Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

And I Shall Dwell

by Dave Wilkinson

Psalm 23:6

February 18, 2001

A Christian psychologist named Dennis Gurnsey writes: "I was walking out of my office at a church only to see a little girl come skipping out of the church office on her way back to the classroom. Evidently she had been sent on an errand by her day school teacher and she was reporting back to her class. The distance from the church office to her classroom was about one hundred feet. As she skipped, she chanted a little saying to keep herself in step. "My Mommy loves me, my Daddy loves me, my teacher loves me, my Grandma loves me, God loves me, Jesus loves me." She felt loved one hundred feet worth. I continued on my way impressed with the privileged position of that little girl, and how much I wish my patients felt just one-tenth of the love she felt. What a difference it would make in their lives."

Do you ever skip inside because you feel loved one hundred feet worth? You can. That's the message of this Shepherd's Psalm. King David felt loved "a hundred feet worth." He said of God: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."

Why can we trust God?

The answer to that question is what the gospel is all about. We can trust God because He is good. He means the absolute best for each of us and has the power to bring that best into reality. As Paul wrote to the Christians at Phillipi: "I am confident of this, that He who began a good work in you, will bring it to completion in the day of Christ Jesus."

God is good and God is merciful. He feels compassion and he freely acts on what He feels. Other Scripture proclaims this:

"O give thanks to the Lord for He is good; for His steadfast love endures forever."

"Who is a God like You, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression?"

"But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. For by grace you have been saved through faith. It is not your own doing. It is the gift of God."

In Psalm 23 David declares that he is under the sound, sympathetic, intelligent care of the Good Shepherd. We have seen the dimensions of this care as we have explored this Psalm. David knows that God's steadfast love is a persistent reality. So now David says that the goodness and mercy of God will "follow him" all the days of his life.

This does not mean that goodness and mercy bring up the rear like a U-haul trailer we pull through our lives. It means that God's goodness and mercy pursue us. They chase us. They dog our footsteps. They won't let us go.

Many of you have had exactly this experience -- the experience of being pursued by God. We've talked about this together -- how you have spent years with your back turned on God only to joyfully discover that God had never turned His back on you. Some of you have gone pretty far away. And you have discovered that truth of the Psalmist's words: "Even if I make my bed in Hell, you are there." And just as soon as you were ready to look beyond the mess you had made of your life, you discovered that God was there, waiting patiently for you to finally look His way.

God is good. God is merciful. His love pursues us. We know this so well that we take this for granted. As Christians, we are like children who are part of a stable, loving family who assume that all homes are just as stable and loving. But suppose we had been brought up in a religion that saw the world as hostile.

A great Japanese Christian named Toyohiko Kagawa was brought up in such a religion. That is why the gospel -- when he believed it -- brought him so much joy.

He writes: "I lived in lonesome fright up to the age of eleven, in the country of Awa Province. There I was told that we would be cursed for such an act as spitting on the soil, that evil spirits inhabiting mountains, rivers and deep wells would damn us for slight misdeeds. There were supposed to be devils in ponds, water imps in streams and ghosts in solitary places. Thus I spent my boyhood in the midst of fear and terror. Nowhere in the universe was there love or affection, nor any friend that would sustain me. It was the greatest joy for me to learn finally that the essence of the universe is love and that God is a merciful Father."

God is good. God is merciful. He pursues us with His goodness and mercy. So the great progression or movement in the Psalm ends with a great affirmation: "I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Now the awareness of eternal life was not central to the Old Testament. Most Old Testament people saw God's blessing being reflected in long life and material well being with immortality coming through children.

But David has a special insight into the ways of God that goes beyond the religious norm. David knows that to be God's guest is to be more than an acquaintance invited over for the day. It is to live with Him forever.

Despite what some writers claim, David's words about "Dwelling in the house of the Lord forever" have nothing to do with David's hope to live out his last years in the temple. When David wrote these words, the temple hadn't even been built. Rather, the words come from David's awareness, perhaps through a deep intuitive knowledge, that a shepherd who does so much to bless us in this life, will not be hampered by our death.

David knew that God's covenant allows no ending to His commitment to His people. David knows that far from being the end of the line, death is the door to the fulfillment of all.

In the words of Max Lucado: "We needn't know very much about sheep to know that the shepherd never leaves the flock. If we see a flock coming down the path, we know a shepherd is nearby. If we see a Christian ahead, we know the same. The Good Shepherd never leaves His sheep. "Even though I walk through a very dark valley, I will not be afraid because You are with me."

Now if you look carefully at the final verse that starts "Surely, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever," you'll see a definite connection. There's a reason that the conjunction "and" is inserted. For there is a connection between this life and forever.

A lot of people think this life is an independent, closed unit. Then forever, on the other side of the grave, is some other independent, closed unit, and there's really no connection between them. They say that what you do here has no bearing or what happens there. But the Psalm reflects the fact that they are joined. The one continues into the other.

Psalm 23 really isn't talking about sheep; it's about people, it's about us. It tells us that there is a connection between this life and the forever life to come. Those who belong to the Lord, those who are the sheep of His pasture, those who in this life are followed by goodness and love are also the ones who will live forever in the house of the Lord in the next life.

But the reverse is equally true. If a person is not a disciple, the days of this life are not connected to the goodness and the love of God. And those persons will not dwell forever in the house of the Lord. In fact, we are told that rather than being pursued by God's goodness and mercy, they are pursued by God's judgement. For this life is not independent of the next life. What we say and do here and now is connected to what we will experience and where we will be in eternity to come.

If you ask the average person what happens when people die, they would say, "Everybody goes to heaven." All you have to do to qualify for the pearly gates and the streets of gold is to die which, sooner or later, we all do.

Heaven is the normal expectation of most Americans. Heaven is expected -- like Social Security and Medicare. You reach a certain point, and it's just there when you need it.

I'm amazed by the number of movies and television shows now dealing with themes of death and what happens after death. When you listen carefully to what the scriptwriters say, they always describe it this way: "The person who has died has gone to a better place. They're happier now than they were before. They've gone to be with the man upstairs." All of this is the certain expectation of most Americans.

It's interesting because this absolutely contradicts what Jesus says in the Bible. In John 3:36, Jesus says, "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, but God's wrath remains on him." Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."

That sounds awfully exclusive. It sounds pretty narrow. We may not like this very much. But that doesn't matter because we do not have the power to create eternal reality by what we like or chose to believe.

There is truth that stands outside of our preferences. The reality of heaven and hell is God's issue, God's choice. He is the one who determines what is and what isn't, and what are the requirements to get in or stay out. And it is this same God who declares that there is a connection between this life and how and where we spend forever in the next life.

Just speaking in a very pragmatic way, the worst possible mistake is to choose wrong now and spend forever regretting it -- completely apart from the fact that we miss the relationship with Jesus in this life. And the best possible choice is to choose right and to live right now and then spend forever celebrating.

For Jesus absolutely promises that anyone who is a Christian, anyone who follows His voice has eternal life for sure, permanently, never to be snatched away. He promises that. There is then nothing arrogant, nothing inappropriate for a Christian to say confidently, "I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." We shouldn't just hope for heaven. We should count on it.

As the Apostle Paul said in Romans 8: "I'm convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

But get this, when we have that kind of confidence in the permanence of God's commitment to us, it's not just confidence for eternity. It oozes over into a confidence for living. It's confidence for the here and now.

As you know very well from your own relationships that if relationships are wrong, it undermines your confidence for just about everything else that you do. If relationships are right and good, then that stabilizes and strengthens you for the rest of life. And when we can say, "I'm sure of this, I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever," then our confidence is not based on us but upon God and what He says. That gives us confidence for everything else in life. It is a wonderful thing. We can step out on the high wire of life in confidence because we know that God has placed an unbreakable net under us.

Toward the end of his life, Victor Hugo wrote in The Future Life: "I feel within me that future life. I am like a forest that has been razed; the new shoots are stronger and brighter. I shall most certainly rise toward the heavens the nearer my approach to the end, the plainer is the sound of immortal symphonies of worlds which invite me. For half a century, I have been translating my thoughts into prose and verse: History, drama, philosophy, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song; all of these I have tried. But I feel I haven't given utterance to the thousandth part of what lies with me. When I go to the grave I can say, as others have said, 'My day's work is done.' But I cannot say,'My life is done.' My work will recommence the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley; it is thoroughfare. It closes upon the twilight but opens on the dawn."

That can also be our confident expectation. For we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

And when we arrive, what will we find?

C.S. Lewis insists that our biggest surprise is that God will not look strange to us. We'll have no faintest conception till that very hour how He will look, but when we see Him we'll know we've always known Him, and we'll realize with a start what part he has played at many an hour in our lives when we thought ourselves alone. That fleeting sense we've often had of someone friendly nearby will be explained. That central music that sings through every moment of happiness, and then evades our memory, will be recovered, for we won't say to God when we see Him, "Who are you?" We'll say, "So it was you all the time!"

The Lord is our Shepherd. It is Him all the time. Let us celebrate in the words of this twenty-third Psalm: