I mean your Bibles to Psalm 50 verses 1 to 6. The mighty one, God the Lord speaks and

summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,

God shines forth. Our God comes. He does not keep silence. Before him is a devouring fire, round about him a

mighty tempest. He calls to the heavens above and to the earth that he may judge his people,

gather to me my faithful ones who made a covenant with me by sacrifice.

The heavens declare his righteousness, for God himself is judge.

I have two purposes this morning and one is to begin a series on this

Psalm which will take us about three weeks I think and the other is to pick up on

last week's text.

You remember verse 14 of Hebrew 13 said,

here we have no lasting city.

But we seek a city that is to come.

And we talked as a staff about singing about that city, singing

about Zion and about the heavenly Jerusalem and the city of God and we said probably for many Christians today, especially if they didn't grow up in the church,

that whole idea of Zion and the heavenly Jerusalem and the city of God is a very vague

at best unknown idea. And so as I reflected on that I thought to myself, perhaps and Dean

sowed the seed in my mind, perhaps we should devote a whole message to the theme of Zion. And that's what I'm going to do today.

I'm going to take verse two here and focus on Zion. We've sung about Zion City of our God.

Glorious things of the year spoken. Zion City of our God, he whose word cannot be broken,

form thee for his own abode.

And I want to spend a kind of thematic 30 minutes with you, not so much unpacking these six verses, which I'll come back to next week,

but taking that one idea, Zion from which God shines forth and unfolding it biblically from the first time it occurs until the last

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