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Dr. Gene Scott's Nitro Pill Series

Valley of Weeping
VF - 736
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Dr. Gene Scott Ph.D
Stanford University

 

 

Valley of Weeping

 

A

s you well know, there are seven messages I preach every year including the Easter message.  I preached that on the day of my father’s funeral so I’m gonna depart from the usual Easter message and preach one of the other seven messages I look at each year.  This one has been my own spiritual guiding light throughout all of my adult years and throughout all of my Ministry—Psalm 84: “Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee.”

Underline the word ‘blessed.’  Now churches are associated with blessings that are locatable in time and place, but the Hebrew word here describes a state of being, a condition of being blessed that never changes.

Now I’ve preached on this message for more than 30 years—this verse.  I don’t know how to explain it any differently than I explained it the first time I preached on it.  The problem is I need to repreach it every year because I haven’t got there yet.  I know what the Hebrew says.  It describes a state of blessing that never changes.  It isn’t a sometime affair.  It is an always-the-same state of being blessed.  I ain’t there yet, but I know how to get there.  That’s why I’m preaching the message.  It’s a state of blessing that not everybody gets—“Blessed is the man.”  The definite article separates this guy out from the rest of the crowd.  It isn’t something just sort of sprayed out of heaven.  A certain kind of individual has this blessing.  “Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are the ways of them.”

 

 

 

           Verse 6: “Who passing”—that verb form makes it clear the blessing attaches to somebody that’s going somewhere, a process of change.  I already don’t like some of the conditions.  I’m getting old enough that I don’t like change, and I have gone through enough that there ain’t nothing else God needs to teach me, particularly this kind of stuff.

When I was 30, I used to preach this.  I’d be at churches with people having gray hair and I could preach it with vim and vigor.  Just understand this about Christianity—there’s no sitting-down place.  There is no accomplishment, no place of achievement, no point at which you arrive and sit there and say “Look at the rest of those miserable creatures trying to get where I am.”  Christianity is a journey, not a destination—until we reach that ultimate destination over there.  That means there’s change built in. 

The Old Testament says, concerning a nation that God didn’t think too much of, He says “They’ve settled on their lees.”  It’s a word out of winemaking; it means ‘settled.’  And He goes on to say they’ve “not been emptied from vessel to vessel” so their lees is still in them and they stink and smell bad because they haven’t been emptied.  The process of making the wine would empty one vessel into another and leave the lees behind.  When I was younger I used to really lay into this.  You’ve got to expect change.  Today’s victory is setting you up for Satan’s attack.  And there is simply no place on this Christian journey that you can lay down and say, “Whew!  All I have to do, now that I’ve made my mark and achieved my points and proved to God that I’m okay, is just lay here and wait for Him to take me home.”  Uh-uh!  Now if you don’t like it, you ain’t even close to me. 

I used to preach through this part of the message real fast because it was so obvious.  I was young and I was going somewhere. 

 
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