Growing with Christ in Your Sanctuary
When you were little, or your kids were little, did anybody ever draw lines on the door post measuring the child’s height from year to year? Why did we do that? We wanted to see how much the child had grown, right? It was fun to see how much healthy development had taken place over the years.
But, oh you would be horrified if from one year to the next there was little or no growth. And, if the child actually regressed, you’d go running to a growth expert for help, right?
What about our spiritual growth? Do we ever measure that? Is our spiritual growth important enough to get horrified when we realize we haven’t grown? (“Oh Lord, I know I said I would deal with that issue last year but…”) And when we find that we’ve actually regressed—that our emails now get the time and careful attention than our Bibles used to get—do we go running to a spiritual growth expert for help?
March 3, 2013
Psalm 63, Growing with Christ in Your Sanctuary
Pastor Patti Ricotta, Brewster Baptist Church
[vimeo 61010654 w=500&h=375]
[powerpress]
Well, we can’t put a line on the door year to year to measure our spiritual growth. But, this morning I want to encourage us to think about where we are in our faith journey, and where we’d like to be. And, I want to give you a practical way of creating our own personal opportunities to grow closer to Christ—every day—and that is by creating your own personal sanctuaries.
“We have a sanctuary right here,” you say. “So, why do I need a personal sanctuary? And what is that anyway.” Well, think about God’s purpose in building a sanctuary for his people? In Exodus 25:8, God says, “Have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.” A sanctuary is a place where we are nourished by the presence of God and were we give God the worship he deserves. Here in our sanctuary here, we worship by singing praises to God, we pray for one another, we read the scriptures, we offer gifts for God’s work, and we study God’s Word.
We are well fed on Sunday mornings, I would say. But if Sunday morning is the only time we truly feast on the worship of God, we will quickly become spiritually malnourished. Think about it! If you only ate one meal a week, say, Sunday, and then waited a whole week to eat again, what would happen to you? You wouldn’t survive!
We need to have intentional times of nourishing worship built into our everyday lives. If you create personal sanctuaries where you “dwell with God” throughout the week, I know your life will be transformed.
The Christian author Ruth Haley Barton says, “The spiritual journey can be understood as the movement from seeing God nowhere or seeing God only were we expect to see him, to seeing God everywhere, especially where we least expect him.” Wouldn’t you like to start seeing God’s activity in your life and in places you never expected to experience him before? Creating personal sanctuaries is a profoundly valuable way of helping you get to that place.
We are going to unpack the idea of spiritual growth in your own sanctuaries by going through Psalm 63. And, just to help you visualize what I’m talking about, and to give you some ideas for creating your own personal sanctuary, some very kind people have sent me pictures of the places where they regularly meet with God—their personal sanctuaries. So we will look at those too.
As I read the Psalm, I’m asking you to think about the feeling the writer is experiencing in his relationship with God. Ask yourself how closely you identify with the writer in terms of your own intimacy with the Lord.
Psalm 63
1You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water.
2 I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.
5 I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
6 On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.
7 Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings.
8 I cling to you; your right hand upholds me.
9 Those who seek my life will be destroyed; they will go down to the depths of the earth.
10 They will be given over to the sword and become food for jackals.
11 But the king will rejoice in God; all who swear by God will glory in him, while the mouths of liars will be silenced.
I didn’t choose this passage to lay a guilt trip on anyone. God knows I need more of what the Psalmist has. I just want us to see what’s possible, what we might be missing, and hopefully, help us find a way to move into a deeper relationship with the Lord.
The beauty of the spiritual journey with Christ is that there is always room for everyone, and there is always room to grow. So, let’s see what we can learn from the Psalmist.
The first thing we see is that the Psalmist is completely convinced that there is no other God but God, and he has a sense that he belongs to God. Everything else flows out of that confident assurance. “You, God, are my God,” he says. The Lord is present and personal to him. He knows that it’s the highest privilege in the world to be able to say, “God, you are mine!”
So what is the result of having confidence that you belong to God? You can’t get enough of him and you can’t live without him. The writer says, “Earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water.” To the Psalmist, God is not only personal, he is essential. He needs God with the intensity of a thirsty person in a desert. It’s as if he’s saying, “I know that without you I would wither at the core of my being. My body aches for your touch. Give me your living water. Otherwise, I won’t make it.
Now in verse 2, there is a contrast. Suddenly, the Psalmist brightens up. He knows what to do now; he remembers where he has found God before. He says, “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power, and your glory.” He’s thinking, “I don’t need to be dying spiritually in this desert place. I know where God has filled me before. I’ve seen him there; in the sanctuary.” This is where the Psalmist “beheld” or experienced the power and glory of God.
Why does he see God’s power and glory in the sanctuary? What does the sanctuary do, and by extension, what can your own personal sanctuary do to help us see the power and glory of God? A sanctuary provides a place where you go to be set apart from everything out there, and it’s a place where God revels himself to you, especially through his love letter to you—his Bible. That is powerful and glorious.
Do you have a special place, a sacred space where you go to be with the Lord every day? You may say, “Well, I could set up a place like that, but I don’t have time to spend with the Lord every day. I have a job to get to; I have appointments to meet; I have ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ ‘Z’ to do.” Well, you have time to eat, you have time to take a shower, you have time to watch TV. It’s a matter of priorities. That’s why they call it a Spiritual Discipline!
Some of you may say, “That’s all well and good, but I have kids running around that I need to watch. There’s no shutting the door and letting them run around.” Let me give you an idea. When my children were little, I taught them that in order for me to be a good mom, I needed to spend time with the Lord every day in my sanctuary. (They couldn’t say “sanctuary” so they called it mom’s “sanctu-area.”) I taught them that unless one of them was bleeding, they could not interrupt me in my sanctu-area until I had finished my second cup of coffee. Every once in a while, one of them would come and look inside my cup, and without saying anything, look at me questioningly and hold up one or two fingers, so that they could know, without breaking the no interruptions, now talking to mom rule if I was on my first or second cup of coffee. It worked—they learned, nobody got hurt and nobody even bled! My daily time with Jesus did make me a better mom and they recognized that.
[PICTURE FLORAL CHAIR WITH LIT CANDLE] This is Ellen’s sanctuary. She has all the things she need: a cozy chair, good light, her Bible and journal, pens and highlighters—she even lights a candle every morning. Ellen has actually named her sacred space, “The Life Raft,” She said, “This is where I sit each morning to read scripture, write in my journal, and pray before heading out into the world with all its demands!” Ellen gets up at 4:00am to spend time with Jesus…Just sayin’! …Ok, ok. I admit that at 4:00 AM, I am dreaming! We all have to find the time that works for us.
If you don’t have a place where you regularly go to spend time in the Word of God, I want to encourage you to create your very own special sacred space. Prayerfully walk around your house and ask the Lord where he would like to meet with you. Make it a place that is so inviting that when the Holy Spirit nudges you to come away with the Lord, you find yourself being drawn there.
Of course, your sanctuary doesn’t have to be a chair in your house. In our Call to Worship we read that Jesus said, “Go into your room, close the door and pray.” The point is to have a place where you can shut out the world and be alone with Jesus.
[PICTURE OF STREETCAR] Do you have a commute or go on trips? My friend Barbara lives in Austria and has an hour and twenty minute commute on a streetcar. She is surrounded by people every day, but she has a Bible app on her phone and so she creates a mental sanctuary by closing the door of her mind to the hubbub on the streetcar so she can read her Bible and pray. If you are in a car, you pray right out loud, sing praises, you can get sermon CDs for your trip, or listen to the Bible on CD, and so on.
When you have established a time to meet with God, you will begin to thirst for that time with him more and more and you won’t want to miss it. It won’t be long before you will be able to say with the Psalmist in verse 3, “Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.”
This verse will come alive for you because you will begin to truly experience the love of Christ more and more profoundly. You’ll see that God will never reject you. He will never make you feel inferior, no matter what others may do. As you become more and more grounded in your sanctuary time, Jesus will become your reference point for understanding who you really are. You will be able to shake off the ridicule, exclusions and hurt that other people cause you. You have God’s love, and that is better than anything!
In verse 4 the Psalmist says, “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.” This is a lifestyle; not just a Sunday morning activity.
If we are going to be able to praise God throughout our whole lives it means we have to learn how to make the world our sanctuary. We have to become aware of him and his closeness to us where every we go. That is a commitment and it requires having a “sanctuary mentality.”
You see, a sanctuary can be found in the most random places. Moses found the presence of God at a burning bush. In Exodus 3:5 God said to him. “Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” The word for “holy” here is the same word Psalm 63 translates as “sanctuary.” So, Moses had to take off his sandals because he was standing on sanctuary ground.
That is a beautiful idea! Any ground we walk on, anywhere we go—even the most unexpected places—can suddenly become “sanctuary ground” if only we will look for God there. A burning bush was a very unexpected place to meet God, but think of how important that encounter was. I wonder how many burning bushes I’ve missed because I didn’t expect to meet God in that particular place.
Think about the routine of your day. Where do you think you might find unexpected sanctuaries?
[PICTURE OF NIGHT SKY] Paul Goodhue told me that his sanctuary is created by just looking up. He said, “I am in awe when I look at the universe at night. Sometimes it’s from my chair in our sun room, in my yard, from the beach, from my boat, lately it’s been from Fort Hill. And last year, during the day, it was from my bike on the back roads and bike trails.”
[PICTURE OF BREWSTER STORE] This is a picture Diane Jones took when she was on one of her morning prayer walks with the Lord. Prayer walks with the Lord! You could say every step she takes is on sanctuary ground. Do you take walks or ride a bike, exercise on a treadmill at a gym? If you take a device with you to listen to music, I want to encourage you to also download sermons. I get podcast every week from churches around the country whose pastors’ messages inspire me. Our own website allows you to download BBC sermons. For me, nothing makes the mindless work of household chores go faster than popping on my headphones and listening to a good sermon or Bible teaching.
Now, you can create a mental sanctuary any time you have a few minutes; like waiting at the doctor or dentist’s office, while you’re getting your oil changed, any place you have to wait in line for a few minutes. Just turn your mind toward God and look around. It is amazing how much the Lord will reveal himself to you, when you give him just a few minutes.
As we grow in our abilities to create mental sanctuaries we will be able to say with the Psalmist “I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.”
Well, we’ve gone through half a psalm and found a lot of meaning in it. If you can do that in your sanctuary time, you’ve done a lot. So to get you started, take the last half of the Psalm to your sanctuary tomorrow and do what we’ve done here. That’s your homework! I hope you will take this challenge to sharper your sanctuary mentality and to create a sanctuary in your home if you don’t have one. As we grow in the Lord may we behold the power and glory of God in each of our sanctuary experiences.
Will you pray with me?
Lord, there are times, protected times, personal sanctuary times that we need to build into our lives with you. We need to shut the world out at those times to nourish our two way relationship with you—feasting on your Word in your presence. And there are times throughout our day when you long to reveal yourself to us in the most unexpected places we could ever imagine. Show us what will happen if we turn our attention to you for even a few moments in those seemingly random corners of our day. Remind us that every step we take can suddenly become sanctuary ground if we will only look around for what you are doing in our midst. And Lord, may you develop in each one of us a deeper longing and thirst for you and your Word than we ever thought possible. Amen.