Echoes From the Campfire

A man who is strong has to know when to use his strength.”

                         –Louis L’Amour  (Reilly’s Luck)

       “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.”
                         –Isaiah 35:3 (NKJV)
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“Back in the saddle again.  Back where a friend is a friend…” (Gene Autry) and here we go back to the Psalms.  In this day of confusion, yes, even in the church we are to cling to the Word of God.  He is constantly watching over us, then why, oh why, don’t we take that to heart?  Martin Luther said, “Let him who wants a true church cling to the Word by which everything is upheld.”  Since we are the “temple of the Holy Spirit” is it imperative that we have true worship in our hearts and minds.  Let’s ponder the words of Psalm 84.

          1 — How lovely is Your tabernacle, O LORD of hosts!
          2 — My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
          3 — Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young–even Your altars, O LORD of hosts, my King and my God.
          4 — Blessed are those who dwell in Your house; they will still be praising You.    Selah
          5 — Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, whose heart is set on pilgrimage.
          6 — As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a spring; the rain also covers it with pools.
          7 — They go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion.  (NKJV)

       God watches over us, and care for us through and in every situation.  Yes, even sometimes he allows us to suffer and even die–but He never leaves us our of His sight.  We are His focal point and in His presence eternally.  I had to grin when I read a phrase by W. Graham Scroggie, “Pain, sorrow, and disappointment are transmutable:  we may climb the rainbow through the rain.  Our pilgrimage should be a continuous triumph in and over circumstances.”
       We are to worship in every situation of life.  As the writer here expressed a genuine zeal to worship God in the temple, we should be doing the same, and also realizing that we are His temple.  We should have an extreme passion to worship the Lord from His temple–ourselves.  However, most of the time we live our lives selfishlessly and then think we are worshipping on Sunday.  The writer of this psalm years for the temple, in reality, he was yearning for God.
       One of the ways we worship in the temple of the Lord (ourselves) is when we worship in the difficult times of life.  Baca is a “word thought to indicate a tree or shrub that grows in arid places.  Geographically and psychologically, it’s really the valley of hardship or weeping, and a long climb up and out to Mount Zion where stands the temple.” (George O. Wood)  This is the place of the soul–what are you doing about your soul?  Are you stuck in a place like Baca?  Or you on a pilgrimage passing through that valley and as you do worshiping and praising God all along the way?  As we recognize we are traveling toward God, worshipping in His temple, we can expect to have our burdens transformed into blessings.  We go from strength to strength.

                     “Farther along, we’ll know all about it,
                     Farther along, we’ll understand why;
                     Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,
                     We’ll understand it all by and by.”
                                 –W.B. Stevens