When anxiety magnifies life’s distractions and peace feels out of reach, Psalm 27 shows us the way back to the “one thing” that matters most. In this episode of Fortifying Your Family, discover how shifting your focus from many things to the One who never changes brings a steady soul and unshakable confidence no matter what storms arise.

Checkout these other Family Fortress Ministries Podcasts:

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Welcome to the Fortifying youg Family Podcast.

It can be daunting to navigate through an anti marriage and family culture.

Our teacher will expound biblical principles to help fortify our families and keep these sacred institutions strong.

And now, here's this week's teaching from Sam Wood.

Unless you understand, the reason that we get anxious is because little things become one things in our life and become the focus of our life.

Unless we really grasp this, we'll be full of fear and anxiety and worry when trouble comes our way.

So the question is really, as we think about this, how do we make God make sure God remains the one thing in our life?

How do we make sure that God remains the one thing in our life?

In verse four, David says there are two things we need to do to dwell in the house of the Lord.

To make sure that God remains the one thing in our life, we need to gaze at his beauty and we need to seek him his temple.

If you want God to be your one thing, then you have to gaze at his beauty and seek him in his temple.

In verses 8 through 10, David says, Show me your face.

And in verse 11 through 14, he says, Teach me your ways.

This is the same thing as gazing on his beauty and seeking him in his temple.

So let's consider them for a second.

What does he mean by gazing at his beauty?

What does it mean to gaze on the beauty of God?

To gaze means to continually look at something or someone for a very, very long time.

So to gaze at God's beauty means to have uninterrupted communion with God.

To have uninterrupted communion with God.

This is a difference in knowing about God and really knowing God.

It's a difference in knowing about him intellectually and knowing about God experientially.

One of Augustine's writing, he shares what it really means to actually see God or gaze on his beauty.

He says there are three parts to gazing on God's beauty.

This is good.

Hope you'll write this down.

I think this has been so meaningful to me.

I've been meditating, reflecting on this psalm over the last year.

He said there are three parts to gazing on God's beauty.

He says there's retentio, complatio and dilectio.

Now, I'm not going to tell you how to spell that, but let's look at those and I think you can see what those words mean.

Retentio, he says, is finding truth or getting truth from the word of God.

Retentio is a word for Retain or to retain the Word of God in your life.

You see the truth of the Word of God.

You learn the truth from the Word of God.

You know it and you retain it in your mind, you retain it in your heart.

But Augustine says you can't stop there.

Once you get to the truth, once you see that God is holy, for example, once you see that God is wise, you don't just close your Bible at that time.

You move from retentio to complatio, which means to contemplate.

Or you move from retaining the Word of God in your heart, in your mind, to contemplating on that truth of the Word of God that God has shown to you.

You gaze, listen at God through the truth of the Word of God.

That means you start to ask yourself questions when you read the Bible.

What does this verse tell me about God?

What is this verse saying to me about God?

How is this verse describing God to me?

What does it show me about God?

What does it show me about how marvelous he is, how holy he is, how righteous he is, how loving he is?

Do I really understand it?

You start asking yourself questions like this, am I living it out?

You're contemplating, you're meditating on the Word of God.

You're turning it over and over in your heart, in your mind, and you're thinking about the truth that you just read, that you've retained in your heart.

You're contemplating upon it.

What Augustine means is this is a discipline of the mind in which you're reaching out and you're actually saying, God, I want to see your face.

You do what Paul says in Ephesians, chapter one and verse 18.

And I preached on this several months ago on Sunday night, if you remember the verses in verse 18 of chapter one, he said, the eyes of your understanding, a heart being enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of your calling, what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us?

Ward, who believes that?

You don't know about it, but you really know it.

You know it experientially because you have meditated upon it, because you have contemplated.

You're not just reading the Bible mechanically, but you're taking time to read the Word of God, to gaze into the Word of God, to see the beauty of God in His Word, to contemplate on the beauty of God.

Then there's the third thing that he mentions, to retain it, to contemplate on it.

And then he says, there's delectio which means to delight in it.

To delight in it.

Wow.

Let me ask you a question this morning.

Don't give me an answer, but I want to ask you a question this morning.

Have you ever read the Word of God?

Read something in the Word of God, you begin to contemplate what you just read.

You begin to meditate on what you just read.

And all of a sudden it brings a smile to your face and it brings joy to your heart.

And you begin to delight in the Word of God.

Hope you can say yes to that.

I know I've been riding down the road at times, and it's like the Holy Spirit would bring a verse up to me that I've been studying or reading.

And it's like all of a sudden I began to see something in it I never saw before.

And I began to just kind of sing to God.

I began to delight in God's beauty.

We know what it means to gaze at something, all of us do.

We gaze at things all the time.

But unfortunately, we don't spend much time gazing at God.

I mean, we might gaze at the possibility of a new home.

We were in the Northwest, and we saw some of the most beautiful scenery you can see in the United States.

And I've often been.

I've been up to many times, and I've thought to myself, what would it be like to have a home sitting right there, right beside the water, right there right at the foot of this beautiful mountain.

And then when we begin to gaze and think about that, we begin to imagine it in our mind.

You know what I'm talking about, don't you?

We begin to imagine what that would be like to us in our mind.

Listen, if you're single, maybe you're gazing on the beauty of a certain relationship and you think about what life would be like if you just had him, Just had her.

You gaze on the beauty of it.

You fill your mind with it.

You begin to taste it, and you begin to even rest in it.

But, folks, listen.

Unfortunately, as I said, we often gaze on many things in this life, but we don't take time to gaze on the beauty of God.

I believe this is what it means.

And I've preached messages on both of these verses.

And it came to my mind even as I was studying this morning.

In Isaiah, chapter 26, verse 3, when it says, that will keep him in perfect peace.

Whose mind is what stayed on God.

That word stayed means to lean upon or to gaze upon the beauty of God.

Then I think of the verse in Isaiah 50 and verse 10, where it asks a question, who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness and hath no light?

Then it says this, let him trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his.

God said, if you want to have perfect peace, if you want to be free of fear and worry and anxiety, then take time to lean your mind on God.

Take time to claim the Word of God in your heart, to meditate and contemplate on the Word of God, and then to delight in it.

That's exactly what David is talking about here.

Wow.

Augustine said, what you're looking for in the ocean, what you're looking for in the horse, what you're looking for in the music, what you're looking for in a beautiful face.

We need beauty in order to settle ourselves down.

We need beauty to be satisfied, to experience pleasure, and to deal with the restlessness and churn inside ourselves.

But listen to this.

Only God's beauty will do it.

Only God's beauty will do it.

Let me ask you a very important question here this morning.

Are you taking time in your life to gaze at the beauty of God?

Are you taking time, are you setting aside time to gaze at the beauty of God, to see God through His truth and meditate on that truth, contemplate that truth and and delight in that truth that God has shown to me?

But not only do we need to gaze at his beauty, we also need to seek Him.

David doesn't just say, I want to gaze on your beauty, God, but I want to seek him in his temple.

The word seek is a very specific Hebrew word that means to go to and get counsel from.

So David is saying, I don't want to just gaze at your beauty, but I want to go to you and I want to get counsel from you.

What David is saying is, when I come into your temple, I'm seeking you to find out what your will is so I can please you.

I want to obey you, God, above anything else.

As I gaze upon your beauty, as I meditate in your word, as I delight in in your presence, it constrains me to want to obey you.

It constrains me to do your will.

It constrains me to obey what your will is for my life.

Let me try to illustrate this in marriage, since I deal with marriage a lot.

You know, in marriage you gaze, at least I hope you do, at each other's beauty.

I mean, I gaze at the beauty of my wife a lot.

I'm embarrassing her.

I Think, wow, God has given me such a beautiful wife, and I'm so thankful for that.

And maybe some of you wives can even look at your husband and say, well, maybe he's not beautiful, but I gaze at him sometimes.

Your spouse.

Listen, Debbie is my best friend.

Hope, your spouse is your best friend.

I have intimate conversation with Debbie I don't have with anybody else.

I have communication with her I don't have with anybody else.

I have intimate communion with her I don't have with anybody else.

But because I really love her.

Because you love your husband or because you love your wife, you're always looking for ways to serve them.

I know I do.

I take pleasure.

Listen, I take pleasure in seeing my wife have pleasure.

So I continually look for ways that I might find in my life that I can serve her, that will give her pleasure because I love her.

But if you're a selfish spouse, if you're a selfish husband or selfish wife, and you don't take time to learn what your husband and wife's needs are, what their desires are, if you won't serve them in the little things day in and day out, it'll be the end of your intimacy.

You can't live selfishly.

You can't just walk around the house every day doing everything you want and never consider them, never try to serve them, and then expect to have a wonderful time of gazing at her, his beauty.

It just doesn't work that way in relationship.

If you want intimacy, if you want to gaze on the beauty of another person, if you want to commune with that person you love, you also have to find out what pleases that person so you can serve them and do it.

Listen, to gaze on God's beauty without seeking his will will never work.

You need to do both.

So how do I seek his will?

You seek his will by reading your Bible, by taking time to go to the Lord in prayer.

You seek his will by, even as I said a while ago, meditating upon what you read.

You seek his will by being generous and not stingy with what God has given to us.

I know Brother Mark mentioned this morning how when we was in back in the back part of the building, how blessed we are, folks.

We are so blessed.

God has been so good to us.

You seek his will when you live a pure life before God, a holy life before God.

You seek his will when you're forgiving instead of full of bitterness and unforgiveness.

You seek his will when you have a servant's heart that says, what can I do to Help you instead of always looking and saying, what can you do to help me?

In fact, the more you gaze on him, the more you gaze on God, the more you'll be motivated to seek Him.

Because your delight will be in him.

It won't be out of duty.

It'll be out of devotion and pleasure to please God.

But also notice in this passage, David says that he will gaze at his beauty and seek him in his temple.

So we might ask a question as I begin to close.

What is his temple?

What does he mean by that?

Jesus said in John 2:19, when the money changers were in the church and the Jews were asking him what authority he had to drive these money changers out of the church.

Jesus answered and said unto them, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

Then said the Jews, or the Jews were looking at Jesus, saying, what are you saying?

You must be crazy.

You gonna raise this up in three days?

They said, 40 and 6 years was this temple in building.

And wilt thou rear it up in three days?

Hey, it took 46 years to build this temple.

Are you crazy?

You can't raise this temple back up in three days.

But in verse 21, Jesus said this.

But he spake of the temple of his body.

You see, Jesus is the temple.

Our text says that David desired to gaze at the beauty of God in his temple.

What did David mean when he said that?

I believe it means he went and he watched the temple rituals.

He saw the beauty of God through these temple rituals.

Animals were sacrificed at the temple, and David gazed on the beauty of the Lord through these sacrifices that he was observing.

You say, how did he do that when he saw the animals being slain?

He saw the beauty of God's justice, the beauty of God's holiness.

He said, here's a God who requires that sins be paid for.

Here's a God who is so good and so holy he cannot dismiss sin.

Here's a God who can't overlook our sin.

Here's a God who must deal with sin, who must deal with evil.

What a God.

I'm sure David said, what a God.

What a just God.

What a holy God.

Here's a God who wants to deal with their sins so we can still come to him and approach him.

Here's a God who wants to forgive us of our sins.

Here's a God who desires that we would have communion with him.

Now listen, folks, if David was able to gaze at the beauty of God through the temple worship, how much more of the beauty of God should We see if we gaze at God through the face of Jesus Christ.

You see, when we gaze at the beauty of God, it's not through a bull being sacrificed on an altar.

We see the face of God incarnate, who was nailed to a cross, who suffered the agony of being crucified, whose body was literally torn apart, who bled drops of blood in your place and my place, who was separated from His Father.

For us, we gaze at the beauty of God and the person of Jesus Christ.

How much more do you think we can see the beauty of the face of God if we do what Paul said?

We are beholding with unveiled faces the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

We must gaze on the beauty of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

We need to see him dying on the cross for our sins.

We need to do what Isaac Watts says in the beautiful hymn.

We need to survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died.

Gaze on the beauty of God through the person, through God's Son, God's incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.

Listen, the Bible gives us a tremendous solution to anxiety, to worry, to all of our fears, to gaze on his beauty and to seek Him.

He must be the supreme priority of our life.

He must be the one thing in our life.

We want to be free from anxiety.

We need to make sure that we take time to go to the Word of God, that we don't let our schedule, we don't let our busy life crowd God out of our life.

It's amazing to me how many, even young people that we have given advice to, even couples about the importance of the Word of God after they get married and reading the Word of God, having devotions together in the Word of God, focusing their heart on the Word of God and keeping it focused on the Word of God, that we can come back six months or nine months later and talk to them about their daily devotions or daily time of reading the Word of God.

And they're not doing it.

I believe our church is a field full of anxious people.

Our world is filled full of anxious people because we're gazing at the wrong things.

We need to gaze on the beauty of God and seek him in his temple and let God be the one thing in our life that will never, ever forsake us, that this world can never take away from us.

There was a famous English missionary named Alan Gardiner.

He was shipwrecked on a very remote island.

He and his companions tried their very best to stay alive until somebody came to find them.

But nobody did come to find them.

Finally, he died far away from everybody, far away from his loved ones, far away from his family.

Dying of thirst, dying of hunger.

A horrible, horrible way to go.

When they finally discovered his body, they found right next to his body, his quiet time notebook, his journal.

And this is what it says.

The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.

Right underneath it.

The last words he penned in his journal were these words.

I am overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God.

Wow.

How could he do that?

How could he not be full of anxiety?

How could he not be full of worry?

How could he not blame God for him being shipwrecked on that island?

How could he not be angry with God?

Because he had the one thing, and there was nothing to be afraid of.

There was nothing to fear.

There was nothing to worry about.

There was nothing to be anxious of.

He had that one thing David said in verse four.

One thing, one thing.

Repeat it with me, Church.

One thing have I desired of the Lord that I will seek after that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

To dwell, to gaze, to seek.

That's the answer to anxiety.

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