Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jensen Holt McNair. When I was in middle school my dad was

memorizing a whole psalm and asked if I wanted to memorize it with him. And

despite not loving doing Bible memory verses at school, I said yes, I liked the challenge, I guess.

So I started reading Psalm 84 every night to commit it to memory, and I succeeded. Now, well over a decade later,

although Psalm 84 is not something that I can recite entirely by memory,

different bits and parts of it are stuck in my mind.

And I think about the passage often.

You see, every night as I read Psalm 84,

the meaning behind the words was shaping me, encouraging me and teaching me, teaching me about what

it meant to know, to love and to faithfully follow God.

Psalm 84 was a Psalm written for one who was making their pilgrimage to the temple.

You see, different Old Testament laws commanded that the Israelite males present themselves

in the temple at different times throughout the year, at different festivals.

And so faithful Israelites would make their pilgrimage from their home to the temple of God.

And this Psalm was written to encourage them, to help them worship and delight in their pilgrimage as they made their way to the place where God dwelt.

Even though as a middle schooler I never made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to stand before God in his temple.

Even with my limited understanding of theology at the time,

I knew these verses related to the ways that I was called to faithfully follow God in my life. Now as I've grown up beyond a middle

schooler and my theology has also grown, I've come to find this chapter about Israelite

Pilgrims journeying to the temple, has so many parallels to the journey that I find myself on as I followed Jesus.

And so today, we're going to learn about what Psalm 84 meant for its original audience, but also what it means for you and for me today.

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