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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.”
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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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