“Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands! Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing. Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him and bless His name. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting, And His truth endures to all generations.” (Psalm 100:1-5)
Psalm 100 is like the churches dress rehearsal for heaven. The Jubilate as this Psalm has been termed was daily used by both the ancient Jews and the earliest Christians in the worship of God, and it is still sung today as the Old One Hundredth. This Psalm, from (v.1) is a call for ALL people to “shout to the Lord!” It is a call to delight in, rejoice over, and brag on the self-existent and eternal God. It is a time to rejoice in the God of all creation.
Is that how we come into God’s house? Do we come in rejoicing?
The late pastor J. Vernon McGee said, “I would emphasize the fact that God does not want you to (regularly) come before Him with a long face.” Adding, “at the time of this writing most of the bars have what is called a “happy hour.” I wish we had a “happy hour” in church, without the liquid. Let us tune up and get ready to worship the Lord.” [i]
Because God is Good, Joyfully Serve Him
(vv.1-2) “Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands! Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing.”
It has been suggested that because of the psalmists call for All of the earth to “raise a shout for the Lord” (Psalm 100:1 Septuagint) that this psalm points to the honor of Jesus the Messiah especially during His millennial reign on the earth (Rev,. 20:1-4). It suggests a time of the universal praise and adoration of Jesus; a time as one commentator put it, “when the entire world will recognize and sing ‘Joy to the world, the Lord is come!’”
This is not to say that the world at large has nothing for which to thank the Lord today. His common grace – the sunrise and the rain (Matt, 5:45), His kindness (Luke 6:35), His patience (2 Peter 3:9), His compassion (Psalm 145:9) but I dare say that until a lost soul realizes the grace of God upon his life through faith in Jesus, he will not recognize those common graces at all. Thus, only the faithful will shout joyfully to the Lord both now and forever more!
Not only are we to joyfully shout but we are also to gleefully serve the Lord – (v.2) “serve the Lord with gladness.” It is rare when you find someone so spiritually free and filled with the presence of the Lord that their service is expressed as true worship. The Tanakh (another name for the Hebrew Bible) substitutes the word worship for service and makes the powerful connection between everything we do being done to glorify God (1 Cor. 10:31).
Finally, in the first stanza of this psalm we are told to “come before His presence with singing.” With renânâh – joyful singing.
Why? Why should God be worshipped so robustly?
(v.3) offers the answer “Know that the Lord, He is God!” There is no other God who created us – mankind has made many gods in his own mind and with his own hands, but God is God. He is God – unapproachably high or supreme: (v.3b) “He made us” and frankly, I think that the second part of that is a translational error as there is no conceivable way that we physically made ourselves. On the other hand, many of us think that we are self-made men and women. “I did that!” We say: “I am who I am because of my labor, my effort, my knowledge, my ability, my talent.” This was the mentality in Laodicea in (Rev.3:17) where they said: “I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’—and do(did) not know that you (they were) are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked—” With these words, I think we are reminded that not only apart from God are we nothing but we also that we desperately need Him. The Tanakh translates the phrase “He made us and not we ourselves” as “He made us, and we are His.”
We worship Him because we have been bought at the price of His Son’s precious blood. (1 Cor. 6:20, 1 Peter 1:19). We worship Him not only because of His unapproachable greatness but also because of His intimate nearness: (v.3c) “We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.” We are His sheep who believe upon the name of Jesus. We are those sheep over whom the Lord the Shepherd (John 10:14-16) and because He is our Shepherd, not only “shall we not” but we DO NOT WANT or lack for any good thing now or in the eternal future.
Because God is Good, Praise and Worship Him
(v.4) “Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him and bless His name.”
This being a call to spiritual thanksgiving we should bring the sacrifice of praise. The writer of Hebrews defines this in (Heb. 13:15): “Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name. But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” We are to come into His house with thanksgiving and praise because God is good.
We bless the Lord – we adore Him for all He has done and for who He is in actuality and to us. As we said, in actuality His is the Most-High God but to us He is Abba Father – and “because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses” making us “alive with Christ.” (Eph. 2:4-5). We thank Him for His salvation. We thank Him because (v.5) “His mercy is everlasting” – “through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, (Lam. 3:22-23) because His compassions fail not, they are new every morning: great is your faithfulness!” The word ʾĕmûnâh translated truth in our bible is rendered faithfulness in the Tanakh where it concludes: “His faithfulness is for all generations.” In (Psalm 40) David declared that God had “put a new song in his mouth – praise to our God.” Going further, David said: “Many, O Lord my God, are Your wonderful works which You have done; and Your thoughts toward us cannot be recounted to You in order; if I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered.” (Psalm 40:3, 5)
God (Eph. 1:3) “has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.”
Jesus has (Rev. 1:5-6) “washed us from our sins in His own blood and has made us kings and priests unto God and His Father – to Him be glory and dominion forever!”
We all have things to be grateful for here. Like Hannah for her son (1 Sam. 1:10-19), Hezekiah for his healing (2 Kings 20:1-6), David for his victory (1 Sam 17:45-47), and Solomon for his wisdom (1 Kings 3:5-14), God has answered, God has been merciful, God has provided, and God has been present.
Christian, there is one thing about which you exclusively have reason to be grateful. Unlike Hannah, Hezekiah, David, or Solomon, you KNOW that you have been redeemed from a devil’s Hell – a real and everlasting torment to be experinced by all who refuse the salvation of the Lord through Jesus Christ. If you were the poorest person in the poorest country in the world, because the priceless treasure of eternal life which you recieved as a grace through Jesus Christ from our forgiving God you have something for which to be forever, joyfully grateful.
The Lord has given but He has also taken away. Up against our sense of gratitude at this time of year presses grief.
To Serve and Worship God Well – Count Your Blessings
(1 Thess. 5:18) “in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
Some people never need to be told to do that because gratitude is engrained into the DNA of their character, while others have to be encouraged constantly because complaint is a part of theirs.
Which are you?
Do we not have much to be thankful for?
Some of the things for which I am thankful are:
The words of the preacher who once told me that Jesus loves Me. The song of the Cardinal. The roar of the surf. The crunch of fresh fallen snow under my boots. The laughter of my wife. The playful antics of my children and grandchildren. The silence of a calm morning, and the noise of a windy one. The clang of a rope gently beating against the flagpole to which an American flag is tethered, and I am thankful for my health.
That is a brief list of the things for which I am thankful.
But what if I had cancer?
What if I was blind, or deaf?
What if I was imprisoned in a hospital room too weak to go anywhere?
What if everyone I have ever loved was gone and I was all alone?
Could I be thankful in circumstances like those? Could you?
Some of you are in one of these situations right now.
Should we let our grief cancel our gratitude? Job did not. Twice he was stricken severely and twice he responded in a way that expresses gratitude in the worst of situations:
(Job 1:21) “And he said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.””
(Job 2:10) “Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?”
The fact is, that we have innumerable reasons for which to be thankful from the only God worthy of our gratitude. Some of you are hurting this season. You hurt because something or someone you had is missing from your life this year. To be thankful right now, you may need to see the world and your life through a different lens. Consider George Matheson, Scottish minister and hymnwriter of the late 19th century known as “the blind preacher” who had all but completely lost his eyesight by age 18. Once he prayed: “My God, I have never thanked you for my thorn. I have thanked you a thousand times for my roses, but never once for my thorn.”[ii]
My prayer for those who are hurting during this season is that you can thank God anyway. He has given. He did bless. He may have taken; and yet for all of these He is still to be praised; may His presence be enough to carry you through this time. To all I say: May your season of Thanks and Giving – be full of reflection God’s goodness and many blessings in your life and may your mouths full of praise to His holy name!
[i] McGee, J. V. (1997). Thru the Bible commentary (electronic ed., Vol. 2, p. 822). Thomas Nelson.
[ii] Shenton, T. (2006). Opening up 1 Thessalonians (pp. 109–110). Leominster: Day One Publications.
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