In the sermon titled 'Psalm 133 Behold the Beauty of Unity,' Jeremy Lyerla emphasizes the significance of unity among God's people as depicted in Psalm 133. Unity is likened to the anointing oil on Aaron and the dew of Hermon, representing God's presence and life-giving refreshment. The sermon highlights that unity is a supernatural gift from God, achieved through the work of Christ and the Spirit. The cost of unity involves a commitment to dwell together, requiring a death to self and a rejection of consumerism. Biblical unity is not uniformity but a harmonious gathering of believers. The blessing of unity is described as life forevermore, an experience of eternal life beginning now, characterized by communion with God and others. The sermon calls believers to treasure, embrace, and receive the blessing of unity, as it offers a foretaste of heaven.

Well, while I'm getting situated here, if you'll turn to Psalm 133. Beginning in verse 1. Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. It is like the precious oil on the head running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon which falls on the mountains of Zion, for there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.

Excuse me, Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for your goodness. I pray that this morning you would sustain my voice as I battle this cold. I pray that you would speak to us through your word, that your spirit would minister. It's life giving truths to our hearts.

We ask you this in Christ's name, amen. Y'all have to bear with me today. My son decided to give me his cold. So, well, the temple in Jerusalem is finally complete. Imagine this.

Years of planning, years of labor, the finest materials, the best craftsmen, all for one purpose, to build a place for God's name to dwell. Now the dedication has come. All Israel gathers men, women, children, leaders of every tribe, and the priests. They come and they bring the Ark of the Covenant into the Most Holy Place. The trumpet sound and the singers raised their voices in unison.

For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. And then it happens. The cloud of God's glory descends and fills the temple so powerfully that the priest couldn't even stand to minister. God himself had come to dwell with this people. And at that moment, Israel is united.

It's united in its place and its purpose and its worship. And that right there was a foretaste of heaven. And now what if I told you that you can experience something similar, you know, the clouds not going to come down and fill this place, we'd probably all freak out and run out the back door. But what if I told you that God has promised a blessing for his people when we live together in unity. And what if I told you that presence is dependent a little bit on what we do?

It's given to us freely in Christ, of course, but what if I told you that your prayers, your posture this morning, will either enhance or diminish that blessing for everyone else in the room? Well, that's what Psalm 133 is about. It's David's reminder that when God's people gather in unity, it's not just nice fellowship. No, it's the place where God commands his blessing, life forevermore. And so here is the theme of this song, and the theme really of our time together today, and that is when God's people come together in unity, he gives them a foretaste of heaven.

Now let's set this in context a little bit. This is not something new to the Bible. It's not something new to the Psalms. But it runs throughout the entirety of scripture. You see in the garden, Adam and Eve lived in perfect unity with God and with each other, and that really was, in a sense, heaven on earth.

But as we know, sin entered and unity was shattered. Division came on the scene between man and God and between the man and his wife and between brother and brother and sister and sister. And really disunity unleashed a foretaste of hell. Yet God promised to restore this unity through the covenant of grace. He called the people to himself.

He redeemed them out of Egypt. And he brought them into the land to be his covenant family. And then in the tabernacle and later in the temple, God came to dwell with his people again, giving them glimpses of the heavenly reality to come. And in the church, through Christ and the gift of the Spirit, God now dwells not in a building, but in his people. And then at the end, the crescendo of the Bible, at the end in Revelation, we see the new heavens and the new earth, and this story is the climax.

It's the perfect expression of unity, perfect worship, perfect fellowship with God and one another forever. And so Psalm 133 sits right in the middle of this story, and it was sung by pilgrims traveling up to Jerusalem, gathering as God's covenant people at the temple. And David, he wanted them to see that when God's people dwell in unity, they get to experience this foretaste of heaven. And so that's our invitation to Psalm 133 shows us three things today and it shows us that to experience this foretaste of heaven in the church, we need to first treasure the beauty of unity. And second, we need to embrace the cost of unity.

And third, lastly, we'll look at that we need to receive the blessing of unity. Well, let's look at our first point. And it begins there in the first verse, if you'll look there with me. Again, it says, behold, how good and how pleasant it is. Now David begins with a command.

He's like, behold. And as soon as he begins this psalm, it's almost like he begins and says, wait, stop, stop, stop, wait a minute, stop. Look, don't rush past this thing. Unity is rare. Treasure it.

You see, David knew from experience how rare unity is. And we do too, in the church, in the world. Unity is a rare thing. But David knew this. His life was filled with division and pain.

One son raped his sister. Another murdered that brother. Absalom, he rebelled, he fractured the kingdom, and even David's counselors and generals betrayed him. So David has seen the destruction of disunity, but he also knows the healing power, the beauty of true fellowship, true unity among God's people. And that's why he says, when you see this rare jewel of unity, stop and behold it.

I don't know if you guys ever heard the true story of a guy named Bobby who he was at the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas. And he was walking through there one day and he noticed this little glimmer the size of a jelly bean in the dirt. And it was an 8.5-carat white diamond worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And hundreds of people had walked past this diamond all day long, and he saw it. And whatever you found there, you got to keep.

So he got to keep this rare diamond, but no one else stopped and noticed. Well, David's telling us Don't miss this diamond. Behold the beauty of unity. And then he gives us two examples, two similes in our passage today. In verse two he says, it's like the precious oil on the head.

Verse three, it's like the dew of hermene. So it's like oil running down, down Aaron's beard. A picture of priestly anointing. Really it's a picture of God's presence, his joy, his consecration. He says it's like the dew from hermit.

It's life-giving refreshment that is graciously given from above. And really these both point us to Christ and the Spirit. Christ is our anointed high priest. The Spirit is the refreshing dew poured out at Pentecost. And unity is their gift to the church.

And what this means is that unity is not natural, it's supernatural. And Jesus prayed in John 17 that his people would experience this supernatural unity. He says, their father that they may be one even as we are one, so that they may, so that the world may believe. Well, What about you this morning? Have you stopped to behold this idea of unity, the unity that we have?

Have you thanked God for the brothers and sisters Who walk with you, who pray with you, who forgive you, who serve with you? Or have you grown kind of numb, seeing only the frustrations and the irritations that come along with rubbing shoulders with people in intimate, long-term relationships? Brothers and sisters, what a gift we have been given. What a gift we often forget to behold. You know, the enemy of our souls, he doesn't want us to stop and behold the beauty of this.

He wants God's house divided. He wants his people divided. He wants the church to lose its witness to the world around it. He wants the church to not experience this foretaste of heaven. I was thinking about this.

When we forget this foretaste of heaven, when we don't value it, we don't behold it, we kind of start looking for other things in the world to fulfill us. Well, this unity can be a problem. In fact, Thomas Watson, the Puritan pastor, said this. He said, unity among believers, it's their strength, And the devil does most mischief when he can divide. And he gives us this picture.

He says, he blows the coals of contention and then warms himself at the fire. Well, when we stop and behold the beauty of unity, we'll treasure it. And when we treasure it, we are actually depriving Satan of one of his favorite tools, division. And so this morning, God is calling us in Psalm 133 to see that we possess a beautiful treasure, unity through the finished work of Christ and the gracious working of His Spirit. But unity isn't just something that we admire from a distance.

It's something we're called to live out. And so Psalm 133 doesn't merely call us to just behold it. It calls us to be committed to it, to pay the cost, to possess it. And that brings us to our next point. To experience this foretaste in the church, we need to embrace the cost of unity.

We read in our text again verse 1, behold how good and pleasant it is. Then he says, when brothers dwell, when they dwell together. You see, unity is not passive. It's not maintained by accident. No, it requires costly commitment.

We can't preserve it by being passive. It's built. It's maintained by active commitment. And we get this idea from the word David uses here, dwell. It's the Hebrew word used here.

And it doesn't mean just to drop in occasionally or to share a social space. It has more to it than that. It has this idea of to abide, to remain, to settle into a shared life. It implies relational permanence, a covenantal presence, not a consumer convenience. It's the same word that is used when God dwelt in the tabernacle in Exodus 25, and the same word used when he did so also in Solomon's temple.

You see, God wasn't merely visiting his people, he was staying. He was covenantally committed to remaining in the midst of Israel. And so today, God no longer, as we know, dwells in a temple made with hands. He actually dwells in every believer. That's what he told the Corinthians.

First Corinthians 3, 16. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you? That's just mind blowing to me. You see, just as God dwelt among his people in the tabernacle, just as God dwells in every believer, so David is calling us to dwell with one another with this same covenantal presence with one another. What a beautiful thing to behold when God's people filled with the Spirit are committed to a shared life of worship and mutual care and sacrifice.

It's beautiful when we approach the church this way, but not as consumers who are in it for personal profit, but instead as those committed to dwelling together as the family of God, the household of faith. Members bound together in Christ, devoted to God, devoted to one another in lasting relationship. Well, how do you view the church? Do you view it as a covenant community? Or do you kind of have a consumer experience mentality about the church?

Are you building your life with God's people? Or just attending until something better comes along? Have you committed to dwelling with your brothers and sisters? Have you embraced this commitment to those in the body? Well, embracing this commitment to the body requires, honestly, something most of us instinctively resist, and that's a death to self.

Right? Most of us have an aversion to dying to ourselves. Maybe you're different, but I have a very serious aversion to die into self without the help of God's spirit. And disunity exists because Instead of dying to self, we live to please ourselves. Unity requires death to self.

You guys know James 4, 1 through 3, I'm sure. James highlights where this disunity comes from. I'll read those few verses there. It says, what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? What's causing the disunity among you?

He's saying, is it not this? You want to know? I'll tell you, " he says. It's that your passions are at war within you. You desire, you do not have, so you murder.

You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and you quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask, but you don't receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your own passions. Well, without a commitment to dying to self, true unity is impossible, because our selfish desires will always lead us to fight, to stir up conflict, and to demand our own way. You See, we are often more committed to our preferences than to Christ, more attached to our comfort than to our covenant community.

And God often brought judgment upon his people when disunity was breaking out. You think of the story of Korah or you think of Ananias and Sapphira who lied and were going to just start to spread disunity and corruption in the church. Didn't turn out so well for them. But what we see from this is that God desires that his people live together in unity, living for the benefit of the community. Well you might ask, What does biblical unity look like?

Well, just real quick, a few verses from the New Testament tells us that biblical unity includes unity of place. Think of Acts 2, where it says, they were all there together in one place. There was unity in location. They had a local expression of the body of Christ. It also included unity of doctrine.

They were devoted to the apostles' teaching in Acts 2 42. It included unity of heart and possessions. They were all of one heart and soul and no one had any need. It includes unity across cultures. There was no longer Jew and Greek and barbarian.

And it includes unity of body and spirit. And so simply put, unity is God's people joined by the Spirit, gathered in one place, believing the same truth, sharing life and resources, loving across differences, and living as one body in Christ. But notice something, Unity isn't uniformity, but supernatural harmony in Christ. This kind of biblical unity requires that we, again, die to self. I don't know if you guys have ever heard Bonhoeffer's statement where he says that when Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.

You don't hear that in the church too often. Come and die. And only when the church is filled with people who say this and who say with Paul For me to live is Christ and to die is gain Only when that is true will unity thrive When we say for me to live is to walk in unity with God and his people, experiencing this foretaste of heaven. And death, death is gain, for it ushers me into this full realization for what I was created for, unhindered fellowship with God and man. Brothers and sisters, God is calling us to embrace the cost of unity.

And here's the wonder. When we walk this costly path of unity, God himself meets us there. He lets us taste the very blessing of eternal life. And that leads us to our last point, that to experience this in the church, we need to receive the blessing of unity. So we see that we must treasure the unity God has given, we must commit to paying the cost of unity, and we must position ourselves to receive the blessing God pours out when his people dwell together.

Look at verse 3, the last part. He says, For there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore. So again, David writes this Psalm for those pilgrims on their way to the temple in Jerusalem, so that They remember that when they get there, God has a blessing for them. Now imagine this. This is probably hard for most of you to imagine unless you're like a backpacker or something.

Imagine walking 10, 20, 50 miles in a hot, dry, mountainous land on foot to go to church. Most of us would be like, you know, maybe we'll watch online. Maybe we'll, no. Just to meet with the people of God to worship, They did this. They walked far.

And as the, you know, I can imagine myself as I'm walking up this next hill and it's, you know, getting late in the day, it's 90 degrees, I'm thinking, why am I doing this? Is this worth my effort? And David says, yes, yes. And the word he uses here is kind of stunning. He says, there, there in that place, among these people, in that kind of unity, God has commanded his blessing.

It's not a suggestion, it's not a loose offer, it's like maybe when you guys get together there, there might be a blessing, I don't know, you're gonna have to just go find out. No, he says God commanded. Actually, he decreed it. As a king decrees, so God decrees a blessing. And so when you go together with God's people for worship, when you dwell with them in unity, you will receive a blessing.

And that blessing is life forevermore. Not just eternal life, but life forevermore. Not just something in the future, but really eternal life starting now. You see, in scripture, eternal life is more than just duration, Right? Think about that.

People are going to be in hell for eternity. Is that eternal life? When God says we inherit eternal life, please no thank you. No, it's communion with God. It's a life infused with the joy of the Spirit, with the love of the Father, with the grace and mercy and forgiveness of the Son.

It's knowing God in the relationship that we were meant to have. Jesus said in John 17, he says, this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. So eternal life is again communion with God and that life is experienced now, not just in eternity. And so when we dwell together, we are tasting this life forevermore here and now. This is the very reason Christ came, to restore the fellowship that was lost in the garden.

It's to step into the reality of heaven before we ever reach the other side. Think about it. When we pray together in one spirit, when we sing with one voice to our Savior, when we forgive one another and serve one another and lay down our preferences to exalt Christ together when we enjoy sweet communion with our brothers and sisters in Christ. We're not just simply doing church. We are receiving a foretaste of eternal life.

This is the life we were created to experience, the blessed life that awaits us in heaven. Well, the opposite side of this is a little bit of a warning. Because many miss this blessing. Why? Because they isolate themselves instead of integrate into the community.

They consume instead of commit. They hold grudges instead of forgive. They leave when it gets hard instead of dwelling when it gets costly. And the good news is, is that Christ has secured this blessing for us. By his death, by his resurrection, he won life forevermore for his people.

And now by the Spirit, we can receive it together. It's not earned, it's not reserved for perfect churches or perfect people. It's a grace given blessing decreed by God for those who walk the path of Spirit-enabled unity. And so right now as we gather in Christ's name, right now as we sing and serve and listen and love and forgive and pray, we are receiving the foretaste of heaven's joy, restored fellowship with God and with one another. And so in Psalm 133, David is telling us that those journeying to Jerusalem, hey, it's worth the effort.

God has decreed a blessing for you there. And so brothers and sisters, the journey that we make to come together on the Lord's Day, it's worth it. Getting the kids up, kicking the dog, whatever it takes to get to the people of God to worship, It's worth it. All the effort is worth it. You can't experience it online.

You can't experience this foretaste of heaven hiking alone in the woods. No, we receive this when we gather for worship as God's people, as we dwell together. Well, landing the plane. From Eden to New Jerusalem, God's story has always been about dwelling with his people in unity. It was lost in the garden.

We got a glimpse of it in Israel's temple. We have a foretaste of it now in the church and one day we will feast on it forever in the new heavens and in new earth. But today as we wait for his return, Psalm 133 says, you can experience it now. So ask yourselves, will you treasure the beauty of unity? Will you embrace the cost of unity?

Will you receive the blessing of unity? Brothers and sisters, David in the word of God tells us, behold, how good and how pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity for there the Lord has commanded the blessing life forevermore. Let's pray. Father we thank you that you have not left us in our sin, separated from you. Thank you for giving us a foretaste of heaven, for enabling us to graciously be a part of this body.

Help us die to self. Help us live to Christ. Make the world jealous for what we have as a body as we dwell in unity, and as the chaos around us continues to unravel. Well, we thank you. We ask you for these graces in Christ's name, amen.