Many but not all of the Psalms have some brief introductory comments. If you look at them in your Bible, you’ll see some of the Psalms have a little brief introductory comment even before verse one of the Psalm.

Sometimes it’s acknowledging who the author is. So you’ll see some of the Psalms in your Bible are headed up with a little comment, a Psalm of David. That’s all it said before verse one.

Some of them are showing why the Psalm was written. Some of them show how the Psalm was to be used. Some of them are showing us that these Psalms were actually for, like most of them, Psalms to be sung.

This Psalm is a Psalm for the choir director. It gives us an idea that it was going to be sung immediately, doesn’t it? Of the descendants of Korah, these were men who were noted as part of the music team, men who were noted as the singers, as the choir. It was to be accompanied by a stringed instrument.

I won’t get into that today, but it’s an interesting area of study for any of you who are a little bit musical. Dig in and have a study around what the musical instrument probably was. It probably wasn’t a piano.

It does have strings. It probably wasn’t a guitar like Ross often plays for us. It was a different sort of instrument of the day.

I love some comments that I see from some Bibles. The blessedness of dwelling in the house of God. That’s a nice little title for Psalm 84, I found in one or two translations.

This Psalm, like other Psalms of ascent, expresses the joy of a pilgrim traveling up to Jerusalem and then up to the temple to celebrate one of the feasts. The pilgrim focuses his attention specifically and especially on the thought of being there in the very presence of God. For the people of the day, that’s the way it worked.

They went to Jerusalem. They went to the temple because that’s where they could be in the presence of God. The New Testament believer, in an even greater way, can come into the presence of God.

Hebrews 4:16 says these words, “so let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.” The book of Hebrews is an amazing book.

Let me read a few more verses to us from Hebrews chapter 10:19 “And so, dear brothers and sisters, we can boldly enter heaven’s most holy place because of the blood of Jesus. By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the most holy place. And since we have a great high priest who rules over God’s house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts, fully trusting him.  For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.” 

And so, the book of Hebrews goes on, just explaining a little bit to us of the difference between the New Testament saint and the Old Testament saint, as it were. The sons of Korah were the descendants of Levi, and they were the gatekeepers and the musicians in the temple at Jerusalem.

It’s interesting to note those two truths. They were the gatekeepers and the musicians. Remember that as we read the Psalm together in a moment or two.

There are three important things I want you to note as we do come through the Psalm. Four times, “O Lord of heaven’s armies”, that phrase is mentioned. There are three parts to this Psalm, and two of them are followed by the word interlude in some translations or the word selah in some other translations.

There’s a strong theme in this Psalm, and that theme is the joy in God’s presence. Hence my introductory question. Did you feel joy when you walked through those doors this morning? Because you were here, not because you were here in Fairfield Baptist Church necessarily, but because you were here with a group of God’s people who were gathering specifically to praise and worship his name.

That’s why we’re here. That should bring joy in our hearts as we gather today. Today I’m going to lead us to acknowledge together those three statements regarding joy.

There’s another one in the Psalm as well. We’ll concentrate on three of them today. Some translations, and maybe you’ve got it on your phone, or maybe you’ve got it on your lap if you’ve got an open Bible there, use the word blessed.

Our translation today will use the word joy to describe the happiness of those who, like the sons of Korah, lived around the house of God, as it were. Some of you come here so regularly that I see you every Sunday morning. Every Sunday morning that I’m here, you’re here.

It’s almost as though you live in the house of God. This was the concept of the sons of Korah. The temple wasn’t just one building.

It was a group of buildings, and some of them lived around the temple. They lived in the temple area. They were there.

They were the musicians. They were the sons of Korah. They were the gatekeepers.

All those things will come up as we read the Psalm through together. Our three statements. What joy for those who can always sing your praises.

That comes in verse four, and we’ll read it in a moment. What joy for those whose strength comes from the Lord. Verse five, and then in verse twelve, Oh Lord, what joy for those who trust in you.

Psalm 84

The joy of singing God’s praises. Let us look for a few moments at these first four verses together. To the devout Jew of the day, when this was written, the temple was their dwelling place.  The temple was the place where they met God. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem and then on to the temple was to be made so that they could be in God’s presence. Many of the Psalms speak of this journey.

In fact, some of them were written specifically to be sung on the pilgrimage as the people were going uphill to Jerusalem and to the temple. But for you and I today, we are so blessed in that we have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The spirit of God is within us in a totally different way to what it was in the Old Testament.

We have the presence of God within us and we do not need to come to this building to find God. We can talk to God in our own homes. We can talk to God wherever we are.

Yes, we do come to this building to meet God. We come to this building as we have this morning to be with God’s people and to be specifically in God’s presence. God is with us.

God is within us. While we cannot take the Psalms and say that they apply to Fairfield Baptist Church, every one of them, we can learn a lot of lessons about how people can gather to worship God and the importance people placed in their lives of worshiping God and the importance people placed on being with God and with people together. This Psalm was written to be sung and that’s the clue we were given even before verse one.

I love the first couple of verses. How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of heaven’s armies! I long, yes, I faint with longing to enter the courts of God. With my whole being, body and soul, I will shout joyfully for the living God.

Do you long to be here? Do you think about being here? Somewhere in the middle of the week, do you think about it? What are you going to do on Sunday? What do you say when somebody goes to you, and what did you do on the weekend? Do you mention everything else that you did but church? Or at the top of the list, yes, on Sunday morning I went to church and we worshipped God and we sang together amazingly well because we were worshipping God. We had joy in our hearts, we had joy in our faith. What an opportunity to be a witness and to be a testimony when people ask you that casual question as they often do on Monday morning.

And maybe the other end of the week, on Friday, people say, hey, what are you going to do on the weekend? Oh, I’m going to mow the lawns and I’m going to wash the car. No, we don’t need to go there. I’m going to go and worship God on Sunday morning with friends at Fairfield Baptist Church.

The psalmist uses this little phrase, O Lord of Heaven’s armies. There’s some debate amongst the commentaries about who this actually refers to. Some feel it refers to the heavenly angels, other thinks it refers to those who live in and around the temple area, those who served God in the temple area.

We’ll take both of those as possibilities and be twice as rich. How about that? Shall we do that? I love verses three and four. Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow builds her nest and raises her young at a place near your altar.

O Lord of Heaven’s armies, my King and my God, what joy for those who can live in your house always singing your praises. Wow. The sparrow and the swallow.

I just love the illustrations from nature that the psalmist brings to us. I think all of us probably know what a sparrow is. I saw one or two out the window yesterday.

Most of you probably know that Faye and I have now shifted into town. We’ve been in here just a week and a bit. Yes, there were some sparrows on the lawn and there was a lot at 10-foot road where we used to live.

But I find it interesting that the scripture says, even the sparrow finds a home. It wasn’t clear to us where the sparrows nested when we’re at 10-foot road. Was it in the big tree or the smaller tree? It used to come to the kowhai tree and Fay used to tell the sparrows off because she thought the sparrows were taking the buds of the flowers because our kowhai tree never flowered.

It’s been in there for two or three years but never flowered. But the sparrows were there a lot nipping at it so we wondered where it was. I tell you, has anybody seen a swallow in town? We used to see them a lot out at 10-foot road.

And look at the difference, this is how accurate scripture is. Even the sparrow finds a nest, a home, the swallow builds her nest and raises her young at a place near your altar. You see, swallows love to be near people.

They will fly, I put my hand out because they would fly not even an arm’s length away, they would come right this close to me at times. Right in my face the swallows would go by. And at one stage we had five swallows’ nests on the wall of the house.

So on the bricks, the outside of the house, the swallows would build their nest. They would get the mud, they would make mud I would imagine, and then bring it up and build a mud nest on the side of the house. And we at one stage had to go around and clean them off.

They were making such a mess and there were five of them. And yet the scripture says the swallow builds her nest and raises her young at a place near your altar. I point that out because to me that’s just how accurate scripture is.

The sparrow finds a home but the swallow builds her nest. O Lord of heaven’s armies, my King and my God, what joy for those who can live in your house and always sing your praises. May it be that always on a Sunday morning when we walk in this door we know that we’re going to sing God’s praises.  That’s why we’re here. It’s what we do. It’s what we join together and do.  We join our hearts, we join our voices and we sing his praises.

Let me read those verses again from verse five. What joy for those whose strength comes from the Lord who have set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When they walk through the valley of weeping it will become a place of refreshing springs.  The autumn rains will clothe it with blessings and they will continue to grow stronger and each of them will appear before God in Jerusalem. O Lord God of heaven’s armies, hear my prayer. Listen O God of Jacob.

Wow. The valley of weeping, some of your translations will have the valley of Becca. This is apparently a waterless place.

It’s a place that became a place of springs when the rains did come. The rains would come and would cover the arid valley with ponds of water and make it a place where it was a place to walk through to get to Jerusalem. This was a vivid picture of God’s blessings and God’s faithful, his blessings on his faithful pilgrims.

Those of you who were here a couple of weeks ago will remember Eleanor made some comments to us about this arid valley that was often used as a valley walking up towards Jerusalem. Our final point comes the joy of those who trust in God. The joy of those who trust in God is the final statement as we come to it.

O Lord, look with favour upon the king, our shield. Show favour to the one you have anointed. There’s a lovely little sort of a metaphor in a way.

In speaking to those who participated in the temple, the king would also be there to participate in feast times at the temple. So the king being mentioned is not unusual. The king was regularly described as God’s anointed one in the book of Psalms and here it is again.

Do you trust yourself more than you trust God? I wrote that down and then I felt quite challenged that I’d written down and nearly took it away because I have to ask my heart that question as well. Do I trust myself more than I trust in God? Do I try to work everything out and then if it doesn’t go too good then I go to God? You know, life can get a bit like that at times. I try and do everything in my own strength and at the last resort I’ll turn around and ask God for it.

Do I pray first thing and see God’s blessing on the things that I do, or do I do things and then talk about God with it later? And I feel very challenged and I have to use this illustration because it’s been a bit like that for me in the last week. I think you all know what I’m going to say when I say it’s incredible how dependent we as a, not as a congregation, that we as a society have become on broadband. Imagine if you took broadband out of your house.

Well, that’s what happened to us a week and a few days ago. We shifted out of one house and into another so broadband had to be done differently. I could tell you so many stories of what’s happened in the last bit, it seems I’ve been tested time and again.

I finally just yesterday got my printer to actually talk to my computer. I got to the stage where I was thinking, Lord, how am I going to print out my notes for being together on Sunday? My mind was thinking, no, I’m going to have to send it to Ross and Heather and get them to print it out for me.  Normally I’d have sent it to the church office and got them to print it but I knew Gaylene wasn’t going to be here this morning so Ross and Heather nearly got it. You know, I had to challenge myself, was I praying about this? I woke up yesterday morning feeling challenged about having put this in my notes and I lay there and I’m saying, Lord, the last time I connected a wireless printer I didn’t need an app to do it on my phone. But nowadays they tell you you’ve got to download this app on your phone and then your phone will tell your computer.  I know I’ve done it before. So I went onto settings on my computer and worked it through from there because I knew I’d done it before.

Verse 10. Iunisi, you see, I was talking to her. She rang me this morning.  She’s an encourager, that lady. She’s out encouraging other people today. She’s not preaching but she’s out encouraging others, I know that.

She said she loves this verse. A single day in your courts is better than a thousand anywhere else. I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God than live the good life in the homes of the wicked.

Wow. You see, this is who the men were. This is some of the sons of Korah that the psalm was written with them in mind.

They were the singers. They were the gatekeepers. They were the men who had a particular place.

One day standing at the door of the temple or just being near or even not inside it was better than a thousand days fellowshipping with wicked people. Wow. That’s what they were saying.

It’s better to be at Fairfield Baptist. No, we can’t make that comparison. Yes, we can make that comparison.

You can’t take everything in the Psalms and make them apply. You can’t take everything about the temple and make that apply for us. But we can learn so much about the attitude of people to God, the attitude of people to worshipping together, the way in which they came and were before God.

I wonder if we get a single day. Can you take one in seven and call it God’s Day and be together with God’s people? I’m talking to the converted, aren’t I? I love little phrases. Listening to God is essential to walking with God.

Since we were made for an intimate relationship with God anywhere, with him is better than anywhere else without him. Wow. Time with God is better than anywhere else without him.

The last two verses say this, for the Lord God is our sun and our shield. He gives us grace and glory. The Lord will withhold no good thing from those who do what is right.

Oh, Lord of heaven’s armies, what joy for those whose trust is in you. Our sun and our shield, these are pictures of God’s overall provision and God’s overall protection of us.

The last statement, what joy for those who trust in God. Do you trust God more than you trust yourself? It’s a challenge, isn’t it? Joy and rejoicing is where we’re at this morning. Joy and rejoicing is what we get when we read the Psalms.

Note to self, my word for the year is joy. You know I like to finish with one word at the end of a sermon. Obviously it is joy.

Our summary for today. Joy in singing God’s praises. Joy in the strength from God.

Joy for those who trust in God.   Praise to God. Strength from God. Trust in God.