(upbeat music)
- Hi, this is Pastor Tom, and I want to welcome you
to our look at Psalm 65 in Drive Time Devotions.
The Bible tells us that when we come to faith in Christ,
we are adopted into God's family.
God is our father.
Other believers are our spiritual brothers and sisters.
I love the way that Psalm 65 pictures for us
what it means to be a part of God's family.
Look at verse four with me.
Let me read it.
Blessed are those you choose and bring near
to live in your courts.
We are filled with the good things of your house,
of your holy temple.
We are filled with the good things of your house.
So I want to ask a question as we look at this Psalm today.
What does it mean to live in God's house?
Now these verses are about the temple of God in Jerusalem,
the place of worship.
And even today, you'll sometimes hear people talk
about the church, the church building as the house of God.
That doesn't mean that that's where God lives.
You and I as believers, we're now the dwelling place
of God through his Holy Spirit.
But I do think there are some wonderful pictures
of what it means to be in God's family
as you think about us being spiritually
in the house of God together.
And we do together as brothers and sisters in Christ,
we are the household of God.
We are in God's house together.
Every home that you enter, physical home,
it has a specific culture to it, a feel to it.
Some homes, they feel very loud and energetic.
Other homes are very calm and quiet.
You can feel the relational connection in some homes.
You can feel the relational stress in others.
So here's the question.
What does it feel like to live in God's house
as God's child?
Listen to the descriptions that you hear
in just this Psalm, Psalm 65.
God's house, what's it like?
God's house is a house of forgiveness.
Verse three, when we were overwhelmed by sins,
you forgave our transgressions.
That's what it's like to live in God's house.
In God's house, you sense this forgiveness in every room.
You know that you are forgiven
because of Jesus' sacrifice for you on the cross.
And you know that he can give you the power
to forgive others because of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.
Notice in this Psalm, it says,
when we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave us.
Some of you, listen into this, you grew up in good homes,
homes that helped you to deal with the things
that overwhelm us in this world.
Some of you did not, and I'm sorry for that.
But some of you, you grew up in a home
where no matter what was happening
during the day at school or at work,
you knew that you could come home
and you could find a place of acceptance and love.
God's house is like that.
You enter into his presence, you come home,
and our Father replaces your self-condemnation
with his sacrificial grace.
He replaces your transgression with his forgiveness.
It's a good house to be in.
It's a house of forgiveness.
It's also a house of hope.
Verses five to seven,
you answer us with awesome deeds of righteousness,
oh God, our Savior,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
and of the farthest seas,
who formed the mountains by your power,
having armed yourself with strength,
who's still the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of the waves, and the turmoil of the nations.
How much hope does God have to give?
Notice here, it says,
his hope goes to the ends of the earth,
to the farthest seas.
There is no place in this world
where you cannot find his hope.
And God has the power
to put that hope into your heart today.
The same power that formed the mountains
is the power that can put that hope into your heart.
The same power that calms the seas
can put that hope into your heart.
So if you're feeling hopeless right now,
I want to encourage you,
walk in the front door of God's house.
Come into his presence.
He has hope to give you today.
It's a good house to be in.
It's a house of hope.
This house of God, it's also a house of wonder.
Listen to verse eight.
Those living far away fear your wonders.
Where morning dawns and evening fades,
you call forth songs of joy.
I love the wonder and joy in this verse.
Now, the truth is, serving the Lord,
working for God in this world
where things can get tough sometimes,
where there's a lot of battles,
we talked about this week that we face,
serving the Lord is serious business.
And sometimes in that, we can lose the wonder
and we can lose the joy.
God's house is a house that's filled with laughter.
God's house is a house that's fun to be in.
Some people think we should always work for the Lord
and never be entertained.
I mean, you should never smile
if you're really working for the Lord.
You gotta be serious about this.
God doesn't have time for that kind of fun and frivolity.
Well, who do you think thought up a smile?
Made you so you could smile and laugh.
Who do you think thought up entertainment?
A long time before we put colors on a TV screen,
God was lighting up the sky.
Verse eight in the Living Bible says,
the dawn and the sunset shout for joy.
Just think of the ways that God entertains us.
He entertains us with beauty.
He goes overboard on this one.
I mean, I could talk about all the beauty on the earth,
the plants and the animals.
As if that wasn't enough, God put beauty into the sky.
He could have just made the sky gray.
Like, well, you got all this beauty on the earth to look at.
But no, when we look up, we see the beautiful blue
in the sky, the beauty of clouds.
Some of the clouds that I've seen
are the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
Shockingly beautiful.
The beauty of stars up in the mountains on a clear night.
The beauty of a rainbow.
God entertains us with his beauty.
He also entertains us with drama.
The drama of how we're designed as human beings
and how we grow, the drama of the seasons.
He put all that into place.
He also entertains us with humor.
If you don't think God entertains us with humor,
just look at a camel.
Just look at an ostrich.
God made that.
Just look at a duck-billed platypus.
I mean, don't think he entertains us with humor.
Just, I hate to say this, just look in the mirror.
God entertains us in so many ways.
I could go on and on and on.
God's house, it's a house of wonder.
And then let me just give you one more.
We could go on and on, but one more in this psalm.
God's house is a house of abundance.
Listen to verse nine, beginning in verse nine.
You care for the land and water it.
You enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water
to provide the people with grain,
for so you have ordained it.
You drench its furrows and you level its ridges.
You soften it with showers and you bless its crops.
You crown the year with your bounty
and your carts overflow with abundance.
The grasslands of the desert overflow.
The hills are clothed with gladness.
The meadows are covered with flocks
and the valleys are mantled with grain.
They shout for joy and sing.
Verses nine to 13, which I just read,
this is the choir of creation,
shouting for joy, singing for joy.
And there's these wonderful pictures
of growth and abundance all throughout.
The hills clothed with gladness,
the grasslands overflowing.
You melt the clods, you level the ridges.
We might do the plowing.
If you've ever plowed, you can do the plowing,
but only God can send the rain that softens the earth
and prepares it for planting.
I want to encourage you right now to maybe pray verse 11.
Verse 11 says, you crown this year with bounty
and your carts overflow with abundance.
Pray right now, God, would you crown this year
with a bountiful harvest in my life?
Would you make even the hard pathways
to overflow with abundance?
This house of God, it's a house of forgiveness,
of hope, of wonder, of abundance.
That's what it's like to be part of God's family.
That's what it's like to enter into God's house.
Ephesians 2.19 says, now therefore,
you're no longer strangers and foreigners,
but you're fellow citizens with the saints
and members of the household of God.
When you read the New Testament,
you see, as we mentioned earlier very clearly,
that we as believers are now the temple of God.
We are God's dwelling place.
That means you don't have to go somewhere else
to experience what it means to be in God's household.
You just need to connect with the presence of God
through his Spirit, which he put in you.
So let's do that right now.
Our Father, we connect with you.
And in our mind's eye, we just envision
walking in the door of your house where we live.
It's our house.
It's our house.
Because he died on the cross for us, Jesus,
who invited us to become sons and daughters of God.
It's our house.
God's house is our house.
We are so thankful that we can walk into this house
of forgiveness and of wonder and of praise,
this house of purpose, this house of hope,
this house of abundance, and know it is where we live.
Whatever the world says about us,
whatever we feel about ourselves today, this is our house.
And so God, we walk in the front door right now,
and we recognize that we're home.
We're home with you.
In Jesus' name, we praise you.
Amen.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)