Faithful pastors submit to God’s word and herald it boldly. And they don’t pit the Jesus-breathed red letters against the God-breathed whole (2 Timothy 3:16). They don’t pervert biblical justice or condone immorality. Brothers, labor to teach God’s word to God’s people for the good of God’s church. And as you labor to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), serve as an example to the flock. 

He lies motionless in the living room, his body gaunt and his breathing labored. His wife of over three decades stands close by. These are sober and holy moments.
I visited him at the care facility a week earlier. A month before that, we talked at the hospital. There he gushed over his wife and how she loved him. When I walked in, he was sharing the gospel with the interfaith chaplain. But now this dear saint is unconscious, days before his death. The psalm I read may be the last words he hears before he is face to face with the incarnate Word. The hymn we sing may be the soundtrack that ushers him into heaven. I cherish this moment.
I’m reminded of a quote from Richard Baxter: “I preached, as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men!” (The Poetical Fragments of Richard Baxter, 35). Our lives, and the lives of those we minister to, will come to an end. We serve and labor to prepare our people to meet Jesus. This is our primary task. All pastoral ministry labors in light of the end.
Imminent End
We all will die. We all will stand before Jesus. The apostle John describes the great white throne of judgment, where all the books are opened (Revelation 20:11–15). All will be judged for what they have done. No one will escape accountability. The apostle Peter charges the church, “The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers” (1 Peter 4:7). In other words, live wisely in light of the end. Moses, likewise, prays for insight as he draws near to imminent death: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).
We are dying, and so are our people. God has numbered our days. We are not guaranteed sixty, seventy, or eighty years of life. Eternity informs our labors in the present. We serve as men aware of judgment day, ready to stand before Jesus. We are dying ministers who minister to dying people.
The inescapable end keeps us sober — or it should. God will pronounce our labors as straw or gold (1 Corinthians 3:12). Will earthly ministry result in shame or commendation? Leaders watch over souls as those who will have to give an account to God (Hebrews 13:17). These are hard words with profound implications. Who is sufficient for such a task? The stakes could not be greater, nor the difficulty of the task more pronounced.
Within this sobering reality are embedded two beautiful and complementary truths: Jesus will judge, and God gives grace.
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The longing a lover feels for his beloved is what the psalmist feels in Psalm 84. His language is love language: “How lovely is your dwelling place. . . . My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord” (emphasis added).
This psalmist knows God and has been, one could say, wounded by His presence, so that the only balm is to return to that presence. He longs for it. He yearns for it.
The great church father Gregory of Nazianzus described this feeling in his poem De rebus suis as knowing in his inmost being “the sharp stab of desire for the King.” C.S. Lewis gave fine expression to this desire in his Reflections on the Psalms: “I have rather—though the expression may seem harsh to some—called this the ‘appetite for God’ than ‘the love of God.’ The ‘love of God’ too easily suggests the world ‘spiritual’ in all those negative or restrictive senses which it has unhappily acquired . . . [the appetite for God] has all the cheerful spontaneity of a natural, even a physical, desire. It is [happy] and jocund.”
The psalmist knows that his true happiness—blessedness—is found there, in the presence of the King. Scripture is incredibly clear on where true, profound, enduring happiness is found, and this is because the Bible addresses our deepest longings and desires.
Augustine said in his Confessions that “all men want to be happy” and do what they do in order to be happy. But not all are happy, because they do not seek happiness in the place where it can be found. The Bible tells us where it can be found. Psalm 84 tells us where it can be found. The source of happiness is in God’s presence and its receptor in man’s heart. The context of Psalm 84 is pilgrimage, something required of the faithful Israelite, yes, but also something greatly desired because of what it means for the lover of God—he is celebrating pilgrimage to worship God in His temple.
The Hope of the Psalmist
In the first four verses of Psalm 84, the immediate reference for the psalmist’s hope is the temple, seen in imagery: dwelling place, altars, courts, house. Why? Because God’s presence is concentrated there. He is homesick to return.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
My soul longs, yes, faints
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and flesh sing for joy
to the living God.
Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O LORD of hosts,
my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house,
ever singing your praise!
The psalmist is comforted that he will find rest and shelter in the temple by the tender reality that even birds find a home there. He is most likely recalling the literal temple with its stone facades and eaves where birds find shelter in crevices, just as might be seen today in grand stone building facades in the great cities of the West.
If a bird can find rest and shelter there, certainly a humble follower of God made in His image can.
The Experience of the Psalmist
The experience of the psalmist confirms his hope for God’s presence. God’s presence is something he knows, allowing him to exclaim, “Blessed are those whose strength is in you” (Ps. 84:5). His experience is the flip side of the first beatitude—“Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). Indeed, it goes from strength to strength (Ps. 84:7).
There is a dynamism, a growth, a freshness that comes from frequency in God’s presence.

Written by David R. Upham |
Thursday, June 15, 2023
 In Dobbs, the Court once again has looked back to our tradition, our laws, our Constitution, and found therein a reserved right of the states to protect prenatal life. Dobbs is in full harmony with Loving. Like Loving, Dobbs is a recovery and vindication of our republic—a great victory for constitutional truth, justice, and the American way.

Our national Supreme Court has set aside the so-called “right” to abortion established in Roe v. Wade (1973) in favor of the states’ reserved authority to protect prenatal life. The Court’s decision proceeded from this syllogism:
(1) The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment protects only the rights enumerated in the Constitution or otherwise “deeply rooted” in our “Nation’s history and traditions”;
(2) the right to abortion is not such a right;
(3) therefore, contra Roe, the Amendment does not secure any right to abortion.
According to the dissent and many commentators, the Court’s reasoning threatens various unenumerated and innovative rights. Indeed, Justice Thomas, in his concurrence, specifically questioned the putative constitutional rights of contraception, nonmarital sexual activity, and same-sex “marriage.” These putative rights do, indeed, seem foreign to our Constitution and were only recently acknowledged by some of our laws.
The dissenters, however, mentioned the right of interracial marriage, first endorsed by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967). According to Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, the right of interracial marriage, like the abortion right, is not deeply rooted in our traditions. Indeed, laws banning such marriage once prevailed as widely as anti-abortion laws did; therefore, just as the new right of interracial marriage was vindicated in Loving, so was the new right of abortion six years later in Roe: “The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry each other. To the contrary, contemporaneous practice deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion.” By this account, Loving, like Roe, was evolutionary, and anti-traditional.
But the Dobbs dissenters are wrong, egregiously so. Their opinion reflects a widespread and serious misunderstanding of our nation’s history.
The right of American citizens to intermarry, regardless of race, is, indeed, deeply rooted in our traditions of freedom and citizenship, and is, for this reason, consistent with the original intent and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. To be sure, bans on interracial marriage, of course, were once widespread in some parts of our county.
But such laws were never our American tradition. They were not original but innovative. It was not until 1691, nearly a century after Jamestown, that Virginia became the first colony to ban such marriages. Moreover, these laws were never universal. At Independence, only about half the states retained such laws—and nearly all were south of the Mason-Dixon line.
When our political ancestors first migrated to America, they brought with them the English common law—a general customary law recognized in England at the time. This original law recognized three principles.
First, that law secured extensive liberty, including a broad freedom to marry. The ease with which the common law allowed marriages gave rise to what we still call “common law marriage”: a marriage that happens simply by the unofficiated and even unwitnessed private agreement to live as husband and wife. The “consent of the parties is all that is required,” as James Kent later explained. Under this law, racial barriers to marriage were unknown.
Second, the law recognized broad birthright membership: All persons born under English jurisdiction were English subjects. Here too, the law recognized no racial discrimination.
Third, that law incorporated or reflected the complementary principles of legal “due process” and “equal protection,” both of which aimed to secure, to all persons, the rights of life, liberty, and property against lawless violence. Here too, these principles involved no racial discrimination whatsoever.
This protection extended to all living human beings—even before birth.
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