Good morning, church. Please go with me to Psalm 24. The book of Psalms, psalm 24. If you want to use one of our Bibles, just raise your hand and someone will bring one to you.

We’re in an extended series through the psalms, and my hope is the psalms will teach us to pray. The psalms were written over hundreds of years. There are some from the time when the people of God were slaves in Egypt, crying out for deliverance and justice, and others when the kingdom of Israel is at its height and conquering kings are riding home through the gates of Jerusalem. There are psalms about everything. Angry prayers, prayers asking God to punish enemies, confessions of sin, nature songs. Praising God for his wrath.

In our modern era, we’re used to worship music, which tends to focus on some aspect of God’s character or work, or our response to God, and usually is fairly positive, uplifting. And I get it, that’s what you typically need in a worship service, it’s just not always what you need in life. The psalms are prayers we’re meant to carry with us into our lives, wherever our lives go. And sometimes our lives go down into a pit, or to war, or into the waiting place, where all we really want to know from God is, how long, O Lord.

The more of life I’ve lived the more grateful I’ve become for the psalms that used to make me cringe. I used to get embarrassed by all the prayers that lash out at God and at other people—I remember asking Sunday School teachers how that could be loving. But now, I’ve had real enemies and needed some way of talking to God about it. I’ve been a victim of injustice, and in those moments I needed some angry prayers. The psalms were able to teach me those. Those prayers are less about what you should say and do and more about what you really feel and go through.

I’m hoping the psalms can draw us into prayer whatever we’re going through, that we could learn to live our lives in a posture of prayer to where prayer is more natural for us. It’s a matter of dependence. Whatever you use most often to facilitate your life you learn to depend upon. Phones, electricity, air conditioners. I want us to be a people who depend upon the Lord.

At first glance, the psalm for today looks like a song of celebration, but when you look closer, there’s some confession in it, and incredible humility coming from a king. Let’s read it. If you will, please stand while I read. [Psalm 24]. This is the word of the Lord; thanks be to God.

This psalm beautifully depicts something the Lord has been teaching me over the past several months, and I hope it’s come through in my prayer and teaching—just how important God is, and yet how small, how close he makes himself to us. But more than a description of creation and praise of God, this psalm is an act of humility, of Christ-likeness even, on David’s part. This psalm is David abdicating his throne. I’ll explain what I mean.

First, you have to let yourself remember how important God is. The psalm opens with a retelling of the story of creation. We worship the very God who created the earth, who established its foundations, who filled it with life. Not only did he create it, but he still owns it. God is the landlord of all the landlords. He is the king of all the kings. Everyone who has ever had power on the earth, God has had more. Everyone who has ever owned land, really it was a lease, written in time and mortality, borrowed from the lord of all the earth. Any emperor, any president who has ever drawn a line on a map of the earth and said, this is the border of my sovereignty, really they’ve planted a flag on land that is already owned. We, all of us, are imposters until we realize this world is not our home.

This psalm is a psalm of David. David, who was king over Israel. David, who established the borders of the land of Israel through countless battles and glorious victories. He went out many times from the gates of his city leading hosts of warriors with him. His rule inaugurated what is often talked about as the golden age of the kingdom of Israel. He bore the covenant of the God of all creation, and through his line came the promised salvation, not just of Israel, but through Israel, the entire world. The salvation and blessing of Immanuel, God with us again, the effects of sin on the earth reversed, the chasm between God and humanity healed.

From very early in David’s reign, people sang songs about his deeds, his prowess in battle. I know some of grew up reading his poetry and picturing David the artist, but there was another side of this man. David the warrior, David the glorious conqueror who inaugurated a dynasty and became to the people of Israel, even to this day, thousands of years later, a mythical figure. Jesus, hundreds of years later, walks through the streets of Jerusalem, and people just beginning to grasp the smallest idea of Jesus’ power call out to him, “son of David!”

Tolkien writes, “Something really higher is occasionally glimpsed in mythology: divinity, the right to power (as distinct from its possession), the due worship; in fact, religion.” And so here, in the midst of David’s mythological status, I’m hoping we will see something really higher; a right to power, a due worship. I hope we see in him, the Lord, himself.

When I say this psalm is an act of David abdicating his throne, what I mean is that David, in everyone’s mind, was the king of glory. In everyone’s mind but his own. David writes a psalm about the king of glory who owns the land in righteousness, and he says the Lord, not himself, is that king. Not only that, in the psalm David confesses his own sin.

When David writes about who will be privileged to ascend the hill of the Lord and stand in his holy place, he writes it with a good deal of mourning. Most scholars think this psalm was written when David brought the ark of the Lord back into the city of Jerusalem—that was a high point of David’s rule. The ark coming back to Jerusalem meant the Canaanites were defeated, and God was with the king in Jerusalem. But if you go read that story in 2 Samuel, right in that moment when the ark is returned to Jerusalem and David dances in front of it through the streets, David calls the prophet Nathan to court and tells him, to build a temple to the Lord so that God would live among the people in Jerusalem.

At first, Nathan agrees, and tells the king “do everything in your heart,” but the Lord comes to him after he’s home that evening and tells Nathan, David will not be allowed to build the temple in Jerusalem. Later on, in the Chronicles, we learn why: in short, he doesn’t have clean hands. He doesn’t have a pure heart. There are other psalms David writes where he begs the Lord to give him these things, but he feels the distance keenly between who he is and the man God really needs to rescue his people Israel. This psalm is an admission, if you’re looking for a king of glory, it’s not me.

In the passage where Nathan tells David he’s not going to be able to build the temple, Nathan makes it clear that the covenant of God—meaning God’s promise to rescue Israel and redeem the rest of the nations of the earth through them—that covenant is not going to be fulfilled through David. It’s a promise meant for his descendancy. So this psalm is David’s way of admitting he is not what Israel needs, not to be saved from their enemies, and not, in a deeper way, to be saved from themselves—clean hands, pure hearts. The refrain of the psalm, over and over again, who is this king of glory? Who could possibly save someone so thoroughly? The Lord.

David, this legendary king of Israel, you have to look through him to see “divinity, the right to power (as distinct from its possession), the due worship.” You have to see the importance of David. Understand his wealth, his status in the kingdom as the inaugurator of the golden age and a dynasty, his legendary military leadership, literally already in his twenties the stuff of songs sung in taverns along the way. You have to see all of that to see, through him, how important, how glorious the Lord is in comparison.

The Lord, who didn’t conquer land, but instead created it; who does not just win battles, but will win peace everlasting for his people. If it’s remarkable and undignified that David danced through the streets in front of the ark, think about the Lord coming to live a lifetime among this people. For God to be that powerful, that high-up, that glorious, and to want to pour his life out among us; that’s sacred.

In the same lecture I’ve already quoted of Tolkien’s, he points out a difference in what he calls magic, and what he calls enchantment. The reason I’m going back to Tolkien, it’s not that I’m a fan, but I have a great respect for his theological understanding of power. He points out that what the Bible calls magic, it’s less of a forbidden knowledge than it is the will to have power over things and people. Magic is saying the right words, and all the sudden controlling the weather, or controlling a person’s actions.

Enchantment is in many ways the opposite. It’s taking power and investing it in things and people to help them grow, to help them become somehow more free, more like themselves. So he imagines a spectrum, control vs. investment. And I bring all of that up to explain, maybe in a strange way, explain what Christ’s life does to ours, explain what he does with all of his glory and power.

Any other person who becomes established as a king of glory would come conquering, controlling. They would build themselves the highest throne on the highest hill. Even David, himself, who was a man after the Lord’s heart, a king of glory, bearer of the covenant, even he abuses his power to murder a man, commit adultery if not much worse, and establish himself in wealth, come to trust in his own power over the Lord’s.

Give any other man divine power, and we become magicians. We use it to control the world and the people around us. We set the masses to work towards our ends, burn the forests, dam the rivers, build technology that we give out to the masses telling them it will make their lives better, but really it just makes their lives a little less free. Only God, himself, is strong enough to pour his power out into the people around him. The world through Jesus’ life in it, instead of becoming a hell of powerful men bending the world to their will, becomes an enchanted world where even common folk have powers to heal and to save, prophesy, they can enter at any time into the court of the most powerful king and make a request, or ask a question, or just sit and enjoy each other’s company.

Life in Christ is full of enchantment. Theologians call it sacramentalism. The idea is that the glory of Christ is so overflowing, and he gives it out so freely, that he fills all kinds of ordinary things with glory, power, and meaning. An ordinary loaf of bread, because he breaks it, can be a means of grace in our lives, a reminder of Christ, himself. You stand staring at oceans in their enormity and our spirits bow in worship to their creator. You go hiking and the way the light comes through the leaves of trees, because he called it good, is a kind of communion with the delight of the Spirit.

Because the Lord knitted each of us together, you meet in each person his breath, his life, and his craftsmanship. Because he spent his life working a job and providing for his family, so as we go to our offices and factories and schools each day, we’re able to work as unto the Lord and build like we’re building his kingdom.

To quote Tolkien one last time, Louis, I swear, “In God’s kingdom, the presence of the greatest does not depress the small.” Any other person as the king of glory would come through the city gates and draw every eye to him. But in Christ, when the gatesmen lift up their heads and the ancient doors are opened to the king of glory the glory fills each of us and the world around us. Life lived in the presence of this king is enchanted. The blessing of Christianity isn’t health or wealth, or anything like that. The blessing of Christianity is life lived imbued with the glory of the Lord of creation.

Oh, God. Give us clean hands, give us pure hearts. Each and every day, my hope is that the king of glory would make me more like him. I want my life to be filled with his glory. That I could see the world the way he sees it, and see people the way he sees them, as sons and daughters, cherishing every moment together because our time together will overflow into an eternal moment of glory. I need him day by day to wash me, make my hands clean, make my heart pure. I need him to teach me his forgiveness, his wonder, his life. In our own way, we all want what David wants here, to be able to stand with him with clean hands and a pure heart when he comes at last in glory; and God wants the same.

I love the image we get in the psalm of a stir passing through a city. Someone calls out to the gatesmen to open the doors, and as the doors swing open a grand party is revealed, the great king coming into the city. It made me think of the movie Aladdin, the scene where prince Ali is entering Agraba: “He’s got seventy-five golden camels; purple peacocks, he’s got fifty-three!” You probably remember. Genie goes around talking him up, this handsome prince who fought off a hundred bad guys with swords, and the whole city comes out to see what kind of man he is.

The psalmist imagines a moment like that, the whole city gathered to see who this could be who warrants such a gathering and procession, every person on their roof, craning their neck to see what glorious ruler will come, and the gates open to reveal the Lord, himself, arriving at last to live in peace with his people.

“Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.” Amen, lift up your heads, o my people. Open your minds and hearts that the king of glory might come in.