For a day in your courts is better than 1,000 elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
– Psalm 84:10
What a great verse. This picture of the psalmist saying, “One day with you, God, and just as a doorkeeper in your house, just standing there with you, one day like that is better than 1,000 anywhere else in the world.” Just think of all that you could do for 1,000 days in this world just to live it up and the Psalmist says, “One day with you would be better than 1,000 elsewhere without you.”
Psalm 84:10 teaches us that being with God is better than everything in this world.
This is the posture of those who actually know God. They know. We know that just being with God in his presence is better than everything this world has for us put together. And you keep reading. Verse 11 says, “For the Lord, God is a sun and shield the Lord bestows favor and honor. And no good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” See it.
God is the one who provides every good thing that we need or could want. God is the source of all that’s good, which means we can’t experience that which is truly good apart from him and being in his presence, which is why we seek him daily. Why we say from the moment we wake up in the morning, “God, we need you. We want to walk with you today.” It’s why we set aside time in our day to get alone with God because that time is more important than anything else we can do during the day.
And then the beauty for us, that’s even different from Psalm 84, they in the Old Testament needed to go to the temple to encounter the fullness of God’s glory. You and I, through Jesus’s sacrifice for us on the cross, and his resurrection from the grave, we are the temple. His Holy Spirit dwells inside of us. We walk with God in the presence of God in all of his fullness every day.
Psalm 84:10 challenges us to spend time with God daily.
Oh, God, help us to live in this reality then. God help us early in our day to set aside time alone with you, to be with you, to pour out our hearts to you, to hear from your Word. God, we pray that in each of our lives, I pray this over my life, I pray this over every single person listening, that the most important time of our day would be time alone with you.
And even as I pray I know that is the most important time of my day or anyone else’s day. God, we pray that we would see it that way and we would treasure that time and we would be long in that time in a way that leads, oh, God, to walking with you all day long. Concentrated time alone with you that leads to continual time with you in the course of our day, wherever you lead us, in school, in work, and in everything we do.
This verse calls us to live aware of God’s presence in our lives.
Help us to walk and live and think and desire and speak and act with awareness of your presence with us all the way till we lay our head on our pillow at night and we look to you and pray to you, seek you before we go to sleep. And sleep in your presence and then start all over again the next day.
God, we praise you for making it possible for us to be in your courts. Jesus, we praise you for making it possible for us to live in the fullness of your presence, to experience all the good things that flow from you and your presence. And so we pray that Psalm 84:10 would be the posture of our lives. And God, that you would use us to lead other people to experience relationship with you, the goodness that flows from your hand. Help us to share the gospel today with people around us.
Prayer for the Mochi People
God, we pray for opportunities and for boldness. And God, we pray for people who can’t experience this because they’ve not heard the name of Jesus. They’re not even aware of the gospel. God, we pray for the Mochi people of Pakistan, 3.7 million of them, no known followers of Jesus among them. Lord, we pray that the Mochi people of Pakistan would be reached with the good news that you’re a sun and a shield and you bestow favor and honor and good all through the gospel, the good news of Jesus and his death for their sins. God, we pray for the spread of the gospel to the Mochi people of Pakistan so that they might enjoy your presence. Oh, God, we pray all of this according to your Word in Psalm 84:10. In Jesus’ name, amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
