Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Psalm 133, emphasizing the beauty and blessings of biblical unity among God's people. He highlights that unity is essential for experiencing God's blessings and reflects a glimpse of heaven on earth. The sermon encourages listeners to actively promote and protect unity within their families and church, reminding them that true unity fosters joy, strength, and a powerful witness to the world.
Welcome and Introduction
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms.
These couple of verses, Psalms 133 is only three verses. You may look at your paper and say, how did you get all these notes out of three verses? The Lord does mysterious and wonderful things with us and through us.
I promise you, I won't be too long. We have a business conference today, and we've got a lot going on as well. But Psalms 133,
I know you just stood, but we'll stand again. I read to God's Word, and we'll read these three verses and jump right into the message today. The Bible says this,
Psalms 133, verses 1, How good and pleasant is it when brothers live together in harmony?
It is like a fine ool on the head, running down its beard, running down Aaron's beard, onto his robes.
It's like the dew of Hermon, falling on the mountains of Zion. For there is the Lord, has appointed its blessings and life forevermore.
Lord, we love you, and thank you for the reading of your Word. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated. When people, specifically God's people, dwell in biblical unity, they experience what we call God's blessings. God's blessings are not abstract. They're not hard to find or know.
But we can begin to see this through this passage we're going to look at. That we also display God's character in our life. And really the beautiful part about having unity among brothers and sisters,
biblical unity, is we get a small glimpse of what heaven's going to look like one day. In heaven, we're all going to be worshiping Jesus. We're all going to see him and his glory. We're going to see what he did for us.
And we're going to see who we worship here in invisible. We get to see visible.
And we get to have a small glimpse on earth of what that's going to look like one day in heaven. This psalm, Psalm 133, if you have a study Bible or any type of Bible that notes different things, you're going to see there a song of ascent of David.
And what that means is these are specific psalms that they would sing as they were going from their homeland.
So the youth asked me this morning a question about Capernaum and about what was going on there.
And so if they were coming from Capernaum, they would have these psalms that they would read and they would praise the Lord through these songs as they ascended up to Jerusalem.
So as they're going to the mountain, as they're going to worship God, as they're going to the Passover festival, these are some of the things that they would say as they were going together in this unifying moment of
Unity Among Diverse Tribes
ascending up. And so think about it for a moment. These are different tribes.
All 12 tribes were all going together up into one. These were different occupations, different backgrounds, different personalities, and they're all heading to the same place for the same purpose.
And that purpose was to worship the same God. And when David stepped back and as he's seeing this ascent, as he's seeing what's going on, this is what he writes down. How beautiful or delightful is it when brothers live together in harmony?
And I think this is a beautiful picture because I'm sure there were no conflicts in what was going on.
I'm sure there wasn't a dad that said, boys, if you don't listen and you don't pay attention, I'm going to knock your teeth out. I'm sure the dad never said that as they were walking up this mountain, as they were going to Jerusalem.
I'm sure in modern day, in first century Christianity, as they were going up this mountain, there were some conflicts.
There were little boys, just like there's little boys today, that misbehave and do things that are wrong.
I'm sure that not everyone agreed on everything. I'm sure as they were stopping to have lunch and mom pulled out the manna or the chicken, the fried chicken from KFC, I'm sure the little boy in the back seat said, mom, I don't want that. We had chicken yesterday.
Why can't we have something different? And I'm sure there was some type of conflict and everyone didn't agree.
But what bonded them into unity was not where they were at or their thoughts or their purposes, but it was because they were all bound in one accord going to see this God that they were going to worship in truth and in purpose.
You see, a church can have a crowd and not have unity. A family can share a house and be in disunity.
And you may have been in a house that was disunity. And you had a mom and a dad, but everyone disagreed with everyone and everyone had conflicts and there was no such thing as a unifying house. But a ministry also can have activity and not be in unity.
A church can have activity and not be in unity. And David says this as he's looking at this and we are looking backwards in time and we're looking at how David writes this in the Psalms. And he says this,
unity is precious and more precious than we realize. Because it says how delightfully good is it when brothers live in unity or harmony. And so what are the blessings of unity? First one, we're going to break this down.
The Beauty of Harmony
How delightfully good is it when brothers live in harmony? David begins with this exclamation.
He is overwhelmed with the beauty of what he sees. It's like looking out into a sea of people.
And I'm sure you saw this if you were watching the news or any type of celebration. Even yesterday on the 4th of July with the 250th anniversary, you had different people from different tribes all in one place watching fireworks,
going and having cookouts. Maybe you watched Joey Chestnut eating like 7,500 hot dogs in like two minutes.
I mean, there were different people of all different tribes and we were in unity in one moment watching what was going on in America. No one was like, hey, what's your social?
Where are you at in your tax code? Are you at this level or are you at this level? Oh, you're at that level.
You need to get behind me. No, we're all together and we're worshiping. We're loving. We're celebrating America in this mindset.
And all of a sudden, this is David looking into this same thing and saying, how delightfully good is this? How beautiful is this unity?
So what are some of the blessings of this unity? The first is this, a divine blessing. He says, how good.
When we hear this word good, your mind should automatically go, maybe it doesn't, but your mind should go to this idea that when God made the world, he said it was good. When he made the animals, he said they were good.
When he made the people and the trees, he said it was very good. As God is making creation, he is declaring this work of goodness.
And so unity is not something that we invent as man. I cannot invent or create unity.
I can try to give the broad scopes of what unity is, but only through God working in our families, working in our churches, working in what we do brings this unity into what God has purposed for our church
and our family. The church is not held together by a person. The church is not held together by preferences or programs. We are held together by Christ and Christ alone.
As we sang this morning, as our choir sang, is it in Christ alone that we have a hope. It is not in man. It is not in what we have or what we don't have. And we pray.
I pray as your pastor for God's blessings in everything we do to be a unified people.
We were at camp this past week and you saw a picture of the kids around a campfire. And they're around that big campfire.
And there's a moment in the campfire, it happens every year, where the campfire is burning. And as the little logs inside of it begin to burn and fall, the structure of the teepee just sort of collapses. And all the kids are like, oh, what just happened? And it reminded me of this.
While those sticks are all in unity and burning together, the fire was bright. But as soon as it collapses and some of those sticks begin to be disconnected from the pile, the fire was not burning as bright as it could before. And this is what happens when Christians are together. We burn bright.
Our community sees that we're burning bright. We see that we're doing things that are on mission together. And all of a sudden, as the disunity begins to happen, the fire and the brightness of our lives begins to diminish because we are no longer in a unifying moment.
Actions Affecting Church Unity
I want to ask you, are your actions strengthening the unity of the church? Or are your actions straining the unity of the church?
Are you bringing about this unity that needs to happen? Or is it what you're doing pulling and stretching the unity to the point where there's no longer this unity that we have? Because there is this blessing that we have, the divine blessing from God.
But there's also this delightful blessing. It says, how delightfully good is it? David is using this word as a pleasant or a joyful moment. When unity happens, it is joyful.
You have been in the room before. You have been in the car before where you're riding down the road. Maybe you're on a long road trip. And you go for maybe three or four hours. And the kids are quiet. They're getting along. And you're like, this is wonderful.
Like, what happened? Did someone stab someone and someone died back there? And so they're trying to hide it. Like, why is it wonderful? And why is it quiet right now? Because when we dwell in unity, it is a pleasing, joyful thing.
And you've been in the car as well where there has been constant conflicts. And mom has to change the seats and go to the back. And she's going to have to discipline them.
Or we have to pull over. And we've got to discipline the kids. Like, you don't want to be in those situations.
And God is saying, this is a delightful blessing when we create this unity, when we're in this unity that creates joy. I'm telling you, as your pastor, it encourages me more than everything to see God's people genuinely love one another in a way that is a biblical unity.
Now, on the flip side of that, nothing will discourage you, me as a pastor, more than to see constant conflict and fighting.
And I believe this is why David writes this, because it's natural for us to have our own preferences. It's natural for us to not want to live in unity, because as Terry was saying this morning,
Satan wants to come in and create this disunity. He wants to put these thoughts in our heads to where, are you really right? Is he really right?
Is he really doing these things in the right way? And he brings in this disunifying moment where it begins to cause division to happen in and of the church and the family.
The same is true in the church. God wants us to be perfectly in unification together.
You've been to the family reunions where one brother has to sit on one side and the other brother has to sit on the other side. And if they even get naturally close to each other, is the fight about to happen?
There's a lady that's 94 years old, maybe older than that now. She lives right down the road from my house. She went to my last church. And when her husband died,
the two brothers told each other that when mom died, they were going to kill each other. They have not seen each other in like 10 years.
Both of them have had family members that have died and neither one of them have come to the funerals because if they came to the funerals, they would kill each other.
I don't know what the conflict is between them, but I believe that the reason, and I'm saying this sort of tongue-cheek, but I really believe the reason that mom is still alive is because she's afraid if she dies, they're going to kill each other.
And so she is forcing herself to stay alive to bring unity to this family because as long as she's there, there's unity.
And she knows as soon as I'm not here, the unity's gone.
And all of a sudden, we begin to see this sometimes in the church and we begin to see this sometimes even in the children of Israel.
As David is writing this, you can imagine how this children of Israel, as they're going up to this place where they're going to worship God, are in disunity. And David is saying, we need to have this unity.
Not only is there a delightful blessing, but there is a distributed blessing. Look at what it says, brothers living together. Together, blessings do not stop with us.
The unity now begins to affect everyone around us. When the church walks in harmony and in unity, worship is strengthened. Ministry is beginning to be multiplied. Evangelism is going out and people are hearing about God and people are hearing about what the church is doing.
Strengthening Families Through Unity
And the biggest thing that can be the best distributed blessing that we can see is families begin to be strengthened and families begin to be encouraged because we begin to love and care for one another.
We begin to care for what is going on when we begin to say, hey, I'm struggling in this area. I'm struggling.
What's going on? Can you help me? And we begin to rally around one another and begin to love one another. And we begin to show the love of Jesus to one another.
And when this happens, this is where the people on the outside begin to look in and say, there's something different going on. There's something encouraging going on over there. And I want to go and see what is going on. Jesus said it like this,
by this, all men will know that you're my disciples by how you love one another.
He doesn't say, everyone's going to know you're my disciple by how you give.
He doesn't say, everyone's going to know you're my disciple by how you show up on a Sunday morning. He doesn't even say, by this, all men are going to know you're my disciple by how much you can sing and praise and lift your voice.
He says, everyone's going to know you're my disciple because you have love one to another. There's unity among us.
And when we begin to love one another and care for one another, it brings in this ability for others to see what is going on.
Think of a pond that's completely still. And you begin to throw a rock into the middle of that pond and the ripples begin to go out more and more and more. And it affects the entire pond that's there.
This is what is happening when we begin to make a splash of unity in the church.
It begins to ripple around to every single person that's here. And more and more people want to be unified. And it creates a kingdom multiplication of what is going on in our church. Not only is it a distributed blessing, but it's also, number four, a durable blessing.
David is giving us a glimpse of something greater. As I said in my opening statements, unity among God's people points us to heaven. Revelation says that every tribe, every tongue,
every nation is going to gather together and they're going to worship the one true and living God. One people worshiping one king forever and ever.
One commentator said it like this, what we will enjoy perfectly in heaven, we should be pursuing passionately here on earth. What we enjoy perfectly in heaven, we should be pursuing passionately here on earth.
The church is simply a rehearsal party for what's going to happen one day in heaven.
You've been to rehearsal parties. I've been to these rehearsal parties for weddings and the wedding comes and the main event's there.
But before the main event happens, the bridal party gets in and the husband gets in and the bride gets in and the wedding director gets in and the mother-in-law or the mom, the bridezilla shows up and it's crazy and it's chaos and everyone wants it their way.
And somehow in that hour, hour and a half, we make it through that wedding rehearsal. We knock out all the kinks and then the wedding party comes in the next day. And it's like, it's flawless. Everyone comes where they're supposed to be. Everyone's perfect. Everyone's smiling.
The bride comes in. Everyone's excited for what's going on.
God is telling you, telling us how we're practicing here on earth should be an exemplification of how it's going to be one day in heaven.
When we stand before God and we say, God, I've worshipped you here on earth and I can't wait to sit before you and sit before your throne and worship you in heaven.
Are we preparing ourselves for eternity by preparing ourselves to learn how to love God now in through his blessings that he has given us?
Number two in verses two through three, he gives us the beauty of unity. And David gives two word pictures. That's why I love some of David's writings.
And my wife tells me all the time I should preach more of the Psalms because the Psalms are so beautifully written. But he gives us two very vivid word pictures that I don't really have to explain well, but I'm going to because this is what we're doing.
He gives us two of these beautiful pictures of unity. The first is this, the consecrating oil.
He says that it's like fine oil on the head, running down the beard, running down Aaron's beard onto his robe. Now the sacred anointing oil is what he's talking about here. This oil was not cheap oil. It was very expensive. It was very fragrant. It was holy.
And it tells us that the unity in the churches is precious. Not everyone has this.
Not everyone has this unity that we seek to have. Not everyone is going to have this, but it's telling us that it can happen and it can be a spiritual unity among other people. Unity is precious, but unity is also how he puts this in this word picture. It's all encompassing.
When we have unity in our life, it encompasses our entire life. Look at how he describes it. Look at the repetition. It's on the head. It goes down the beard. And then he even throws in.
It's running down Aaron's beard. I think this is why it's biblical for me to have a beard, even though Pat tells me I shouldn't. It begins to go onto the robes. You can even imagine this picture.
It's going down his robes onto his feet. It's going everywhere on his body. The blessings just continue to flow because true unity reaches every part of the church's life.
It starts at the head. It starts at putting the oil on the head, Christ himself, and it's running down the face of Christ. It's running onto the robes.
It's running even to the feet of the church. And if we are drenched in this oil of unity, it begins to bring the entire church into one beautiful picture of being so encompassed with this beauty of unity that we come together and we say, God, I can't help but be in unification.
I can't help but want to love someone else. Even though I don't agree with everything, even though I don't agree with how they're doing things or what they're doing, can we just have this love one toward another?
The second thing we see here in verse 3 is the refreshing dew. He says that it's like a dew of Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion. Now, for us here in America, we're like, okay, cool. Dews of Hermon, mountains of Zion. I don't even know what that means. Okay?
This is why it's beautiful to know and to be able to see the Holy Lands because you understand that Hermon is known for its abundant moisture that happens. Something we haven't had this year. Lots of rain, lots of dew. Mount Hermon was this life-giving dew.
Mount Hermon was the place that they knew when they go, they're going to get refreshed.
They're going to see green grass. They're going to see green trees. They're going to see mist in the air. But when you talk about Zion, Zion was dry. Zion was in the middle of a desert. It had no refreshing to it.
People that were shepherds would not take their sheep to Zion because they would die there because there was nothing there. And look at what he says. It's like the dew of Mount Hermon falling on the mountain of Zion.
Look at this picture. It says, listen, unity brings refreshment to people who are weary, who have been battling their work week, who have been on a battlefield, who just feel like life is just pointless.
It's like the dew of Mount Hermon. It just begins to fall in this desert place over here. He says this is what unity begins to bring. It begins to bring renewal and refreshing to people's lives.
And all of a sudden, when we begin to bring nourishing growth to other people, discipleship follows.
Discipleship of one another begins to grow. And all of a sudden, God brings this work of renewal. And this statement that I read this week rocked my world. It said this. God often works most powerfully where believers are walking together.
As believers are walking in unity and walking in one accord, God begins to work more powerfully in those areas than anything else. We see the disciples sitting in the upper room. And we're going to look at that in just a minute. And we see God's blessings falling on them.
As a person that doesn't make any plants, I don't grow anything. I can't even grow grass this year because it's not raining. I do understand this. If you don't have healthy soil, you're not going to have healthy plants.
It's sort of this common thing, right? If you don't ever fertilize, if you don't take care of your weeds, if you don't do this, your grass and your plants are going to fail to grow. Christians as well grow best when we are in healthy, unifying friendships who love the Lord.
Number three, as we look into the New Testament of the practice of unity. Very quickly, I want us to think about Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47.
Psalms 133 begins to lay out what unity and truth look like. And then we fast forward three, four thousand years later to a New Testament illustration in the early church. Now, I'm not going to preach this. I've already preached this portion of this passive scripture last year.
But I want us to look at what it lays out practically in the lives of the church. When we're in unity, the Bible says that we are devoted to a couple of things.
I'm going to read that for us in Acts chapter 2. It says this in verse 42.
Now they were devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship to breaking of bread and prayer. And everyone was filled in awe.
Many wonders and signs were being performed throughout the apostles. And now all believers were together and held all things in common. And as we begin to walk through this, I believe that when we are people who are unified, we will be devoted to a couple of things. The first is this.
We'll be devoted to the same truth. They were devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.
Unity begins to build on the truth of the gospel. It does not build on compromise. I want us to understand this. Just because we are unified in one truth doesn't mean I have compromised what I have believed in order to grow closer to someone.
Biblical Unity Defined
Biblical unity is not everyone lowering their convictions, but everyone giving up their convictions to what the Bible is saying is true.
And when we want to be together, we are simply saying I'm going to submit my will to God's will. I'm going to submit my truth, what I believe is truth, to what God says is truth. And sometimes our truth is different than God's truth.
Sometimes we want to believe certain things, and unfortunately, the Bible can wreck our theology.
Many times in my life, I have been proved wrong looking at the Bible where I thought what I believed was what the Bible said. And then all of a sudden, I started reading the Bible and practicing the Bible and saying, God, what are you saying here? And it's like,
hold on, this is different than what I believe. I believe something different. I'm wrong, and the Bible's right.
This is where unity comes in because we are devoting ourselves to God's word, and our scripture is beginning to shape our relationships within the church. So not only were they devoted to the same truth, they were devoted to the same fellowship. The word fellowship here means sharing life together.
Rather, not just sitting in the same room, but sharing our burdens, sharing our victories, sharing our struggles. I love it.
I love it. I love it when people call me and say, Pastor James, I'm struggling in this area. Can you help me?
Can you just send someone by, or could you come by? Or they say, you know what? I've got this victory. I've got to tell you about this thing. Like when Caleb, the other day, he said, you know, I just want to praise the Lord for losing 30 more pounds. That's a victory.
We get to share it together.
It may seem insignificant to some people, but for him, it's a huge thing. And so we should share those victories. We should be rejoicing in those things together.
If I were to walk up here today and say, you know what? I'm going to put a pile of bricks in front of the altar this morning. This is going to be a building.
Everyone in here would look at you and say, Pastor James, that's ridiculous. A pile of bricks does not equal a building. You could pick up one brick and say, is this a building? No.
But if I put all those bricks together with mortar and I leveled them all up and I was not good at masonry, if I put them all together into a connected, seamless wall, you would say, yeah, yeah, we're starting to see a building there.
And God is telling us we cannot just be attending or practicing.
We've got to be connected in fellowship in order for us to be unified together.
And so they were devoted to the same truth. They were devoted to the same fellowship. Number three, they were devoted to the same table. It says that they were breaking of bread. Unity, I believe this more than anything, is built and shaped around meals and remembering Christ.
That's why I like to eat together as a church. That's why I like to be together as a church. I model this on my own family. Every night, we try to the best of our ability, unless ballgames happen,
but 300 days out of the 365 days of the year, I could probably safely say that me and my family are sitting around a table and we're having a meal together at night. We're sharing how things went. We're talking about the burdens that they're going through.
They're big burdens for an eight-year-old. They're little, tiny burdens for a dad that's 37 years old that's got bills and life and church. But I sit down and I say, Hudson, what's going on in your life? Well, Haddon at school was mean to me today, Dad.
Well, that's a big burden for him, but it's not so big for me.
And so we begin to walk through some things and we begin to work through some things. And I continue to remind him who Jesus is and how Jesus loves him and how Jesus cares for him and how Jesus died for him because we're unified around a table.
And this is why it's so important as the disciple says that they were devoted around the same table because it reminds us that we have more in common than we believe.
And when we sit at a table together, it begins to show us that the ground is completely level at the cross.
The burdens we have, the difficulties we have, the struggles we have are brought together to the cross.
And God says, now you're around one another who can encourage you and love you and care for you. And then it begins to lay out the last thing they were devoted to. They were devoted to the same prayer. And it says, and the prayers that they had.
Nothing will unify a church more than God's people praying together in one accord, seeking God's face together.
I'm telling you, it is difficult to remain divided when you fall on your face in front of a group of people and you say, God, I need you to work in my life. I need you to work in our church's life and our family's life.
And you begin to pray together for them and with them.
You begin to see God working in your life because you are devoted to praying together.
Closing Thoughts on Unity
Who in our church are you continually to pray for? As Terry comes and closes us in worship, as we play a song of invitation, I want us to begin to think through a couple of things. Psalms 133 begins with a declaration.
That declaration, as you can imagine in the Declaration of Independence, it's that same declaration, right?
How beautiful it is for God's people to work together in unity. He then ends with a promise. And this is the last part of chapter Psalms 133 that I didn't read. For there the Lord has appointed the blessing, life forevermore. The blessing is now commanded, not because there was perfection.
You see, I was told as I was growing up in life that if I was a perfect little boy, I would get the blessings of the Lord.
If I did everything perfectly, if I had the right haircut, if I wore the right clothes, if I did everything with the perfectness of Christ, then God's blessing would be poured onto me.
Nowhere in this passage does it say we have to be perfect. It says because Christ was perfect, he anointed the blessing for life evermore.
Many of us say, you know, if I'm popular enough, if I reach the right status in life, that's where I'll begin to see God's blessing. It doesn't say that here. Maybe people in here will say,
if I get the right amount of money in my 401k, if I get the right prosperity in my life, then I'll receive the correct blessings of the Lord. All he is telling us to do is to seek the Lord's face and we live forevermore.
As I said earlier, Satan wants us to be divided. The flesh loves division. Pride in and of ourselves, we love division. But Christ comes in and he says,
I delight in unity. I want our people to be unified together, to be loving one another together so that all men would look and say, there is something different there and I've got to go find out what it is.
So I want to ask you this morning, are you protecting unity? Are you promoting unity in your family and in the church?
And are you personally pursuing unity so that you can look and say, I want to be the one that drives unity, that I want to be the one that drives harmony in our churches so that I can be the one that leads by example.
You see, when we get to heaven, we're going to all dwell in harmony. The world gets a glimpse of what heaven's going to look like by looking at us. Are we experiencing God's perfect unity here on earth as we get to dwell here with brothers and sisters?
Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Help us this morning as we become a unified people. Some may say, yes, we are unified people. And I believe we are.
But I believe there's room for more unity. I believe there's room for more growth. I believe there's more room for more of us to love one another and share the burdens that we have. God, help us to grow closer to you by growing closer to one another this morning. We love you.
In your name we pray. Amen. Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week.
Auto-generated transcript · 5,748 words. May contain errors. Select a timestamp to play from that moment.
More from Summer of Psalms
View all
Psalms 51
Psalms 150
Psalms 110
Psalms 76
Psalms 63
Psalms 127
Listen to this sermon