On My Way Up | A Summer Pilgrimage in the Psalms of Ascent

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And now here's this week's message.

This morning we start our summer series.

It's going to be um it's not going to be a traditional summer in the sense that well it is it's gonna be closer to a traditional summer.

Who grew up?

You had summer actually included the month of August.

Right.

So I don't know when we decided to shorten that to June and July.

Not didn't vote for that.

I'm not a fan of that.

It is it is that.

Um we will no doubt we will we will go through August, and who knows, I might I might flirt with September.

You know, just you never know.

Um but it's our third iteration in the summer of the Psalms.

The first um the first time we did it, um, it was almost by necessity, in the sense that uh it was an easy series to invite other people to speak into because uh I I was tired and I I needed some other people, other people to to preach.

Um and then two years later we did it in 2021.

So you can actually go back in the archive and you can see you can 2021 summer in the psalms, you can see the psalms that we did.

And then 2023, we realized uh I really enjoyed that summer.

That was that was a really, if I can say it, it was a fun summer to preach and enjoy, and realized that there was 150 of them, and that we can do it again, and it would be okay.

And so in 2023, we did another series, Summer in the Psalms, and there might have been a psalm or two repeated, but for the most part, it was new psalms, uh, which brings us to this summer and doing it again.

Um, but uh in a in a different way.

It's they're not random psalms, they won't be in random order.

We're gonna specifically stay in Psalm 120 to 134.

Collectively, they're known as the Psalms of Ascent.

Um they were um when when the four are written by David, one's written by Solomon, the rest are anonymous.

When the Psalms were compiled, like the Psalms weren't written chronologically or sequentially, they were just written, and a compiler, compilers, then formulated the order of the 150.

Um and you could say in in some respects that you know they're just random in terms of where they were put.

I don't I don't know what thinking went in, but these 15 were purposely joined sequentially.

They were purposely put in order to carry Israel on a pilgrimage.

And a minute I'm gonna share the differences that I draw between the idea of a journey and a pilgrimage.

Um they were to be taught, learned, sung on their ascension to Jerusalem three times a year for the three-annual demanded pilgrimage by God.

You were always going up to Jerusalem no matter where you were.

There were higher parts of the geography than Jerusalem, although Jerusalem set on Mount Moriah, set on a hill, it's 2,500-ish feet above sea level.

But like here, geographically, when I would when I would say I was going home to New Jersey, I'd say I was going up north.

All right, and then when I was coming home, I'm going down south.

And yet, no matter where you were geographically, whether you were north of the city, east of the city, west of the city, or south of the city, you were always going up to Jerusalem.

And so the pilgrimage was twofold.

There was a pilgrimage of being shaped.

We would use vernacular on this side of the cross, we'd say shaped into the image of God.

So the journey was a shaping.

Now you know you got to see it as dads, grandfathers, moms.

You can see that, okay, son, daughter, we're going on a trip.

Yes, we've been on this trip before, and we're going to sing some of the same songs.

And we're going to learn the lyrics to these songs.

We're going to learn the message of these songs, and they're going to be sequential.

We're going to start with this one.

And it was, it was all prepared for shaping them into being a people of God, going to the temple where they were going to meet with the presence of God.

Okay, so it's it was it was double imagery.

It was a double ring.

I use that phrase a lot here.

These are the two things they are after.

And so this is why we have them in sequence today.

We're no longer heading to a physical temple in the sense that God's presence was located solely in that place.

We carry the presence of Christ with us, and yet we're still on that same pilgrimage, becoming the people of God, being shaped into the people of God, going to be God and to meet his presence, to be in his presence.

I wrote it out, I've I've wrestled through this.

It's much easier to preach random messages on the Psalms.

So some of these I'll read because it was the best, it was my best wrestle at the moment.

Okay.

So they the Psalms were compiled together as pilgrim songs.

Songs when held together map out a physical and a spiritual pilgrimage.

Step by step, psalm by psalm, they articulate a movement from current living conditions to a growing dependency on God's presence, on God's goodness, on God's power, and God's promise for the future.

God's people have always been a pilgrim people, a people on the move, a people being shaped by God and a people following God forward.

Now, because I'm a word guy, I'm going to make too much of the difference between the journey of a pilgrimage, but pilgrimage with me.

I'll take what I got.

A journey, you might have even said life's a journey, right?

Life's a journey.

That's a nod to the kind of the ups and downs of daily life experience, which lends us to say, well, you just got to go with the flow, roll the punches.

Um, as my dad got older and things agitated him more, I'd go over to the house and I'd say, Dad, it's just a bump in a road.

It's just a bump in a road.

I'll make a couple calls, we'll take care of it.

Don't don't get don't get so upset about that.

So we we think about journey in that way.

That the twists and turns of a journey, they're anticipated, they're just considered part of the life process.

Right?

And if that's all I read to you, you would agree with that.

You would say, yeah, sure.

But here's the difference in my opinion on pilgrimages.

One embarks on a pilgrimage to be shaped and be changed.

That the end goal, the destination is a culmination of the pilgrim progress, making the process and destination integrated so that the ups and downs aren't dismissed as disconnected parts, they're embraced as shaping experiences necessary for desired outcomes.

I know that, I know that's a lot.

Um if you live daily life with a predominant perspective that life's a journey, um then we're just I think it's a reactive, I think it's a reactive approach to life.

I wonder what today's gonna hold.

I wonder what I'm gonna have to do today.

I wonder what's coming at me today.

And then we we take life as it comes.

Journey.

A pilgrimage takes what's coming at me not as random, but as something that God will use for for my good and his glory.

That he's gonna use this to shape me into the person of Christ, taking me into the presence of Christ.

Can you see how that how that would impact how we live daily life?

I'm on a pilgrimage.

I God's doing something in me, with me, by me, through me.

And I embrace that.

I want that to happen.

And he's also still taking me to somewhere.

That my life isn't a random existence that has no beginning and no end.

Right?

So there's what I find the difference between if am I on a pilgrimage, am on a journey?

Because the Psalms were taught in a manner to shape a people on pilgrimage, not to give advice to people trying to figure out what's the next move.

You with me?

So there's significant weight and potency to these psalms.

The other interesting thing to me is some of those psalms, today's one of them, doesn't end cheery.

Like, like we're we're used to watching maybe a TV drama and we're looking at our watch.

Well, we don't have those anymore.

So we're we're looking at the time and we're we're we're gauging where we are in the story plot, and we're trying to figure out how they're gonna land that plane in the next six and a half minutes.

All right?

And then and then you hit this to be continued, and then every one of us, if we've into it, go, are you kidding?

Right?

But that's what these Psalms are.

They're a to-be continued.

So they don't always neatly wrap up something where you can, you know, put it on a little index card and put it in your Bible.

Some will leave you like next week, man, Psalm 121.

Like, wow.

Psalm 2012 is so Israel needed these Psalms.

It Israel continually got their eyes off what God was trying to do in them and with them.

They continually got distracted and they continually ran their cart in a ditch.

Continually.

What were those?

Worship.

I mean, the when God drops judgment is because they had spent 70 years of not observing the Sabbath.

Worship, following his ways.

They were distracted by the people around them.

They distracted the places where they were.

They were continually wanting what someone else had and not who they had.

They were continually asking God to be a people like that.

They were distracted, some of the early generation was distracted where they were, not where they were going.

They got lost in all of that, and they ran their cart in a ditch.

And we're as susceptible to that as they were.

We find ourselves in the same place in a different place.

Find ourselves in the same place as we're on a pilgrimage.

We're just, we're not heading to Jerusalem.

That's the different physical place.

But understand, they just weren't enamored with a city.

This city held God's presence.

God chose to make his presence known in that temple, on that hill, in that city.

They weren't just after an adventure for geography.

They were after God.

They went because they were going to see God, and that's where he was, and that's where they were going, and they knew that he was shaping them along the way.

This is why, for generation after generation after generation, these psalms were taught, these songs were taught, the lyrics were taught, the moods, the context were taught.

It was taught in the time they were written, it was taught in the times and retaught in the times that they were in, just like we're doing, just like we're doing right now.

God preserved his plan for this nation, even with all of their all of their stuff.

God would plant people along the way that was served in, I'll say, in two different ways.

One was a lighthouse.

So lighthouses preserved all the way up the New England coast, because if you've been in the New England coast, it's rock.

So you don't necessarily run your ship aground, you run it into a rock.

Dirt, sand, and rock have two different impacts on the whole of a ship.

So a lighthouse, this is there's danger here.

There were also beacons, ways that were showing a way forward.

In Hebrews chapter 11, I think I get this is the sense in which this kind of very distinct chapter, this is the setting to me of this chapter, of the author pointing out the beacons and the lighthouses that were put through a nation to keep them, to try to keep them, or to bring them back into a safe channel.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

The passage begins with Um, now faith is the confidence in what we hope for and the assurance about what we do not see.

This is what the ancients were commended for.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was invisible, or was not made out of what was visible.

This is the God we serve.

One of my favorite descriptions of God Paul uses in Romans when he says that we serve a God who calls things that are not as if they were.

He created everything out of nothing.

Faith is the manner and mechanism for pilgrimages.

I think journey is marked by what I can do in my own strength and my own wisdom.

But you can't do a pilgrimage by your own strength and by your own wisdom.

Pilgrimages are marked by a conviction that God and the ways of God are what will shape my life and give my life meaning and substance.

So verse 4, he starts naming people.

And I went on a mini rabbit trail at the nine, and then I went back to see some kids being checked out of nursery, and Becky told me that I ran late and it was a chaos in the nursery.

So because Becky is in this service and not in that service, I can still do the same thing.

By faith, Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did.

It is the first tragedy story after a tragedy story.

Adam and Eve sin.

They choose their path, their way, deceptively, but still made the choice.

And then Abel and Cain.

Abel was a rancher, Cain was a farmer.

God asked for the sacrifice of blood.

Cain says, I'm really good at farming.

I'm gonna bring you my best, but it's it's gonna be crops because that's what I do.

Abel brings an animal sacrifice.

God accepts Abel's offering, but doesn't accept Cain's.

Cain loses his mind, kills his brother.

It's a shocking story.

It's a shocking story.

Cain chose his way.

Abel chose God's way.

We continually default to our ways.

That's a good way.

It's a good way.

I'm a good guy.

It's good stuff.

This is my best.

That's not what I ask for.

There's your rabbit trail.

I told him though that when I was working through the message, it was a lot longer rabbit trail.

Verse 5.

By faith Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death.

He could not be found because God had taken him away.

For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.

And without faith it is impossible to please God.

Because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

Don't misjudge the word faith here.

It is not faith that God exists, it's faith that he can be followed.

That's faith.

Believing God exists is not faith.

It's just you've landed on that side of the equation.

Is he real or is he not real?

Yeah, I believe he's real.

What are you doing about it?

To believe God's real and not follow God is not to believe he's real.

By faith, verse seven, by faith Noah, when warned about the things not yet seen in holy fear, built an ark to save his family.

By his faith he condemned the world and became the heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.

By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.

By faith he made his home in the promised land, like a stranger in a foreign country.

He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him in the same promise.

For he was looking forward to a city with foundations whose architect and builder is God.

And by faith Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful, who had made the promise.

And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

All these people were still living by faith when they died.

So all of them were on a pilgrimage.

They did not receive the things promised, they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were for you really could say accepting that they were foreigners or strangers on the earth.

People who say such things show that they're looking for a country of their own.

If they'd been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return.

Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one.

Therefore, God is not ashamed to call them their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

All pilgrimages are leaving something behind and pushing to something forward.

Repentance is the beginning of our pilgrimage.

Repentance is a leaving behind and a moving forward.

A better country is one in which I'm shaped now and I'm heading somewhere that I believe is better than where I am now.

Each person, each person's movement in that list that we listed, their movement was predicated on a trust in the goodness of God, a trust in the specific ways of God, and his saving and his sustaining might.

And so for me, these are the questions that have to be answered of turning our life in from this day, just day in, day out journey into a pilgrimage.

I have to ask and answer these three questions.

Is God good?

Is God's ways trustworthy?

Is God strong and mighty to save?

I can't be on a pilgrimage with God unless I answer those questions and I answer yes.

Is God good?

Yes, I believe that.

Why is that important?

Because you will face things that are hard.

Which is what the Psalm, believe it or not, I am getting to Psalm 120.

If I if I don't believe God is good, then I will judge God based on my circumstance, not by who he is.

And so that moves it from a journey to a pilgrimage.

I mean, I mean, i i it inverts that is God's ways trustworthy?

If I don't answer yes, I choose my way when my way makes more sense.

And you've heard me say this many, many times in here.

I don't want to serve a God that makes sense to me.

If I can figure him out that I'm as smart as he is.

And I've already figured out that I need someone smarter than me.

So why should I serve a God that's stupid?

Is God strong and mighty to save?

Do I have to get myself out of stuff?

Or is he strong and mighty to save?

Many times in the Old Testament, it's my my arm is not too short.

My arm is not too short.

So when these psalms were, when these were put together, they were put together to teach and shape a people into being the person of the person of Christ.

Again, if you'll let me use that language from the side of the cross, and to bring them into the presence of God.

Um, and I get that we're in a different place now, but we're we're still in the same place.

We need to leave our place, we need to repent, we need to be shaped into the image of God so that we can experience the presence of God.

Faith in God is a pilgrimage, discipleship is a pilgrimage, heaven is a pilgrimage.

God knows where you are, God knows what stands against you, God is faithful to lead you out and up.

So Psalm 120 says.

Short Psalm.

It's seven verses.

Here they are.

I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me.

Save me, Lord, from lying lips and deceitful tongues.

What will he do to you?

And what more besides you, deceitful tongue?

He will punish you with a warrior's sharp arrows, with burning coals of the broombush bush.

Woe to me that I dwell in Meshach and I live among the tents of Qadar.

Too long have I lived among those who hate peace.

I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war.

If anybody has that psalm underlined in their Bible, I will take you to lunch.

Here's how the pattern of the psalm breaks out.

First verse, a statement of confidence based on past experience.

The second is a sobering assessment of the current condition.

The third and fourth are acknowledgments of God's response to those who stand against us.

Five through seven is a lament of the current position.

So here's what I mean.

I mean, the psalm ends with a lament.

It doesn't end with a triumph.

It lends with a lament.

So I call on the Lord of my distress and he answers me.

So the two things that are striking here, he's basing um I call on, I called on the Lord of my distress.

He answered me.

So it's working off a past experience that gives confidence in a present situation.

Okay?

What God has done.

So the way I phrased this years ago during one Easter message, what God did, God still does.

This is one of the values of reading the totality of Scripture.

Because when you learn the character of God in Scripture, you can bank on the character of God now.

If you don't know the character of God in history, how do you draw a reference to the character of God now?

God will seem capricious now because we only can live life one day at a time, pilgrimage or not.

But when then you when you when you learn of his character through the lives of others, you see the consistency and the strength of God.

Make sense?

Okay.

So the Hebrew word for distress literally translates translates a tight place.

So you've you you you've heard the phrase, I'm between a rock and a hard place, right?

So what what what's what is that?

What's emotions of that trying to convey?

It's trying to convey that I have no good options.

I turn this way and it's a losing proposition.

I turn this way, it's a losing proposition.

I'm trying to figure out which way and tight when I'm when I'm between a rock and a hard place, which is gonna leave me worse off, really, is what you're trying to figure out.

So the psalmist is saying, in my distress, in my tight place, I've called on you and you've answered me.

So there's a there's an acknowledgement in the beginning of this ascent that we can live in tight places.

The tight places are gonna be a part of our life.

Where there's times where whether I decide this or whether I decide this, these are not good options.

And this is where the psalmist begins.

That's what I'm saying.

It's it's a really cheery psalm, isn't it?

Right?

I find myself in a tight place.

Listen, here's what the enemy wants to do in your tight places.

What the enemy wants to do in your tight places is he wants to crush you in those tight places.

What God wants to do in those tight places is to shape you because of those tight places.

See, this is it's a completely different way of thinking about life.

If I'm on a journey, a tight place is the next thing that I have to solve or the next thing I have to endure.

If I'm on a pilgrimage, my tight place is God using those moments to shape me into the image of Christ.

So the moments aren't meant to harm me, destroy me, destroy my confidence.

It's just the exact opposite.

I'm going to shape you in these tight places.

We all know this cognitively.

There is no growth where there is no stretching, where there is no pain.

When everything just goes easy, what do we do?

We stop peddling.

We all do that.

Tight places is also a great way to bring us back to hey, we haven't talked in a while.

Sometimes tight places, because we created it, sometimes completely not.

What we're getting with the psalmist, psalmist didn't create this at all.

This tight place he finds himself in is of no fault of his own.

This is why it it can appear, and it really does kind of carry the tone of a lament.

Part of our pilgrimage with God is a growing confidence in his sustaining and delivering power from tight places.

That is a mark of discipleship.

Because here's who God describes himself as Psalm 18, Psalm 118, and 5.

God describes himself commonly in the Old Testament as a God who brings us into spacious places.

And by that he's talking, I bring you into freedom.

I bring you into rescue.

This is our God brings us into spacious places.

Life puts us in tight places, right?

So there's the Psalms.

Psalm 18 and 19, He brought me out into a spacious place.

He rescued me, rescued me because he delighted in me.

118, when hard pressed, I cried to the Lord, and He brought me into a spacious place.

So this is the God we serve, bringing us to spacious places.

Which means, listen, if we're on a pilgrimage and we're going into being shaped into the person of Christ, and we're going to meet Christ face to face and live with him in glory, that means your present type place isn't your last place.

Like so, if you're going through hell, keep on going.

Actually, it's really good advice.

Right?

Don't sit in it.

Move through it.

A signpost of discipleship growth is leaning on a past God experience for a right now tight place.

And then again, if you believe that God is a future place for you, it means that your current place isn't your last place.

So I don't take some kind of SAT score to determine my depth in Christ.

Right?

Because it's there's not a direct corollary between me being able to quote you scripture to me living by the scripture that I quote.

And many times I need your experience to get me through my experience.

Many times I need you on the other side of a tight place because I'm in my current tight place.

Because tight places are discouraging.

But I think a signpost of my growth in Christ is how I deal with those tight places.

I called on the Lord in my distress and he answered me.

Verse 2 Save me, Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues.

This is the type place the psalmist now finds himself in.

Lying lips and deceitful tongues.

Have you found yourself in a precarious position because someone either deceived you or lied about you?

Anyone in the room?

You've been lied about or deceived, and that puts you in a difficult position.

This is what the psalmist is saying here.

By experience.

The more you try to defend yourself in a place where you're being lied about, digs the hole deeper, seemingly, and I don't understand how and why it does, but it does.

So how do you go through a tight place because you've been deceived, someone is deceiving you, or you're being lied about?

Ironically, um that's just where this discipleship pilgrimage begins for him.

That the truth of God is being challenged by the lies of the enemy.

And I just think it's an apropos time.

We live in a very deceptive lying time.

You know, I haven't seen, I haven't seen society like this in my short life, where before, if you got caught in a lie, you somebody just came clean.

Now they don't.

They double down on the lie, flip it, the you're the problem.

It's all based on deception.

Well, the enemy is a deceiving, lying being.

And so the truth of God is always gonna be challenged.

So in a in a general sense, the truth of God is always gonna be challenged by lying and deceitful, deceitfulness.

And so our discipleship process is always gonna be always gonna be built on how do we handle those lies and that deceit.

Right?

So there's so there's a two-phase of this a personal phase of being lied about and being deceitful, and then the God and the in in God's ways.

Now, here's what I've learned.

If you can, if you can use some of my experience, is that when you find yourself the target of a lie, begin with intercession rather than defense.

Lord, what are you up to?

Your will be done in this manner.

Your name be glorified in this circumstance.

Use this instance to shape me and forward your kingdom and protect me.

You're talking about counterintuitive?

It's counterintuitive.

But me becoming like Christ is counterintuitive than me being Charlie.

And if this is random and it's a journey, then I'm just gonna have to roll with the punches.

If it's a pilgrimage, then God, that there is something.

I'm not saying that that God orchestrates the lies against you.

What I'm saying is that tight place that you think that you're the one that has to defend yourself out of, you're probably the last person that's gonna be effective in this.

And God's gonna be the one that brings about exoneration.

In my particular case, it took a couple years.

It took a couple years for someone to figure out that that was a lie and that I was who I said it was.

But when it came, when it came full circle, there was healing.

There wasn't when I was trying to defend myself.

Verses three and four, this is actually kind of the fun part uh in the psalm.

What will he do to you, and what more besides you deceitful tongue?

I just love it when the psalmist starts taking aim at the person causing the problem.

He will punish you with a warrior's sharp arrows, with burning coals of the broombush bush.

Now you can get lost in the period language here, a warrior's arrows.

We look we see arrows as bow hunting or archery class or something, and we don't necessarily see it as a as an artful way to do war.

So in this century, the archers were it was kind of the air power.

They were so well trained that they were precise, they were precise, um, it was stealthy.

In in many occasions, you could not, you the the the other army would not know where these arrows were coming from because they they were so accurate from such long distances that you couldn't hear an arrow coming and you couldn't see where it was coming from, and yet it was precise and it was deadly.

So when these psalmist is talking about piercing with the arrow, I'll take that.

I mean someone that I can't see, and I don't know where it's coming from, but someone, someone in the name of God, he's the one defending me.

And then the the bush, the broom bush, was a desert um plant, if you will, that was easily combustible.

It would burn hot and bright, but the root system and the the the the I don't you wouldn't call it a trunk because it was a bush, but they would burn so hot and then it would turn into coal.

Well, I mean I'm thinking of charcoal.

That when out, you know, when all your lighter fluid burns off and the coals have the heat inside of them and they still emit heat.

I mean, this is the kind of this is the kind of defense that the psalmist is saying comes to our aid.

God comes to our aid in ways that we can't see from places we can't ascertain.

But they are precise and they do what they were intended to do.

No one shot an arrow in war to hit a thigh, and they were specifically trained to know where the brakes of the armor were for that arrow to pierce.

And then the heat wouldn't be something that would be just quick and gone, but it would last until it accomplishes its task.

So, what's the ultimate answer here, or the the point here is that God has fiercely has your back and my back on this pilgrimage.

Fiercely.

It's not casual, it's a fierce defense that we have.

So back to the hard part.

Last verses.

Come on up, team.

Woe to me that I dwell in Meshach, that I live among the tents of Kadar.

Too long have I lived among those who hate peace.

I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war.

So obviously, the psalmist can't live in two places at once.

So he's taking advantage of the geography in a metaphoric kind of sense to demonstrate where he finds himself and where the nation of Israel find themselves in this pilgrimage.

Qadar was a southern, eastern, I believe, people, nomadic people.

Same kind of demeanor, barbaric, dark.

And so you can kind of hear the psalmist saying, I mean, I can almost see trying to teach your kids, son, this is the place we find ourselves.

We live between Meshach and the tents of Qadar.

We long for peace.

They long for war.

And this is where we live.

But it's not, he's not saying it is what it is.

Right?

He's not saying it is what it is.

You just we gotta figure out a way to deal with this, son.

That we live in a warring time and we want peace, nobody else wants it, and so this is just the way we gotta live.

It's just step one.

We're on a pilgrimage.

You're gonna be a pilgrimage, there has to be some honest assessment of where we are.

This is where he is.

You might find yourself in the same place.

You long for things just to be easy, you're longing for a place to settle down.

I mean, I talked to someone between service and I said, I'm just I just can't wait till all of this is over.

Yeah, all of us, right?

Find the place that we we're living between Meshach and the tents of Godar.

We there doesn't seem to be nothing's gonna change.

The people of Meshachs aren't gonna change, people of Qadar aren't gonna change, this ain't gonna change.

This is where we are.

And yet the psalmist begins.

I cried out to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me.

He even though even though it feels like he's ending, he's ending in this lamenting place, he knows that he's taking his family, and his family even knows as his kids get old enough that, okay, we're rehearsing these steps back to the temple.

This is dad, this is grandpa taking us back through a memory, a reminder of the tight place we're in and why we're here.

And although, although I'm ready to get to Psalm 121, it's good to know that we were in Psalm 120.

And you might find yourself in a tight place today.

There's there's no there's no right, left, up, down, there is no seemingly way that you're not gonna get crushed.

And I I came to tell you today, the old pastors used to say it growing up.

I came all that with this way to tell you this today that God is in your tight place with you, and that tight place will not crush you, it will shape you.

He fiercely is in defense of you, fiercely, strategically, stealthily, deadly.

He is in protection of you.

It might be your current place, but he's taking you to a spacious place.

It is the Psalm 23.

He wants to lead you into green pastures, still waters.

That's a spacious place in which he's referencing in Psalm 23.

That spacious place only makes some sense if you have a context of a tight place.

If you don't have a context of the tight place, it just looks like every other hill, every other stream, every other pasture.

Oh, there's another one.

Oh, there's another one, there's another one.

Oh no, no, no, no.

I want to be in that one because I feel like I'm in this one.

He fiercely has your back.

You may being lied about, you may be living, we are culturally living in a place that just wants chaos and no peace.

And we're believers, we're followers of Christ.

We want to live shalom, we want to live whole, we want to live in peace.

And the world's not letting us.

And newsflash, this is the way it's gonna be.

Because we're on a pilgrimage, because this place was never supposed to be our peace, this place is not our shalom.

He's taking us there, and and the way we get there before we even get there is by him shaping us into the image of God.

And when we're shaped as a disciple of Christ, we can live in the middle of Qadar and Meshach, and we can live whole and in peace.

That's why discipleship is important.

If you're bored with your salvation, it's because you have not been, you are not on a pilgrimage of discipleship.

If someone sold you the bill of goods, that, hey, listen, just you know, just confess your sin to Jesus and he'll make everything else better.

They were not telling you the whole story.

They were skipping a whole lot of chapters.

They gave you the intro, they gave you the conclusion, you made your decision, now you're in the middle.

You're in chapters eight.

And chapter eight don't make a lot of sense.

Unless you put it together with chapter five, chapter 11.

So we're gonna pray together today.

I told you this several weeks ago.

We're still gonna go, we're we're not gonna give up what some may consider to be um an outdated mode of uh of a church service, of giving you an opportunity to come to an altar.

It's it's not a physical location of a piece of mill work along a stage, it's the people that you will meet here.

On this side, there'll be elders and other people of our care team that will sit with you in your tight place and and pray with you.

They they have uh they've experienced tight places, and they may be in one currently.

I one of the best ways for me to get on tight place is pray with someone who's been in a tight place.

Over here, if you just want to change your scenery in terms of sitting and listening and then making kind of this proactive movement of coming and speaking to the Lord.

We we kind of reserve this space over here to let you have that time alone.

You you may have been so moved by the the last song and worship around blood that everything else I've said today just sounds like wah wah, wah wah, wah wah.

And you want to live in that moment.

We have communion on my left and my right that you can take in your pew, you can take knowledge, you can take your family however you want to do that.

Stand with me, I pray as I pray, and then I'm gonna invite you to move.

Father, um, your word is rich and thick.

Um, it is surprising.

Um, it's it's it's deep.

The more you dig, the deeper it gets.

A psalm that I would have overlooked for who knows how long.

Digging in it and digging in in the context of becoming like you and moving to be in uh in your presence, it is so illuminating.

And I pray for my brothers and sisters in Christ, Lord, those who may be just curious about the faith, that find themselves in a moment of despair or tight place.

Lord, I pray that in this morning, in the intentionality of you bringing forth your word at this time, Lord, would be their confidence that you are bringing them into a spacious place.

And Lord, before they even come, before we even pray a concluding prayer today, can I pray as their pastor, Lord, as their shepherd, Lord, to send the arrows.

Send the arrows, let them fly.

Let them fly.

In the name of Jesus, I pray.

I invite you to move and let's worship here in conclusion.

We hope you were encouraged and challenged by today's message.

Again, to learn more about Gateway Franklin Church, find us online at gatewayfranklin.com.

Thanks for joining us today.