Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Matthew 1:23 and Psalm 84:5-7, emphasizing that God is with us, especially during difficult times. He explains that while we enjoy God on the mountaintops, we come to know Him intimately in the valleys of life. The sermon encourages believers to seek God's strength, focus their hearts and minds on Him, and understand that peace is found through the valley, not around it. Ultimately, God’s presence provides comfort and strength as we navigate life's challenges.
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What a wonderful job they did this morning. And if you have your Bibles, we're going to be in two passages of Scripture. I'm going to do a three-part little series here at Christmas,
and one of my favorite times of the year. I know some of you celebrate Christmas all year long by listening to Christmas music all year long, and some people like to listen to the weather is cold outside in the middle of the summer, and that's a wonderful thing to do, I guess.
But we're going to be looking at God with us this morning, be in Matthew chapter 1, verse 23, and then we'll be at Psalms chapter 84, verses 5 through 7.
The title that I'm giving this is God with us, and I think you'll see that in just a second.
We're going to stand and read both these passages, and they'll both be on the screen as well. And so if you have your Bibles and you're willing and able to stand, we're going to stand and read out of reverence of God's Word. Matthew chapter 1, verse 23,
it says, See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel, which is translated, God is with us.
And then in Psalms 84, you may not have your place there, but you can look on the screen, verses 5 through 7. It says, Happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose heart are set on a pilgrimage.
As they pass through the valley of Baca, they will make a source of spring water. Even the autumn rain will cover it with blessing. They go from strength to strength, each appear before God in Zion.
Father, we love you this morning. We thank you for your blessings. Pray God that you'd have your will and way in the service. Help me to have the voice and the wisdom this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated. For us as believers,
it is easy for us to believe God on the mountaintop experience.
How many of you, you can take it yourself in your mind and you can go to a place where God has been blessing, things are good, and it may be this year where everything has went perfect, everything has
just went the way that sort of you envisioned it to go, and you have just had a wonderful experience with the Lord this year, and it may be just a season, a small season where that happens. And it's easy for us to trust God in those moments.
Celebrating Small Victories
I think it's something we can all say. Maybe you've got to raise at work. Maybe your team wins.
I see a lot of red in here today. NC State had a good win last week. I waited a week to mention it from state winning against Carolina. Carolina, you had a good week, and those things happen.
Maybe you're a new parent, and you can imagine back to being a new parent, and your kid sleeps through the night for the first time. And you're like, yes, Lord. There is a God in heaven. He loves me.
He showed favor on me today. And my child slept through the night. Maybe it could be as small as you drive up to Walmart, the wonderful place where we all love to shop, and there's a parking spot at the front row. And you say, hallelujah, glory to God.
He looked down on favor upon me today, and I have a parking space in the front row.
Those are small ways, and they may be silly, but they're small ways where we look down and we say, God is blessing. But there are also times where there's difficult times to praise God in the valleys. Maybe it's you're alone and you're scared.
Maybe it's you're hurting or bad news has come. Maybe you look at your marriage and you say, my marriage is on the rocks. Maybe you begin to look and say, my kids are struggling. Maybe it's in school. Maybe it's emotionally or mentally.
Maybe you're looking at your job and you're saying, God, my job is just not bringing me joy and satisfaction the way it used to. Maybe it's a news that was given of a family member who had received cancer or something difficult in a life in our valleys.
You see, valleys are places where battles happen. They're lonely times. They're desperation in moments of life.
Oftentimes, and I got to see this when I was in Israel, their mountain, everywhere there's mountains.
And they would, you can see this in David and Goliath where one came on one top of the mountain and it was like a stone's throw to the other side. And it was, they were calling out each other and the battle happened in the valley of those two mountains.
One person or one group of people said, I want that mountain. And so we're going to battle in the valley for that mountain.
So the valleys were always seen as hard times, but they were times where we experienced growth.
These are times where we build our faith, where our experience of God is completely different than when we're on our mountaintop experiences.
And I put away this in your notes. We enjoy God on the mountains, but we get to know him intimately in the valleys.
You see, it's on the mountaintop experience where we thrive to be there.
We thrive to be on this mountaintop and to say, I want to be like Moses who went up on the top of the mountain, who came down and whose face shone with God's glory.
But then we get to the moment where we come off of that mountain and we're in a valley and it's, God, I don't like being here. It's uncomfortable. It's different.
But it's in those times where I have seen it most in my life where the intimacy with God begins to happen. You see, in this passage of scripture in Psalm chapter 84, which is where we're getting our text from in the valley, there is this valley that's mentioned one time in scripture.
It's not mentioned anywhere else. It's only mentioned in this passage and it says it's the Valley of Baca in verse 6.
Understanding the Valley of Baca
And they passed through the Valley of Baca. The Valley of Baca was a desert country. It was full of thorns and wild animals. Vipers lived in this area. There was danger everywhere they could turn.
And it was nearly impossible to travel through this valley without some type of trouble or hardship coming upon you.
And when they began to hear this verse, the Valley of Baca, you may hear it other places called the Valley of Tears or the Valley of Weeping or the Valley of the Lost Mountain. But these are all places that all deal with difficult times in our life.
And oftentimes it's in the valley that we grow closer to God and we get to the point where we say, God, I need you more. Came across while I was talking with Allie about me preaching through this passage and preaching through this topic.
And she, on the car, I think it was maybe Tuesday, had mentioned a song that I had heard years and years ago. It's an old Southern Gospel song. I like all types of music, but I'm a huge Southern Gospel junkie, Cathedrals fan, Greater Vision, Gold City.
I mean, you can name some Southern Gospel and I'm going to know who they are. But this song came out back in 2003.
And the name of the song is Even in the Valley. And the chorus says it like this, even in the valley, God is good. Even in the valley, he is faithful and true.
He carries his children through. I'm going to go to this green mic, guys. He carries his children through like he said he would. Even in the valley, God is good.
High upon this mountain. Think about this. High upon the mountain, the sun is shining bright.
My heart is filled with gladness and here above the cares of life. But I've just come through the valley.
The trouble and the fear and the pain. And it's there that I came to know my God enough to stand and say, even in the valley, God is good. The road of life has led you to a valley of defeat. You wonder if the Father has heard your desperate plea.
But there is hope in a rugged place where tears of sorrow dwell. Can you hear him gently whispering, I'm here and all is well. Even in the valley, God is good. Even in the valley, he's faithful and true. He carries his children through like he said he would. Even in the valley,
God is good. This morning, church, as we go through the valley, I want us to understand that God is there with us.
We may not be going through a valley right now, but there will be a time in our life where we're going to go through a valley, where we're going to go through a heartache, where we're going to need
The Meaning of Emmanuel
God in an intimate way. That's why I believe when Matthew penned his gospel, when he said that there's going to be a son that's going to be called, and you're going to name him Emmanuel, and his name is going to be God is with us.
It's a great reminder that no matter what we're going through, God is there with us.
And so as we dissect this passage of scripture over the next couple of minutes before we head down and have some food and fellowship time, I want us to understand a couple of things. In the first passage here, it says,
Happy are the people whose strength is in you. In order for us to have this strength that God has given us, we must first seek God's strength.
We must seek the God's strength in our life and in every area of our life. You see, if you're here today, and we talked about this this morning in Sunday school.
If you were in Sunday school, I hope you were here. I hope you are part of a class. It's a great way to grow. But if you are here and you don't know God personally,
you'll never know the piece of the strength that God has given us. You see, the strength that God gives us in our areas is so much stronger than anything that we can ever have or won't. You see, we, when we live in our own strength, we only have what we have.
We have the futility of our own lives where it is subpar from what God has for us. We begin to get exhausted. We're unable to take it anymore.
We begin to live in our own strength and we begin to see that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday, we got up. I got up at 4.30 yesterday morning and we came up here to the church to go to the event up in Transylvania up at Pisgah Forest.
And I got home and, man, about 9.30, 10, it was hard for me to keep my eyes open. I was in my own strength and my own body was beginning to get tired. And this is what happens when we live in our own strength is we begin to get fatigued and tired.
You see, we're created as interdependent people. We are dependent on other things. We are dependent on someone else.
The moment a child is born, you can't just lay that child down and say, all right, time to take care of yourself.
A child has to have a mother and a father, someone that's going to be a caregiver that takes that child up and begins to feed that child and take care of that child and clothe that child and change that child's diaper and be there for that child as they go through their life.
Dependence on God
We are dependent on others. We are also dependent upon God. And we must depend on God in our strength.
When we're weak, when we are unable to figure out where I'm going to go tomorrow, when we get up and we think, God, I just, I don't have the strength to go forward, we look at God and we
look toward God and we say, God, when I am weak, your strength is made perfect. And God, give me the strength today to be able to move forward. As they were saying here, happy are the people whose strength is in you. It's not in me.
It's not in our job. It's not in what we have in these material possessions. But it's in what God has for us.
The second part of verse five, it continues on by saying, whose hearts are set on a pilgrim. You see, we fix our hearts and our mind on God.
Not only do we seek God's strength, but we begin to put our mind and our heart. I added this mind in here because it's such a powerful picture of whose hearts and minds are set on God. And I want to ask this question.
This is a question that sort of wants you to marinate on over the next couple of minutes is this. What is your heart and mind focused on? What are you focused on in your life? What is your mind consumed with? The Philippian writer Paul says it like this.
Finally, brothers and sisters in Philippians 4 verse 8. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. If there's any moral excellences and if there's anything praiseworthy, dwell on these things.
See, what you think about matters. When we go through our life, when we go through difficult times, when we're in the valley, if all we're doing is consumed with the circumstances that are around us, how in the world are we going to focus on
what God has for us? God says in these moments, in the times where there's a pilgrimage and it's hard, we've got to have our heart and mind fixed on him. You see, our circumstances should not determine our mindset. But oftentimes they are. The circumstance will happen.
A difficulty will happen in our life and it's going to determine how we respond. Maybe this has happened to you where you're riding down the road and someone cuts you off.
And this circumstance of someone cutting you off caused this anger or rage to come out of you and you allow the circumstance to determine where your heart is at in that moment. That's a small, silly illustration, but oftentimes this is how life is.
A circumstance comes and God says, remember, focus on me, even when times are difficult, even when times are hard, and we get our eyes and mind off of Christ.
You see, your heart may be anxious this morning, but your mind can be fixed on God. Your soul may be aching this morning, but your mind must be fixed on God. Your emotions may be out of whack, but your mind must be fixed on God.
You may be thinking this morning, Pastor James, there's too much to do. There's too many things to be done. My marriage is in a hard place. My in-laws are coming to town.
I don't know how I'm going to get through it, but I'm determined this morning to have my mind fixed on God.
We see oftentimes in Scripture, and one of the most beautiful pictures of all Scripture is when Jesus is walking on the water, and he's coming to Peter, and Peter says, if it's really you, God, bid me to come out into the ocean. Bid me to come out into the sea.
And as long as Peter was focused on Jesus, everything was okay.
But the moment that Peter began to get his eyes off of Jesus and his eyes on his circumstances around him, did his life begin to go out of whack? Did his life begin to sink into the water?
And did he begin to call out, God, I need your help? Because he got his mind and his eyes focused on the situations that were around him and not the Savior that was in front of him. You see, we must as well fix our hearts and minds on God.
And that's what it says here, how his hearts are set on a pilgrim, on who God is.
And also in number three, the very first part of verse six is, we know that peace is through and not out. We know that peace is through and not out.
Journey Through the Valley
As we find ourselves in the valley, we must tell ourselves that this is not only part of the journey, and it's not the destination of the journey. We must ask ourselves and tell ourselves we are just passing through.
Again, look with me in verse six. It says they pass through the valley of Baca. They're going through this valley.
They know that this is not the destination. It's just part of the journey as they're going to their destination.
They know they've got to go through this valley. It's the only way to get to their destination. They say, God, we've got to go through here. And in order for us to get to our destination, we've got to go through this. There's no way around.
There's no way out of this. But we've got to go through this valley. My mind went to Psalms chapter 23 verse 4, a very familiar passage of scripture.
And listen to the words again. Maybe you haven't heard it like this before. Even when I go through the darkest valley.
It didn't say even when I go around the darkest valley. It doesn't say even when I go over the darkest valley. It says when I go through the darkest valley. I will fear no evil. I will fear no damage. I will fear no danger. For you are with me.
And what comforts us, what gives us peace in the valley is your rod and your staff. Knowing that you are there.
The way in order for these people that were going through this valley was to get to the city of refuge. That they were seeking to get to was to go through this valley.
See, often times we want to get out of the boat too soon. We want to abandon ship when times get tough.
We want to get off the boat. We want to get off the bus. We want to pull the emergency stop button and say, this is too much. I want to get off. I want to get out.
We don't ever make it through the end. And we never make it through that valley of hard times for God to come in and say, I'm going to help you in this situation. If only you would have stayed.
I was reminded as I was thinking through this just now of Jesus on the side of the Sea of Galilee.
As he had just did a miraculous miracle of feeding the 5,000 people. And he was about to go do another miracle where he was going to heal the maniac of Gadara that was demon possessed. And he told his disciples, he said, disciples, we're going to get in a boat.
Trusting Jesus in the Storm
We're going to go through the Sea of Galilee. And we're going to get to the other side. And all the disciples got on the boat. And Jesus went into the boat. And he went to the lower level. And said he grabbed a pillow and laid his head down and decided to take a nap. Naps are biblical.
We should take naps. Jesus took naps. We should take naps, right? Jesus went in. He took a nap. He laid down. The storms began to come. The valley of Baca began to come for the disciples. And what did they do?
We're not going to be able to make it through this. The storm's going to overtake us. The storm's going to overcome us. We can't get through this. We must call out to Jesus. And so they go down and they wake up. Jesus, Jesus, we need your help.
The storm's about to kill us. And Jesus looked at them in this wonderful rebuke. And he said, did I not say that we're going to go to the other side? Do you not even believe? Do you not trust in me? And he rebuked the winds and the waves. And he stopped the storms.
And he said, we are going to the other side. We must go through this storm in order to get there. To get to the city of refuge and to appreciate what God has to offer us when we get there. Sometimes we must go through a valley of tears and heartaches.
Sometimes we've got to go through the hard times in order to appreciate what God has for us when peaceful times come. For many, the valley is a pathway to a place of peace.
Oftentimes we want to subvert the valley, want to subvert what's going on in order to get to the peace.
And we never get to experience it because we avoid the valley. Number five, we dig and God fills. This is an amazing little nugget of truth in this passage.
As we continue, it says, they make a source of spring water. Even in the autumn rain, we'll cover it with blessings. You see, oftentimes in our life, we're going to get to dry spots. We're going to get to dry spells that don't make sense, that don't understand.
The life just doesn't make sense in what's going on.
And David writes here, we must provide a place for God to pour out his blessing to us.
And a place for him to fill it up. One writer said it like this, show me your faith. As we talked about last week, as we looked at our faith, hope, and love. He says, show me your faith. And God says, I'll show you my faithfulness.
You show me how much faith you have. You show me how much you're willing to dig in, and I'll pour out my blessing upon you that you won't be able to understand how big it's going to be. How far are you willing to step out by faith and trust God this morning? How far are you willing to say,
God, I'm willing to step out and say, God, I'm going to trust in you this morning. I don't understand how it's going to happen, but I'm going to step out and trust in you and see what God's going to do in response.
See, as I was thinking through this, I was thinking of Moses. Moses, Moses, who led the children out of Israel and were about to take the children over across the Red Sea, and as he began to bring this millions of people through the desert, he got to the Red Sea,
and he looked to the right-hand side, and there was a mountain range. There's no way he could go to the right.
He looked to the left, and there was another mountain range, and there was no way for him to go to the left. And then the children of Israel began to complain, and they say,
Moses, you led us out into the desert to be killed, and our enemies are behind us, and we can't go behind us, and they're going to come, and they're going to kill us, and you led us out here
for nothing, and we would have been rather just to be left in Egypt to suffer and to die there. And God said, Moses,
stretch out your hand. He said, take the rod that I've been giving you and put it out over the Red Sea and allow me to do a miracle.
How often is it that God asks us to step out by faith like Moses, and we're not willing to even raise our hand as Moses did?
You see, Jesus, he was encountered into many different people, and there was one man specifically that I love the story of the four people who brought this lame man to Jesus.
They ripped open the roof, and they lowered him down to Jesus, and Jesus looked at the lame man, and he said, get up, your sins are forgiven, and walk.
The miracle was that Jesus did these things, but if the man never got up, he would have never been able to walk.
He had to have faith that God was going to perform what God had said he was going to do, and we in the same way must have faith that what Jesus said is also true, and we must trust
God's Promises in Hard Times
in him. He said, He says, you're going to go through the valley, you're going to go through hard times, you're going to go through some difficult times. He says this, if you dig it, I'm going to feel it. If you draw near to me, I'm going to draw near to you. If you seek me,
you're going to find me. If you make room for me, I will reveal myself to you. See, God rarely reveals himself to those people who are rushed. We're a rushed society. We're rushed people.
From the moment we wake up in the morning, and we begin our day, until the moment we lay our head down, we have our schedules jammed, packed. I am one of those guys.
I want to be busy. I want to have things going on. I don't like just to sit around and do nothing. I want to be a person that is busy and out and about and doing things.
And God looks at us and He says, sometimes we must be still and know that I'm God. And that being still is a hard, hard thing for us to do.
Something that I have tried this last year as several spiritual disciplines that I work on every year in my own life of just the spiritual discipline of meditation that the world has taken and abused, but meditating on what God has for us, sitting in silence and thinking about God's word.
You see, when we do that, we understand that as Moses was just being still in the desert as he was taking care of his animals, he walked upon this burning bush. This burning bush he would have never experienced.
He would have never seen if he was busy, and he didn't take time just to notice the things that were around him, but because he was patient and understanding, and he was understanding that God was going to be
there for him, he revealed himself in this moment. And we, in the same way, must trust that God's going to take care of it. We must meditate on God and prepare ourselves for the presence of God. Just taking time and meditating on God's word and meditating on the scripture.
And then the last thing we're going to look at this morning is in verse seven is we must live in God's power. We must live in God's power. They go from strength to strength. Each appears before God in Zion.
In order for this to happen, they had to have gone through the valley of Baca. For them to stand before God there in Zion,
before the place of peace, before the place of worship that they were going to go to, they had to go through this valley. The beautiful picture that we get to see from this is we never have to go through the valley alone.
Community Support in Valleys
God is there with us. We have people that are around us, a community of people that are around us that we get to go through the valley with us. So whether it's a dark storm or a troubled time or a time where we're weak, God said he's there for us. As we looked at this morning,
he is the light in our darkness. He is the peace in our storm. He is the joy in our trouble and he is the strength when you are weak. This morning, church, we're going to be weak. Our own strength is going to fail us.
And God says, if you just trust in me, I'll strengthen you. There's going to be times where you're going to be joyless in the situations that God on purpose puts us through. And he says, if you can just trust in me in those times, I will bring joy out of your troubles.
I will bring joy out of your valleys. As Terry comes in place for us, as we begin to contemplate some things in our mind, as I want to recap of, oftentimes we enjoy God on the mountains.
But very few times do we experience the valleys that God wants us to go through in order for us to get to know him better. We want to experience God so often in the mountains and we pray for those mountaintop experiences and I thank God that we have them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying avoid the mountaintop experience. Enjoy the mountaintops that God gives us.
But at the same time, enjoy the valleys that God gives us. Enjoy the times where we get to know him more. We get to know him more intimately than we can ever experience.
You see, when I was going into my junior year of high school, the year before I surrendered to preach, God had been working in my life for many, many different years.
Our church was growing, our youth group was growing. In the span of about four or five years, five different young people in our church had surrendered to preach or to go into ministry. God was working in a miraculous mountaintop experience. And going into my junior year, my mom left my dad.
My mom decided that the lifestyle that she was going to live was going to be better than the family that God had given her. And in those moments, I cried more in that year than I've probably ever cried in my entire life.
But it was through that year and through understanding God's goodness and God's grace and God working in my life in a miraculous way that I understand who God is and what he's there for us.
I would not be the person I am today if I didn't go through that valley. I don't wish that valley on anyone.
I don't want anyone to go through what I went through, but God saw fit for me to go through that, for me to grow closer to him in that moment. And in those moments, I sought for God's strength.
I focused my mind and my heart and my vision on what God had for us, not what the world had for me. And I didn't physically do this.
I didn't physically have this passage of scripture there, but I began to dig different places and saying, God, if you're really God, I'm going to, by faith, step out and dig a well and say, you fill it up. God, you fill this void in my heart.
God, you fill this bitterness that I've got toward my mom. You fill it up with joy and love and graciousness towards other people. And God says, if you'll just trust in me,
God's Ever-Present Spirit
I'll be there for you. Psalms 139, I'll end with this passage of scripture, verses seven through 10. It says this, where can I go to escape your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to heaven, you're there. If I make my bed in Sheol or hell, you are there. If I fly on the wings of dawn and settle down in the western horizon, even there your hand will lead me. Your right hand will hold on to me.
See, we cannot see God, but he sees us. The psalmist did not desire to go from the Lord because he said, where can I go?
In the most distant corners of the world, in heaven or in hell, he said, your reach is there. No veil can hide us from God. There's no thickness of darkness that can distinguish who we are or who he is.
It's only through the true light of God that we see him. The secrets haunt us and the different things that we go through haunt us all the time. And he says this, on the other hand, we as believers cannot be removed from God's supporting hand. His comfort and presence is always with us.
We just have to ask ourselves, are we willing to live in the presence of God?
God, even when we go through the valley, are we willing to dig in and press in and say, God, I don't care about the situation. I may not be happy with the situation, but I'm going to continue to press in to what you have for me in my life.
Whatever may be this morning, maybe you're living in your own strength. Maybe your eyes are focused on the circumstances that are around us and not focused on God.
Maybe you just need to come and recommit your life to God and say, God, I want to live in your power. I want to live in what you have for me. Maybe this morning, we're just not living faithful lives toward Christ.
We're not living in a life that is faithfully trusting him in the situations that God puts us in.
Whatever it may be, I don't know why God led me to this passage this week as I began studying, but when we go through the valleys, we must understand that God is there with us. When we go through heartaches and difficult times, God says, go through them
in order to come out on the other side and appear before God in Zion.
Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for your blessings. God, I pray that you would just have your will and way in the service this morning. In your name we pray. Amen.
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