Shall the Dust Praise Thee? — Carter Conlon

The Anointing of the Holy Spirit and the Glory of God

Psalm 30, Father, I thank you, God, for the anointing of the Holy Spirit. I praise you, mighty God. Lord, because you are the author and the giver of all life, you are the one who quickens us when we have no more strength.

You come and infuse us with divine life. And one more time, you confirm your name and your testimony that you have chosen to plant within a people who love you. O God Almighty, I pray today that everything of death be banished in this house, everything of darkness, everything of evil, everything of Satan be banished, be brought to nothing, be destroyed.

I pray, God, for an anointing from heaven that breaks the yoke, that opens the prison door, gives sight to the blind, gives healing to the wounded. My God, let this be a day where heaven records a shout of praise in your house that is unprecedented.

Father, cause it to spread throughout the earth. Let there be a glorious testimony of who you are and what you do among every hungry soul. O God, bring glory to your name in this confused and darkened generation.

Let your name be glorified. Thank you for the anointing. Thank you, God, that I don't have to stand in my own strength. I don't have to speak in my own understanding. You will always overshadow my frailty.

You always come and bring life, and I thank you for it in Jesus' mighty name. Psalm 30. David says it this way, I will extol thee, while it's David or somebody intimately acquainted with him, a psalm written at the dedication of his house.

I will extol thee, O Lord, for the house lifted me up and has not made my foes to rejoice over me. O Lord, my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me. O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave.

Thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit. Sing to the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness. For his anger endures but a moment. In his favor is life.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. In my prosperity, I said, I shall never be moved. Lord, by thy favor, thou hast made my mountain to stand strong. Thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.

I cried to thee, O Lord, and unto the Lord I made supplication. What profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth? Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me.

Lord, be thou my helper. Thou hast turned from me my mourning into dancing. Thou hast put off sackcloth and girded me with gladness. To the end did my glory missing praise to thee, and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto thee forever.

Now David, it's at the dedication of his house, and King David knows that the place that he is in, at this particular moment in time, he has been brought there by the mercy of God. He has not always been strong.

There have been deep and dark and weak points in his life. David is not speaking of a present experience, but a past experience of God's deliverance. And David remembers the seasons, he said, where I cried past tense to you, O Lord, and I made supplication.

And he said to God, what profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth? And David was saying, God, if I go down where people who don't know you are living, if I'm allowed, even if it's from my own frailty or weakness, if I'm allowed to remain there, what profit is it to you?

There's no praise comes to you from these places. And God, even if I give my all in all, but end up living in a place of darkness, then what glory will it bring to you? And David was an honest man with God.

And God only requires honesty, not perfection. Requires the honest heart to say, Lord, where I'm dwelling, I don't want to be. And there were times in David's life where he miscalculated, made mistakes, ended up in places he shouldn't be.

But through it all, he had a heart that kept coming back to God. Beloved, take courage from this. Don't let the devil condemn you when God loves you. Don't let him tell you it's hopeless when Christ died for you and rose again from the dead on your behalf.

Don't buy the lies of the enemy. And Satan must have been at this man's door constantly, trying to pummel him with doubts about God's integrity, doubts about his future, accusations against his own heart, against the nature that was in him, called the fallen nature, the sin nature, which Satan knows only too well.

And he knows that all men are encompassed as it is with the same frailties. And he would be there accusing him of what's in every man and accusing him of somehow displeasing God and somehow God's just going to leave you in this state of weakness and he's not going to come to you.

Shall the dust praise thee? Phenomenal thought really, because when you go back to Genesis 2, in verse 7, the scripture says, The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.

From Dust to a Living Soul

Formed him, formed you, formed me of the dust of the ground. Out of nothing, out of a place where there's no life. Out of something, doesn't even say formed us out of rich earth, where there was moisture and a seed or something in it.

Out of the dust. I don't know if you've ever picked up a handful of dust. Nothing will grow in it, nothing will happen with it, nothing can come of it, you can't do anything with it. And folks, even if you add water to it, it just turns to a kind of a liquefied mud.

It's of absolutely no value in that condition. And God reached down and saw something and created of this, you and me. And breathed into the nostrils of man the breath of life and he became a living soul.

He was given life by God. Can you imagine in the beginning, Adam didn't have, in a sense, he was not under, he was not fighting or battling against sin the way that you and I have to today. God could freely come down into the garden and Adam would not be destroyed because he was created of the nature, the character of God.

He bore the image of God. But into that place Satan came and convinced man in Genesis 3 .19 it was a value to live by self-effort. Only to be met by the eventual hopelessness and inevitability of death.

Listen to what it says in Genesis 3 .19. Here was the curse. God said, in the sweat of your face you will eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken for dust you are and unto dust you shall return.

You will live, those without God, here's the curse. You will live by what comes out of your natural mind. You will produce what comes out of your natural strength and some may go beyond others but eventually you'll come to the end and you'll go right back where you came from.

You started from dust and you will go right back to dust again. You started from nothing and you will end in nothing. Solomon found this out in one sense when he came to the end of his life and he said, all the labor that man does under the sun everything goes to the same place, the rich, the poor, the educated, the unintelligent, everyone goes to the same end.

He said, therefore of what profit is all the labor that we put our hand to under the sun? And to the devil himself, God Almighty said in Genesis 3 .14. And the Lord God said to the serpent, because you've done this you are cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field and upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

In other words, you're going to feed Satan on hopelessness, futility and death forever. You are locked out of that which comes from above which of course is divine enablement, divine knowledge and divine power.

You are locked out. You will feed as it is. Your only sense of accomplishment will be the deception that you saw and the souls in the sense that you were able to devour a fallen man. Those who refuse to rise above the knowledge of God.

You're going to feed on it, Satan. That's what he said to him. Futility and death and hopelessness are your future. That's why Paul the apostle calls those who are governed by what lies beneath the kingdom of God earthy.

He says in 1 Corinthians 15 verses 47 and 48 The first man, that's part of that verse, is of the earth, earthy. And as is the earth, such are they also that are earthy. Those who are governed by their fallen nature are earthy.

Bound as it is to the things and by the things of this world. And even their attempts to be spiritual, apart from that which is offered through Christ are little more than whispers of death. Look at what it says in Isaiah chapter 29 and verse 4.

Look at those who try to be spiritual and yet they're not connected to divine life. Isaiah chapter 29 and verse 4. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives.

Well, that's a nice verse, but that's not the one it's supposed to be. Oh, I'm in Jeremiah. Oh, well, I guess I better put these on after all. Isaiah chapter 29 and verse 4. That was a free verse. There's nothing extra for that one whatsoever.

He says, And thou shalt be brought down and shalt speak out of the ground. And thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be as of one that has a familiar spirit out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.

Attempts to be spiritual apart from the life that is provided solely and exclusively through Jesus Christ produces what I would call this dust whisper. These peepings and mutterings of things that purport themselves to be spiritual, but they don't come from the heart of God.

Folks, when you're listening to the voice of God, there's no confusion. You're not sitting there trying to imagine what God must look like. He has suddenly revealed to you. You're not wondering what it would be like to walk with God.

He makes it very clear to you. Suddenly, impossibility becomes possible when God is the one who is speaking. Now, there are some people today who say, God, I feel so small. I feel so low. I feel so confused.

I feel so powerless. Just like the psalmist David said in that point in his life. He said, what profit is there in my life or my blood? That means my life when I go down to the pit or what I live in a place of despair.

What profit is it, God, to you? And there are some here saying that this morning. That is your prayer. God, what profit is my life to you? That I live in this place of despair. I live with a sense of hopelessness in my heart every day.

My prayers can barely rise above a groan. I feel so small. I feel so insignificant. Shall the dust praise you? Shall it declare your truth? God, at what point will you open my mouth again? At what point will you give me a song of praise?

At what point will you demolish my enemies? Will I ever be able to lift up my voice in victory? Will my life ever be raised to a place higher than my own thoughts have been able to carry me? Now Paul says again in 1 Corinthians 15 verses 47 and 48, As we have borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly.

Christ’s Victory Over the Dust of Death

I want to show you the way out of despair this morning. And it's by understanding that Jesus Christ was brought by the love of God into the very place where you and I, born under the curse of sin, were destined to go.

We were under that curse. We were born with a sin nature. It was only a moment of time that that nature took to grip us and take us into that place where we can't rise above the general tenure of a fallen world all around us.

But in Psalm 22, 15, speaking of the cross of Jesus Christ and what he had to endure on Calvary, he says, Thou hast brought me into the dust of death. Thanks be to God that he came to the earth, he became a man, and he went down into the deepest places that sin can bring any of us to.

He paid the full price for the wrong things that you and I have ever done. He paid the penalty, folks, on Calvary. Everything that you deserve, every penalty of darkness, all weakness, everything that sin brought into this world, everything that you were born with, all restriction, every chain, every prison door, every power to keep you spiritually blind, every devil of hell, every plan of evil, everything ever formed against you.

When Jesus Christ went into the grave and rose again on the third day, he triumphed over it. He broke its power. The prison doors had to open. The blinded eyes had to see. The bruised hearts had to be healed.

We live in an incredible time. We live in a time that God has said, Those who come to me I will in no way cast out, and I will give you power to step on serpents and scorpions and everything that dwells in the dust and over all the power of evil, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.

I am a new creation in Christ Jesus. I'm not bound by the limitations of my past. I'm not called to dwell in the earth. I'm not called to live in darkness. I'm not called just to have to fake a song on Sunday morning.

I am called to let God be God within me, to let Him plant deep within my heart a song that is not born of anything in this world. It is born of God. It is sustained of God. It is given of God. It is carried by God.

It is all about God. It is given to us by God. It is thrown back at God from us, and all to give Him glory. Praise God. He defeated the serpent who dwells there. That's why you have the power to condemn every voice that rises against you.

I don't live there. That is not my destiny. That is not my future. And it may be my past, but as far as God knows, it has been erased. It's all gone. There is no record of it in heaven anymore. I have in Christ risen above the beggarly elements of this world.

That's why the Scripture says, I have the power to put my foot on the mouth of the serpent, because he can't rise above darkness. He can't rise above hopelessness. He can't rise above despair. And that's all he can speak into everyone's heart.

But I have the power in Christ because I don't live there. You don't live there anymore. You can put your foot on the head of the devil himself. Put him under your foot this morning. Put him under your foot.

And Jesus Christ, when He rose from the dead, when that stone was rolled away from the grave, and He stepped out in the power of God, He opened the door of freedom to everyone who had been captivated by the things of this world and the power of darkness.

Shall the dust praise Thee? You'd better believe the dust is going to praise God. You'd better believe. Nobody is ever taking my song. There's no stone outside of this church that's going to sing my song for me.

I'm telling you, God has planted a song of praise in my heart, and God has put a song of praise in your heart. Don't you ever let Satan take that song away from you. You are washed with the blood of Jesus Christ.

You are received with God as if you had never sinned. You are given power over your old nature. You are given power over demonic powers. You are promised healing by the power of Almighty God within you.

You are given new sight, new hope, new strength, new future. Praise God. That's who you are in Christ Jesus. When Hannah was given the power to bring life into this world, she was a woman who came to the temple year after year after year, empty, empty, empty.

Hannah, Samuel, and God’s Power to Raise the Poor

And she had an adversary that would taunt her as she would come to the house of God. One more time in the house of God, eh? And still no life in you. Still nothing in your womb. Still nothing to bring to God.

Still no evidence that you truly have divine life within you. She cried out to the Lord, and the Lord heard her. She went home and conceived and had a child and called his name Samuel. And after weaning him, the scripture says, she brought him into the temple of the Lord and gave him to the service of God.

And once he was given to the Lord, she burst out in song and in prayer. And here's what she said, talking about the Lord. She said, he raises up the poor out of the dust, out of nothingness, out of hopelessness, out of despair, out of darkness, out of a pit, out of where the world lives, out of where people are without God.

He, God Almighty, raises up the poor out of the dust. And he lifts up the beggar from the dunghill to set them among princes and make them inherit the throne of glory. God said, I don't see you the way you see yourself, and I don't see you the way Satan is trying to lie to your heart.

I have raised you from the dead, I've given you my life, and I have prepared a place of glory for you. The wicked shall be silent in darkness, 1 Samuel 2, 9, for by natural effort or by strength shall no man prevail.

Verse 10 says, the adversaries of the Lord will be broken to pieces. Out of heaven he will thunder upon them. The Lord shall judge the ends of the earth, and he will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed.

In other words, not only he will raise Christ from the dead, but he will give strength to those who belong to Jesus Christ. Praise be to God, folks. Do you understand the hour we're living in right now?

Has it really dawned in your heart that the Bible says in the book of Isaiah, when gross darkness manifests through the earth, the glory of the Lord is going to rise upon the church one more time? God's going to have a people.

I think prostitutes and derelicts and drug addicts and the nobodies and nothings and the dust of this world is going to rise and praise God one more time. Praise God. There is going to be a song of praise in our generation.

A song of glory. The Scripture says kings will have to shut their mouths when they see this. People who have by natural strength got into places, they've been carried as far as the natural world, the natural mind, the natural strength can take them.

But suddenly God is going to have a people, a visible people in the earth. And kings will have to shut their mouths and learn and take knowledge of what God has done. Praise be to God. I had an explosion in my heart in Scotland.

I saw something in the Spirit that God is about to do. The enemy has ravaged town after town, city after city, sent scores of young people into the streets, hopelessly addicted and affected by darkness.

But there is something happening in the realm of the Spirit. God Almighty has risen up and He says, I will have a church. I will have a testimony in the earth. There will be a people that are mine. Praise be to God.

Praise be to God. The dust shall arise and praise Him one more time. One more time there is going to be a song of glory in the earth. Hallelujah. You clap like you almost believe that. Praise God. Praise God.

A Visible People and a Testimony in the Earth

David says, what profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth? Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me and be my helper. Now David looks back on how God responded to his prayer.

Thou hast turned from me my mourning into dancing. Thou hast put off sackcloth and girded me with gladness to the end that my glory, or in other words, what you have become in me, may sing praise to thee and not be silent.

O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto thee forever. Isaiah 29, 26 -19 says, The dead men shall live. Together with my dead body shall they rise. Awaken, seeing you that dwell in dust. For the dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.

Praise be to God. This is a precursor as it is of the Messiah. God says, I'm going to have a body. That body is going to go into a grave. I'm going to raise it again on the third day. And the dead will live together with me.

Praise be to God. You know, folks, you've got to understand something. Now, here, let me say it this way. Go to Isaiah 52, please, with me. Isaiah 52. Let's begin at verse 1. Prophet Isaiah says, Awake!

Awake, put on thy strength, O Zion. Put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city. For henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean. Verse 2. What does it say?

Shake thyself from the dust. Get up. In other words, arise. Sit down. That means in the place of rest that God has provided for you, O Jerusalem. Loose thyself from the bends of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion.

For thus says the Lord, You have sold yourselves for nothing, or for naught. Think about Eden. Just for a futile pursuit as it is, Adam and Eve sold out themselves and the entire human race. But he says, You shall be redeemed without money.

You will be redeemed without anything that's considered a value to this world. That's what the Lord says to you today. You sold yourself for nothing. There are people in the body of Christ. Your focus is wrong.

Your pursuit is wrong. You don't live for the glory of God. You don't yet see the value of a soul. You don't yet understand that you and I are left on this earth to be a living expression of the glory of God.

Of who God is and how he raises the dead. And how he gives the faith power. And how he opens prison doors. We are supposed to be a testimony of this. A young man from Ireland, from Limerick, Ireland shared with me, with Greg and I one day at a table.

A Testimony of Transformation Through Simple Faith

He said, I was a very violent man in my late teens and early twenties. And he said, I was so violent that I would fight in the streets. And my enemies and I would break into each other's homes and attack each other.

And he said, I would sleep or sit on the edge of my bed with an axe in my hand at night. Waiting for my enemy to show up at the door to attack me or my family. And one day he was walking down the street.

And an older man just walked by him. And as he walked by, he stretched out his hand. And shook his hand and said, God bless you, my son. And he said, I had never been touched like that in my whole life.

He said he had a good, strong, firm handshake. But there was something in the touch of this man's hand touching my hand. And he said, I was so struck by this, I followed him down the street. And when we got to the corner, when he turned to the next corner, I snuck around and I followed him down the next corner.

And then I followed him to the next corner to see where he was going. And he was so touched by this man's tenderness. Just something he'd never seen, he'd never felt it before. The next day, he would pass by on the street because he saw that this man came home the same way every day.

So the next day he was on the street and this man reached out again, shook his hand and said, God bless you, my son. This man did this with this young man for a full week. And then on the sixth or seventh day, I believe it was, he said, he shook my hand and held it this time and said, Son, Jesus Christ died for you, that your sin might be forgiven.

He said, go home and talk to him and ask him to come into your life and ask him for the new life that he offers you. So he went home and he said, I was Catholic. He said, so I prayed the rosary first.

And he says, now, once once I was through with that part, he said, I put all that away. And he said, Jesus, whoever you are, that man told me that if I would talk to you, you would come into my life and forgive my sin and you would change my life.

And he said, Pastor, I can't explain to you what happened to me in that room. He said, the glory of God came into that room. And he said, something happened to me and I was so shaken and so changed in a moment of time.

He said, a few days later, I ran out of my house. I went to the door of my biggest enemy in all of Limerick, Ireland. He said, these people were so violent, their house was painted black and their windows were boarded up.

They just lived to drink and fight. He said, I knocked on the door. They opened the door and they looked at me and he said they were rugged, rough, full of scars. A lot of them holding weapons either in their hands or nearby.

And he said, I have something to say to you. And they said, come in. And he stood in the middle of the living room and they they either prepared to be attacked or to attack him. He said, Jesus Christ has come into my life, forgiven my sins, and he's given me a new heart, a new hope.

Folks, he said three people in that room that day, three people gave their lives to Jesus Christ. You shall be redeemed without money. It will not be something that has to be learned or earned. Tell me, what did that man do to have that change come into his life?

He reached out and believed he had not been yet theologically spoiled or ruined, as happens in some places. He just simply reached out and in simple faith and said, that man, that man told me. That man touched me in a way I've never been touched.

And that man told me I can have a new life and have my sins forgiven. One line evangelism. Folks, I was so stirred by that story. This man now preaches, teaches, is doing what God did for him. He has a song of praise that circumstance can't take away.

The heaviness or the gloominess of the society sometimes around him does not take his song away. He has arisen out of obscurity and out of the dust. And he has a song of praise that is being heard now in many places.

And folks, that's what the church is. That's what you and I are called to be. Saying of Christ, it says, and many were astonished at thee. His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.

And so shall he sprinkle many nations, and kings shall shut their mouths at him. For that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard shall they consider. He said to me, what do you think God requires of me?

I basically said, just do what that man did to you. Go back to your town, walk through the streets and shake people's hands and tell them, God bless you, son. Let the testimony of life in you in Christ begin to make the difference.

There is a song of praise. The whole point is that, folks, we don't have to figure it all out. We just have to let God be God in us. We have to open our hearts and say, Lord, you give me this song of praise.

You give me this victory. You take me out of obscurity. You cause me to walk out of whatever prison is trying to hold my mind. Take me out of religious pride that makes me feel like I have to somehow learn more or do more to merit you working through my life.

Yes, learning is good and doing is fine. But it's a sovereign grace of God that comes to those of us who are without power. It's the sovereign power of God that lifts us out of all obscurity, causes us, as David said, to stand upon a rock, puts a new song of praise in our mouths and in our hearts that the Bible says people will see and fear and turn to the Lord.

Rising From the Dust in the Power of the Spirit

My heart cries, God Almighty, grip me with your love again. Grip me, God, with the love that caused you to become a man and die for my sin. Grip me with an understanding of who I am in Christ, of who Christ is in me, of what he desires to do through my life.

Cause me to not be always focused on my struggles and on my own problems and on the own difficulties of the day. Shall the dust praise thee, David said. I've been there. I've been, David says, in these struggles.

I've been in these places where I'm overwhelmed by enemies on every side. But, oh God, give me the grace to look up one more time. Give me the grace to get back my song. Give me the grace to go back to the beginning where it all started.

Give me the grace, Lord, to believe you for the supernatural. Give me the grace, God, to walk out of the lies of the devil and every prison he's tried to build around me and around my mind and around my life.

Almighty God, bring me out, Lord, of everything in this world. Bring me out of the places of the thinking of this world and the powerlessness of this world and the despair of this world because the child of God doesn't belong there.

I belong out on the street putting my hand out saying, God bless you, son. Go home and pray. God bless you, young lady. Go home and pray. That's where I belong. That's the testimony of God that has to be established in my life.

There has to be a song of praise in the people of God. This is a confused time, folks. This is a despairing time. I don't know if it's going to get any better, even for a short season. It might spiral out and get even worse.

But we're not called to go there with people who don't know God. We're going in another direction, praise God. We're going to another place. We live by another power. We have other thoughts in our mind.

We have the life of God being lived within us. Praise be to God. Shake off the dust. Shake off the dust. Shake off the dust to this world. Shake off the dust to this world. Arise, the Scripture says. Shake off the dust.

You don't have to live there anymore. I speak to every Christian in this place who is bound by thoughts of your past and memories of your past. And how long will you let the devil torment you with your past?

Your past is past. It's over. It's gone. Jesus said the anointing of the Holy Spirit will heal the bruising in your heart. How many sit and struggle with feelings of inferiority and such like things? The devil constantly yapping at your heels that you'll never amount to anything.

You'll never do anything for the glory of God. How long will you live there? How long will your reasoning be in agreement with that which has fallen, that which is dust, that which is nothing, that which is hopeless?