity, in Babylon. This is Ezekiel 36:23.
And I will sanctify My great name,
Which hath been profaned among the nations,
Which ye have profaned in the midst of them;
And the nations shall know that I am the Lord, saith the Lord God,
When I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.
That is a hard statement, isn’t it? But is it not wonderful to know that the Lord is saying, “I will be hallowed in your eyes”?
One of the things is that we are so worried about what it means to us that we forget what it means to the Lord—what our testimony means to the Lord.
This testimony—“I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me”—is a cleansing testimony. It is a testimony that will stop people from profaning His name.
Instead of saying, “Oh, look at those Christians. What a bunch of hypocrites,” people will say, “Look at those people who have this hope. Oh, that I might have that hope to get me through this time. Oh, that I might have it.”
He is doing it for His name’s sake, for His name. This is not just because He loves us. It is for His name. His name is righteous. He is a righteous God, and He is saying, “I have been profaned.”
In the end, it says:
Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee,
In whose heart are the highways to Zion.
This is the heart that the Lord is uncovering. He is saying, “Blessed is the man who finds it uncovered.”
Blessed means happy. When I find it, all of a sudden I am happy. But happy is just a lousy word, isn’t it? Happy Meal—I am going to get a Happy Meal.
It means I am content. I have been satisfied. It means I am at rest.
Why is the man whose heart is set on pilgrimage at rest? Because he knows the One who is leading him. He knows where he is going, and he knows that the One who is leading him will get him there.
So may the Lord fully uncover this heart that He has given to us. May He have that for Himself, for His name’s sake.
Let us pray.
Lord, we thank You that when You do things, You do not do things to beat us up. You do things to save us. You do things to recover us.
Lord, we just want to tell You that we are thankful. We want to have this heart that You have put in us fully uncovered.
We want You to blow away all the stuff that has been piled up on it, that has hidden it from us so that we do not even know it is there.
Lord, forgive us for being in places sometimes. I cannot say this is for everybody, but Lord, forgive us for being so occupied with other things that we have forgotten that You saved us like that.
It is like that hymn we sang today: “Here is my ear.” Lord, the heart You are uncovering gives You the ear. The other one says, “No, I have other things to do.”
Lord, thank You for stopping things. Thank You for sequestering us and making us have to come and face You—in a good way, Lord.
Lord, for our nation, we do not know what is going to come out of this. But Lord, we thank You that it is in Your hand.
We want to go through the valley of the shadow of death fearing no evil, and the only way we can is by knowing You.
We pray that the times we have, especially alone with You, would be times beside still waters: knowing You as our Shepherd; knowing that You are feeding us and helping us.
Bring us to Your mind as we pray, so that we are agreeing with You.
Lord, we ask that You will not let this time pass by without our responding to You in a way that shows that this heart has been uncovered and that You have gotten what You want.
You have gotten what You paid for. You paid for this new heart. Lord, we receive it. We ask for Your help in Jesus’ name.