A Song of Degrees - Facing God — A.W. Tozer

It's afternoon, and I honestly didn't know whether anybody would be here or not, but as many as there would be at night, except for a little corner over there, and they're coming in there. So you evidently want to hear the Word, and I am going to preach, but not on the attributes of God at this time, but on one of the psalms.

I'm shy about preaching on the psalms because I have found that when a preacher fishes all week and hasn't any time he takes refuge in a psalm. And anybody that can't preach on a psalm was never called to preach, because all you have to do is just stand up themselves.

Psalm 121 and the Song of Degrees

But I want to talk to you a little about the Lord in the 101st Psalm. Will you turn to it, everyone? Turn to it, please, Psalm 120. Suppose we do this. Suppose we read it responsibly. I read verse 1, you verse 8, and we'll all read that together.

Psalm 121. Step mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. Not suffer thy foot to be moved. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. The Lord is thy keeper, the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul, going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and even forevermore. Now, this psalm is one of the psalms called a song of degrees or a song of degrees.

And there are those who say that it ought not to start out, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. It ought to start out by saying, shall I lift up mine eyes unto the hills? No, my help cometh from Jehovah.

It's a little too slick to be true. Whenever an interpretation sounds real cozy, you can be pretty sure that he's brought that up out of his empty head. This is a song of degrees, and it was sung as they marched up the steps toward the temple.

You know, the temple was on a hill, and they had steps leading down the hill. They would come marching up the steps to the worship at the temple, and they had, as David explained, they had singing women and singing instruments.

And they sang as they marched up the steps to the temple, which was, I think, a very nice, pretty thing to do. David wrote, and all other of the writers, wrote songs to be sung as they marched up the hill toward the temple.

They lifted up their eyes, for the temple was built on the hills of Jerusalem. So I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, and this is one of those songs of degrees, which they sang as they marched up toward God, coming to the holy land, as we come here to Mahaffey or go to some of the great conventions.

Only they went to one place only in Jerusalem, and then they went to one place only in Jerusalem, and that was the temple. And so they sang, My help cometh. Their help didn't come from the hills, and their help didn't even come from the temple.

But their help came from Jehovah, who made the heaven and the earth. The Jehovah whose dwelling place was in Zion and toward whose preaching. I always like to think that we're marching with our faces toward God.

Facing God and Walking in the Light

Somebody says he's back on God, he's forced to walk in his own shadow from that time on. And whoever faces God is walking in the light of God's presence, which we talk about. And when they walked toward the presence of God, they were walking into the light.

We have a little saying, my friend Francis Chase and some of the other fellows of the Church, that we're not so concerned with how far a young man has come as we are with the direction that he's facing.

You see, if you go out on the highway and start toward Pittsburgh, it doesn't make much difference just where you are on the road. The thing that matters is, are you headed toward Pittsburgh? If you got on and were purring along at a nice, comfortable 55 miles an hour, and finally found you were on your road to Cleveland or St. Paul, you'd be traveling along, but you'd be aiming wrong.

The main thing is, get a young fellow started in the right direction, and he'll make it all right for himself. When I was a very young preacher, I think it was my 2nd pastorate under H. M. Schulman, who was for 28 years or longer President of the Alliance.

He was then Superintendent. I had in my home the great Dr. George Shaw, who was one of the great Bible teachers and great Saints of the Alliance. I said, Dr. Shaw, give me a little advice about reading.

I said, what should I read, what should I give to it, and so on. He shrugged me off and wouldn't answer me. He said, I am not worried about you. I said, you're ancient. He wouldn't give me any advice.

But he saw that my face was in the direction of the library, and so he didn't worry. It's only that he never goes beyond the little avenue that you need to worry about. But if a fellow is aiming in the right direction, that's the main thing.

These people were aiming in the right direction, they were walking toward God. So they said, my help comes from Jehovah on earth. Now, we don't have to say that, and when Jesus gave us his prayer, when you pray, you say, our Father who art in heaven, he didn't enter heaven and the earth, he didn't need to.

Jehovah, Creator and Sovereign Over All

But you see, back there in David's time, they were pagans. Pagans were all around about them, heathen of every kind. And the heathen believed in gods that had not made the earth. They had local gods, you see.

There were gods that had little local country they ruled over. For instance, Aeolus ruled over the wind, and Neptune ruled over the sea, Maroon ruled over hell, and Ceres ruled over the green fruit, and Venus ruled over love, and Jupiter ruled over war, and Minerva.

They had little local jurisdictions, the gods of the heathen, and David never quite got away from having to fight a little. David never was restful, and all through his psalms he was taking little bows at the dumb heathen god eyes and couldn't see.

And he was everlastingly saying, among the gods will I praise Jehovah, because there were gods everywhere, a thing that you could pick up and worship, and lug it off somewhere and anoint it, and they'd be down on their knees to it.

And David knew that, and he made it very clear here that the god that he was looking to for help made the heaven and the earth. He didn't have a jurisdiction, but he had made the heaven and the earth, and normally he would have jurisdiction over what he made.

Now, that was what we have here. The god we adore is not a local god that isn't good outside the state of Pennsylvania, although some of you imagine that in a sly sort of way, I think. But God does spill over sometimes into Ohio and Illinois.

He made the heaven and the earth, he made everything, and therefore nobody can run out somewhere and serve a paper on God and say, just a minute here, God, give me any sovereignty here. Your jurisdiction ends there.

I get a kind of a sad and sour kick for some fellows who commit a crime and then run across the state line. I heard about a fellow once that had a house built right on the boundary line of two counties, and he'd commit a sin in a bedroom and they couldn't arrest him because he just walked across the boundary.

The fellow over here didn't have the right to come over there, his jurisdiction didn't exist. In Chicago we have Chicago, then we have Cook County, then we have the state. If you commit a crime in the city, you can be arrested by certain police, but if you spill over into Cook County outside the city, the county police will get you.

And if you get out into the state, the state police will get you. So they'll get you all right, probably, if you don't buy them off. It depends on who has what jurisdiction. But Brother, God made my heart too big to ever be satisfied with anything local.

I'm not such a good Alliance man as some of you are, because I'm tempted sometimes at low moments to have sneaking suspicions of people in heaven that don't belong to the Alliance. It's just a little bit, slightly off color, but I honestly think there will be people in heaven that don't belong to the Alliance, unless, of course, we think jaunted that society, like our Baptist friends think.

But Jehovah made the heaven and the earth. That means everybody ought to be a Catholic. I'll explain what I mean. I don't say a Roman Catholic, just a Catholic. Roman means belonging to Rome, Catholicism.

And incidentally, Roman Catholic, those two words cancel each other out, for Catholic means universal here in Rome. So how can they be both at once? I think they'd get straightened out on that sometime.

It's like a guinea pig that's neither guinea, and a Roman Catholic is neither a Roman or a Catholic. He's just something. And we ought to all be Catholic. I can say I believe in the holy Catholic Church and not faint or fall dead, because I know what I mean.

I believe in the universal Church of Christ, everybody that's born of the Spirit and washed in the blood, no matter which way his eyes slant, nor the color of his skin, nor how high he is, nor what language he uses, nor when he was born, nor where.

If he was born of the Spirit and washed, then he can raise his eyes and say, Our Father which art in heaven, he is my brother, no matter when he lived, and no matter what, he is still my brother. So I say we Christians ought to all be universal Christians.

Ecumenicism and Doctrinal Boundaries

Are you bothered any about the tea, or hadn't you heard of it? Ecumenicity. That's a big word to mean the same thing that I've been saying, only meaning it wrong. It means all over, all over. And they're trying to get the Church together and get it solidly formed, consolidated.

That will go contrary to the antitrust laws or not, we'll ask you about that later. But according to the ecumenical idea, everybody that says I'm a Christian all over the world, all gets into one Church.

That may be the Antichrist's way of getting us together for the final big blow-up. But I don't believe in ecumenicity because that means my Church can take it into a movement that doesn't believe Jesus was the Son of God, that he didn't die on us.

Some people in this world don't. It means the Christian missionary alliance has to unite itself up and shake hands and say, Brother, will the man believe the Bible to be the word of God, doesn't believe Mary to be a virgin mother of Jesus, doesn't believe Jesus to be the very God's begotten, not created, and doesn't believe the blood of Jesus Christ redeems men, doesn't believe you have to be born again, trying to get us all united in an ecumenical movement.

So every time you hear the word ecumenical or ecumenical, try to pronounce it unless you have your own teeth. But it's a big word, Brother, but what it means is it wants us all to band together and forget all our differences.

I won't forget my differences with these men at all. These differences are fundamental and vital, and they are the differences between heaven and hell, between life and death. I won't forget my brother who denies the Deity of the Savior of mankind, or who holds this book up and says it's got good ideas and doesn't write it.

God did write this book. So I didn't intend to preach that part, but that got in somehow. What I meant to say was, heaven and earth, and he has jurisdiction over heaven and earth and all things that be, and that everything that is belongs to God.

Direct Access to God in Prayer

And the Christian believer, you see, when he goes to his knees in prayer, he goes past all secondary things. In these office boys and virgins standing between me and the Lord, when I come to pray, I don't want to have to ask the Virgin Mary whether she was a darling little girl, and she gave us the Son, so it was in her body that God prepared that body for which Jesus later took to the cross.

But she had to be redeemed by the blood of her own Son. So for that reason, they don't astonish me when they talk about Hail Mary, Mother of Jesus, and so on, because Mary doesn't stand between us. There is only one mediator between God and man, and that one is himself God and man, Jesus Christ our Lord.

So to pray, he goes back of all secondary things, back of all matter and back of all space and time and life and mind. After all, when I've named those 6 or 7 things, I've named about all there is in the universe, matter and space to contain it, and motion to keep it moving, and faith and life if it is a living matter, and mind.

That's about all there is in the universe. And you and I go back of that to God. We go to the unbeginning one, we go to the uncreated one, we go to the primal source of all things. The praying Christian never deals with subordinates.

When a Christian gets on his knees, he's having a meeting at the summit. We hear of the meeting of the biggest dogs there are, you know, meet somewhere, and they call that meeting at the summit. But a Christian, my brother, when he comes to God, meets God.

You can't go any higher than God. I never like office boys. I never like to meet the second in command. I always want to meet myself. And when I go to prayer, I want to know that no archangel is straining my prayer through a sieve, and that no angel is deciding whether my prayer can get through or not.

And I want to know that I'm going straight to God at the summit. So my help comes from Jehovah that made heaven and earth, and you can't go any higher than that. Then he said, He will not suffer thy fools.

God's Protection and Guidance

Now, that doesn't mean so much to you nowadays. If David had been writing that, he'd probably say, He will not suffer thy engines, because nobody walks anymore. They ride around. And my secretary lives less than one block from the office where she works, and she drives the Studebaker, and drives it right up and parks it out in front of the church.

And then I usually leave a little ahead of her, so I suppose she goes and gets in that thing and drives it back. There it is. We don't walk much. We didn't do much else but walk in those days, and if a man cramped, looking away, cramped on a round stone, he'd take a plunge straight forward.

God will not suffer you to stand cramped on a round stone. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved. He will not suffer it to slide. Now, that word suffer there means permit, but it also means permit with a connotation of pain.

The pain of seeing your foot stumble and seeing you fall. Now, if you don't walk in the light, if you don't walk in righteousness, then the Lord will have to endure the pain of seeing you stumble. David, that the Brother preached about last night so terrifically, the path of righteousness, did you ever hear this passage of scripture or notice it?

It says that thou shalt hear a voice of thee saying, This is the way, when ye walk to the right hand or to the left. And at first that bothered me, because the scripture says, Be leading me. And then it says you'll hear a voice behind you saying, This is the way.

Do you ever wonder why that was like that? Well, it's easy. As long as you stay on the same path he's on, he's always ahead of you. He's in front of you. When you leave the path and turn your back and start to the right hand or to the left, then you hear the voice behind you.

He's not ahead of you, he was as long as you were following him. But when you stop following him, take a side road, then you hear the voice back on the path saying, Come on back home. You'll hear a voice behind you saying, This is the way, walk ye in it.

So the Bible is always right. It just sounds odd sometimes, but if you figure it out, you'll find it was there ahead of you, and you don't have to apologize for it. It says, This God will never sleep.

God Never Slumbers or Sleeps

Now, the pagan gods, of course, they could be caught asleep. I read quite a little of the Stoic and the Egyptian and the other gods, particularly the Greek and the Roman gods. Some of those old boys were really rascals, and if they could catch another god to sleep, they'd just as likely as not rape his wife or do almost anything.

They did those things. There are books about these gods, and you could overcome them. If you caught one somewhere asleep, you could rule over his dominion until some other god got you. That was the Roman idea of God and the Greek idea of God.

Scripture says that Jehovah's eyelids never close. Why do God's eyelids never close? Because God never sleeps, because he doesn't need to sleep. Why do you need to sleep? You need to sleep to recoup your weight.

Sleep is recharging of your battery, and you have a certain amount of energy, and when you do anything, you have a certain amount of that energy. And then you have to stop and sit down and let your energizer work.

The dial begins to move over again to show that you've got more energy than you've expended. When you expend more than you took in, when you take in more than you expend, you feel like a million dollars.

That's why you have to sleep. When I was very young, I fought for years against sleeping. I thought it was an awful waste of time, and I wondered why God ever ordained it in the first place. I went to bed against my will and got up as soon as I could.

I didn't think I ought to sleep, but somehow or other I'm getting wiser now. I've got my mind on some things, because the hills are steeper than they used to be, I notice, and the miles are longer since Eisenhower has been in office.

It costs me more energy to walk a mile than it did under Truman, because I'm getting older, that's what I'm trying to say. Here's what it is. Jehovah doesn't expend energy, and therefore he never needs to recoup energy.

If God expended energy, where would it go? And if God had to recoup energy, where would he get it? If God expended energy, where would the power go to? And when God had to plug in somewhere and recoup his power, where did he plug in?

You plug in to a bed or a stake, but where would God plug in to? Where did God get any energy? God has all the power there is, and all the energy there is, and therefore it's easy for God to go to look for energy.

God does everything he does without expending any energy, therefore God never gets tired, therefore God never gets tired. So rest about that, and don't imagine God ever fell asleep. But somebody says, how about Jesus?

Christ's Humanity and Divine Power

Well, Jesus was a man, and it was the miracle that you saw walking around on the earth. My brethren, Jesus never did a miracle as God. He never did anything as God, but he did as a man filled with the Holy Ghost.

If he had unveiled his deity as he did on the creation, nobody could have lived in his presence, because deity was veiled there. He veiled his deity, he void it. It was still there, but it was as a man, a human being, a perfect human being, full of the Holy Ghost that he wrought.

It wouldn't have been any wonder if God the Eternal God should still the waves, or quieted the winds, or wraithed out devils, but for a man to do it, there was the wonder. And Jesus, as a man, cast out devils and stilled the winds, full of the Holy Ghost.

But he never did it until he was full of the Holy Ghost. And he said it was God through the Holy Ghost that did it. He never complained about it, blasphemed the Holy Ghost, for it was not a man, it was the Holy Ghost doing it through the man.

So as a man, naturally he slept, and he slept in his mother's arms, and he slept in bed, he slept when he got older under a tree or wherever he could sleep. He slept because he was tired. The man, Jesus, expended energy and had to eat fish to recoup it.

But the God never expended energy. So the scripture says, God never slumbers nor sleeps. Thank God forever. And then he says here, the Lord is thine. You should have noticed a little verb here, a little verb, is.

God Himself as Keeper, Wisdom, and Sanctification

He doesn't say, the Lord will keep thee, though that's true. But he said, the Lord is thy keeper. And that's something quite otherwise than to say, the Lord will keep thee. You see, brethren, the difference between the alliance and most other movements is this, that we started out enthusiastic about what God is.

For a great many movements are satisfied with what God will do. We begin to talk about what God does for us. That's good, I suppose, but that's secondary. It's what God is. It took Dr. A. B. Simpson to retell the world that sanctification wasn't a hunk of glory that you could go to God and get.

He said, sanctification isn't a thing at all. Sanctification is Jesus Christ. He is sanctification, wisdom and righteousness, and sanctification and redemption. And we went out to tell the rest of the religious world, much to their astonishment and delight, that God will give things to us, not only give them to us, but be that to us.

I would rather have God be my wisdom than to have God give me a bushel. I'd rather have God be my energy than to have God give me a battery and say, Now, here, you can have this much, and be careful, because something.

God is my energy, God is my wisdom, God is my strength, God is my sanctification, God is my tomorrow day, God is my yesterday, and God is my hope for heaven, and God will be our heaven. What would heaven be there?

What would it be? Brother Schuman used to hear, Old Brother, I won't mention his name because he did a baddie and we kicked him out, but he used to say that if he went to heaven and Jesus wasn't there, he'd sit down in a corner of heaven and cry for a thousand years.

That's particularly right, Brother. John, you know, and I may get in a jam here, but I've been in them before and got out. We tend to think about heaven in too materialistic terms. We think about heaven as a wonderful summer home, a very wonderful summer home, infinitely past and beyond anything we've ever seen, but still a very wonderful summer home, quite like yours, only, of course, marvelously better.

John often used language like that. He said the streets were of gold and the walls were jasper and the gates rose, and he pictured a heaven there. I'm going to whisper this to you, Brother, and please give it some thought anyway.

Uh, I'd feel horribly alone, committed for eternity to a place that had gold streets and jasper walls and pearly gates. After a while that gave me an awful prison to your friend, an awful place to stay.

What makes heaven heaven? The gold on the street? No. What makes heaven heaven? The jasper walls? No. You can go to the jewelry store and buy jasper. Or the pearly gates? No. The gold hanging around your neck came from Woolworth.

What will make heaven heaven? Heaven because the triune God will be there. The Garden of Eden was the Garden of Eden because God walked in the cool of the day with his wife Eve. God came down in the cool of the day and walked with them.

And the presence of God in the Garden of Eden? Eden. And what makes hell hell? It is because God does not show himself there. Wherever he does not show himself, that is hell. And wherever God reveals his face, that is heaven.

And so heaven will be heaven. God will be there. And we'll meet our loved ones. Some people blow their noses like a trombone and weep over the people they'll meet in heaven and the people in heaven. But if I were to go to heaven and meet all the brethren that I've known and loved and would look around and there was no Christ there, no Holy Ghost, no triune God for me to gaze on, I think, as the brother said, I'd weep for a thousand years.

God as Our Inheritance Rather Than a Means to Blessings

But God is thy keeper, he is thy shade, he is thy wisdom, he is thy righteousness. So that if you have God and you don't have God, you have nothing. You remember Levi, when God was apportioning out the land, he said, Well, Reuben, you can have this over here.

And gather. He got a surveyor and he went around and surveyed the whole thing, and when they were done, it was all taken up. And Levi said, But just a minute, God. God said, Levi, you don't get any. I am thine inheritance, and thy exceeding great reward will be your inheritance.

And when God said that, he made Levi richer than all the other twelve to eleven tribes, because he got God, his was the priesthood. He walked into the presence and saw God and sprinkled it on the altar.

He saw God and that was it. Most of us want God for what we can get out of him, as Brother Mason said. He's a Santa Claus and not too much inclined to question when we ask him for anything. He gives us what we want.

We want to knock another fellow out, we say, Please, God, help me to knock this fellow out. When Floyd Patterson beat Moore, was it Moore? Mason knows all about that. He said, The Lord help me, the Lord help me.

I was nasty enough to do a little reasoning about it. I said, Now, just wait a minute. What kind of sportsmanship would that be? You put two persons in the ring against Floyd Patterson and God. I said, If Floyd Patterson helped the other fellow out, or God helped Floyd Patterson knock the other fellow out, that fellow is fighting against two people.

That's not fair. You can't have two men in the ring, and it wouldn't be any wonder if the fellow would go in and get knocked out, and then say, Well, God did it. If God knocks a man out, you can't pray God to help you paralyze an opponent in a prize ring.

You might just as well stop it, you big square-shouldered fellow. If you imagine that, it won't do. And then there are pictures, you know, they think the atmosphere is right, the curves break, and they win the game, and they say solemnly, God help me, I pray.

Well, what about the other side? It isn't right, my brother. It isn't right. There are only nine men supposed to be on a team at a time. You can't get God on there to win. You haven't won at all. No, God will help you, but God won't help you do nonsense, and God won't help things, and God won't answer you when you're asking God ridiculous things.

The fellow wants to get the best of a financial situation, so he gets on his knees and asks God, Oh, God, in the name of Jesus, help things to break my way. Well, they break his way. He goes to the Lord and gets up in prayer meeting and testifies.

But how about the fellow that didn't get the break? How about that fellow who helped him? Who is his helper? No one will help you to cut corners and put over a shady deal, mister. Not even if you give a tenth of your dirty money to God, he won't even help you buy God off like that.

God won't help you if some missionary is being on the field somewhere and he wants a house, and they can get on his knees and say, God, I'm here in the name of thy son, and I want that house. He's likely to get the house.

God will work as long as he's working and for the good of all, but God will never take sides to help a man win a game or help a fellow paralyze another fellow while they count ten over him. Most people don't like that at all.

But I have written that, and people have read it and written in about it, and some of them did. Intelligent ones did, and the rest of them wrote in about it and said they didn't. But another point here.

Preservation in Going Out and Coming In

Tracy Miller would love this. I've got seven points today. Lecture 11 Justification and Sanctification 4 Preserve thy going out and thy coming in. Preserve means to guard and shield and secure. The idiom here describes just the human activities.

Just think back over your life, my friend. What have you been doing all these years? Going out and coming in, that's just about it. I said to the devil, where have you been? He said, I've been walking up and down the earth, that's about all he had done.

And I ask you, what have you been doing since I saw you last? That's just about our life. I heard of an Englishman who was bored to death with life, and he was talking about suicide. Somebody said, How do you want to commit suicide?

He said, Oh, life is awful. He said, I am so sick of getting up in the morning and then coming in at night and taking them off, and then getting up in the morning and putting them on, and then coming back and taking them off.

He said, I have put on socks and taken socks off until I am bored to death. He said, I am sick of the whole thing and I want to die. Of course, it does get wearisome after a while if you didn't have anything in between.

But you think about it now. Going out and coming in, that's about it. And the scripture says God will preserve your going out, and he'll preserve your coming in. He'll preserve that. But that's just about all we do.

Christianity Beyond Time and the Hope of Heaven

And ultimately, the only thing that will matter will be ever more. Ever more. That's all that matters. Look at the clock now. I'm watching my watch here, and I've got two minutes to four, if my time is right.

We watch our watches and we hear somebody pound, we hear whistles and we see the seasons change. The seasons were always changing, but God never stops with us. And I couldn't embrace Christianity if it didn't go beyond time.

It's a cheat, it's a cheat, and a fraud that only carried us to the graveyard and left us there to rot. But forever more is in the Bible, forever more. I heard a young woman recently say that a certain preacher always preached sermons that always ended in heaven.

And I didn't say anything to that thing since. I wonder what would criticize a man like that, for doing a thing like that. Where should a sermon end but in heaven? Where does the Bible end? The Bible begins this way, in the beginning, God made the heaven and the earth, and it ends with a new heaven and a new earth, and I, John, saw the Holy City.

Take the 23rd Psalm. Incidentally, that 23rd Psalm is personal. The old Scofield Bible and some of these teachers kind of intimidated me so that I got afraid to say, I and me and mine. I was afraid of that.

But you know that the Psalms are all full of the personal I. If it's an uncrucified, rebellious I, it's bad. But if it's a redeemed, worshiping I, it's wonderful. My brother Schumann and I, he'll know who I mean.

We know a dear old brother who has now gone to heaven and will have a high place there. But somewhere he'd gotten the idea that you never ought to say I, and he'd tell a story of when one was in Philadelphia, one saw he meant himself, and he didn't like to ever say I.

In the 23rd Psalm he'd probably said, The Lord is one shepherd one shall not want. He maketh one to lie down in green pastures. You see what that would have done to it? It would have taken David. And what's the good of religion if you're not in it?

Personal Religion as Relationship With God

Religion is a relationship between you and God, and there are just two of you. They're talking about social religion all the time, social religion. They say this fellow condemning Billy Graham, he said, We ought not to preach redemption, we ought to preach social redemption.

How can you? Suppose that there were 5 ,000 people, all of them sick, and I'd heal all of them. How could I heal the whole business in the mass? You'd have to heal them one at a time. Don't you ever stop to think that everybody in the world was born one at a time, even twins or triplets, they were born one at a time, and when they die, they die one at a time.

It's marvelously personal about this business. When a plane goes down and kills 50 people in one instantaneous crash alone, each one died by himself, alone. Others were around him, but the dying was his alone.

So why should I allow a grammatical and semantic old-made idea to steer me away from, I is my shepherd, my shepherd, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. And he had, I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever, God linked in a bundle of love forever.

So David wrote the 23rd Psalm, and it ended in heaven, in the house of the Lord forever. And the house of the Lord forever, our Scotch friend said. The Bible itself is like that. Well, I've said this about never preaching any sermons or singing any songs that end in heaven.

Christian Hymns and the Final Hope of Heaven

I got to wondering, what is the matter with that person? The songs I knew, and you know the great songs all end in heaven, every last one of them. Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide my soul, remember how that ends, when I rise to worlds unknown, and behold, beyond thy throne, rock of ages, let me hide myself in thee.