worship - The Text Messages

November 25, 2024November 25, 2024

Grateful Hearts: Reflecting on the Goodness of God

“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 r^enânâh – 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 19^th 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.

January 16, 2022January 16, 2022

The Outpouring of Christian Worship

“Oh come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving; Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms. For the Lord is the great God, And the great King above all gods. In His hand are the deep places of the earth; The heights of the hills are His also. The sea is His, for He made it; And His hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, And the sheep of His hand.” (Psalm 95:1–7, NKJV)

What is worship?

What is worship to you?

Is worship what we do when we come together on Sunday or is it the entirety of what we do as believers? Is worship that part of the service when we sing songs about God together or is worship something we do for God?

The dictionary defines worship as an act of devotion and reverence towards a deity; the Bible identifies the act as the worth-ship of God and the whole duty of man (Eccl.12:13). Worship is an outpouring of love toward Him who has made all things, provided for all things and sustained all things and continues to do so. We worship God through our giving, through serving others, through songs and hymns and spiritual songs and in listening to and obeying the Word of God preached and taught. It is for worship that we meet every week in church but our worship cannot and must not be limited to only the time we spend in this place. One man said, “worship is the overflow of a believer’s joy because of God – who He is and what He’s done” but in another sense, it is a seeking after something we need.

A few years ago, John Piper writing on the subject of worship suggested that worship should be our coming to God for Him. In the article, John wrote about a small group of believers who went to help a man in the community who was in great need. When the man asked those who had come why they were there their response was “we are here for you.” They were there to perform a service for the man – many, John suggested, come into church with the same mindset towards God in worship. But God needs nothing from us at all – it is we who are in need. John continued, “suppose the day upon which that small group went to serve the man was ridiculously hot and while they were doing the work a truck pulls up offering ice-cold, refreshing water and they run up to the window of the truck saying ‘we’re here for you;’” now we have come to the right mind of worship.

God does not need our worship but we need the God whom we worship. We add nothing to God when we lift up our hands in celebration of who He is; we simply give Him what He deserves because He is God but I think that God is pleased and glorified when those He loves express their love back to Him.

Worship Celebrates God…

[v.1-2] “Oh come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving; Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.”

I recently heard the testimony of a woman who had lost her young toddler in Disney World for an eternity of fifteen minutes. A thousand thoughts must have run through her head – what ifs and self-condemnation but she did not dwell on these; she prayed to God and God returned what she had lost. What was her response?

Tears of joy and praise to God for His mercy. Did she sing to Him? Probably not but did she shout out a heartfelt halleluiah? I imagine she did.

Worship is a many faceted thing and can be expressed in the songs we sing, the words we shout and through the action of our bodies. In life, worship is doing “whatever your hands find to do” (Eccl 9:10) or as the Apostle Paul put it, worship is doing “whatever you do, do all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10_31). We worship the Lord when we tithe, when we serve Him and when we serve others. The Book of Psalms bears witness to worship being something sung with or without instrumental accompaniment – in those days the people even worshipped the Lord with dancing (Psalm. 149:3 and 150:4). But the (HB) word used for singing in (v.1) can also be defined as a shout for joy to Him who is “the Rock of our salvation” and our source for help. Worship is coming before God’s face or “presence” and singing or shouting words like these found in [Psalm 96:1,4]:

“Oh, sing to the Lord a new song! Sing to the Lord, all the earth. For the Lord is great and greatly to be praised; He is to be feared above all gods.”

But in order to celebrate God we must reflect upon His goodness.

Worship Requires Reflection…

[v.3-5] “For the Lord is the great God, And the great King above all gods. In His hand are the deep places of the earth; The heights of the hills are His also. The sea is His, for He made it; And His hands formed the dry land.”

Worship requires eyes to recognize the presence of God.

In (Genesis 28:10-17) God had been with Jacob as he fled from his brother into the wilderness between Beersheba and Haran but Jacob did not know it until after he had seen a vision of God; then in [v 16-.17] he declared:

“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!”

Likewise, the voice speaking to Moses from the burning bush awakened the prophet to the presence of God when he said [Ex.3:5]:

“Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.”

It is God who opens our eyes to God – we cannot recognize or discern the difference between the mundane and the supernatural without His intervention upon our sight. Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote: “Earth is crammed with heaven, and every common bush AFIRE with God – but only he who SEES takes off his shoes – the rest sit around it and pick blackberries.”

All of God’s creation declares Him and exalts Him. “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork” wrote the psalmist in [Psalm 19:1]. Paul, reflecting on our Creator wrote in [Romans 1:20]:

“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,”

From Mount Everest to Death Valley and from Niagara Falls to the Mariana Trench – God made it all, God is present there and in control of it all; there is no place where God is not (see Psalm 139:7-18)

Recognizing the power, wisdom, grace, glory, holiness and sovereignty of God in worship leads us to ask with King David – “Who am I, O Lord God? And what is my house that You have brought me this far?” [1 Chron 17:16]

Worship Communicates Thirst…

Worship is an expression of thirst for God

“O God, You are my God; Early will I seek You; My soul thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You In a dry and thirsty land Where there is no water. So, I have looked for You in the sanctuary, to see Your power and Your glory. Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise You. Thus, I will bless You while I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.” [Psalm 63:1-5]

When you entered into the church on Sunday (for instance) what was your mindset? Did you come to church or did you come to worship? If you merely came to church you’ll probably be satisfied to leave pretty much as you came but if you came to worship you will not likely be satisfied until you have experienced God through His Word and until you have emptied yourself in praise at His altar.

To be clear, this article isn’t about worship styles and preferences this is about desire – true worshippers desire more God in their lives. What I mean is, they desire a deeper and closer connection with the Creator than they have. Consider this question:

“If you could have a happy marriage, healthy children, a successful career, good friends, fun vacations, a comfortable retirement, a painless death and no hell – would you be satisfied?”[i]

I would expect those who do not know or trust in the Lord to say that they’d be satisfied with such a life but can a true worshipper of God ever be satisfied with anything less than God? “O God, You are my God! Early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh logs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.”

Can you say, “O God, as long as You are with me it is well no matter what life may bring”?

Worship is an expression of our thirst for God. Thirst for His wisdom, love, guidance, power…

Worship Requires Relationship…

[v.6-7] “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, And the sheep of His hand.”

Finally, worship requires relationship, otherwise it’s like putting the cart in front of the horse. One day, every knee will bow ad every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (see Phil. 2:11) but that worship is not relational. The worst of men will bow in that day in recognition of the Lord’s sovereignty but believers worship Him not only because He made us but because He is “our God.”

In a general sense, the Lord God provides for all people from His treasury – He gives each of us air to breath, life to live and I think, an opportunity to turn to Him through Jesus Christ. But it is only after we have come to trust in Jesus that we are able to worship in a way that is pleasing to God. John Newtons song comes to mind as I think of it:

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now I am found, was blind but now I see.”

It is from the knowledge of God’s love and the application of God’s grace to our lives that we are able to worship the Lord for all He is worth. If worship is an overflow of our joy and delight in God as we reflect on His goodness, mercy and grace towards us then all worship is tied to the relationship we have with God through Jesus Christ.

All of this boils down to how desperate you were for God to intervene in your life in the first place. Those who have truly trusted in Jesus once upon a time realized that they were by nature desperate sinners, desperately wicked and doomed to destruction from birth because of their sin. But in time they learned that God loved them and Jesus died for them – then they called out to Him in their need and received the forgiveness of sin and newness of life through the Spirit by whom they now not only call God “Abba” but they also serve and praise the living God.

But there are those who came to Jesus for the wrong reasons too.

There are some who have said they came to Jesus because they did not want to go to hell. You might be thinking, “what’s wrong with that?” Consider it for a moment from God’s perspective,

“For a person to say that the main reason he or she came to Christ was to escape hell would be like a woman who said that the only reason she married her husband was to get away from her parents or like the man who said that he married his wife because he had a load of debt and she had money – I couldn’t think of any other way out of my debt so I married her.”

If you only came to Christ to have your sin debt paid and to avoid hell – you missed the point of His coming.

He came to give new life to every sinner who would trust in Him. Yes, He gave us a place in heaven. Yes, because of His grace and forgiveness we will not go to hell or taste the wrath of God. Yes, Jesus paid it all. But the new life that He gave is to the praise and glory of the Father – this is the goal, the aim and the chief end of man, to glorify in the flesh and the spirit (1 Cor. 6:20) Him who bought us with the price of Christ’s blood.

[i] Collin Smith

August 18, 2019August 19, 2019

Being Christ to the Least of These

“***For the poor will never cease from the land**; therefore I command you, saying, ‘You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land***.’” Deuteronomy 15:11 (NKJV)

You see them standing on crowded street corners holding signs upon which are statements like, “Will work for food,” “Anything helps,” and a final “thank you” and “God bless you;” people who for various reasons find themselves homeless.

When you see them. What do you do? Do you turn away and ignore them? Do you rolldown your window and shout at them? Do you pray for them? Do you share the love of Jesus with them? Do you serve them?

You might call them the “least of these” (Matt. 25:40,45) but the reality is that while so many people treat them as if they were nobodies and nothing – the Lord God made them and the Lord Jesus Christ died for them. They are just like you and me and frankly, you and I are at best, one calamity away from being right where they are now.

In His word, the Lord said that they’d always be among us (Matt. 26:10) and in a round-about way He implied that when we served them – we were serving Him (see Matt.25:32-40).

I’d like to say that in the process of serving the homeless or anyone else you are also worshipping Jesus. Listen to ALL of what He said to Judas in (Matthew 26:10):

“You have the poor with you always…but Me you do not have always.”

I think that Jesus was calling Judas out for his hypocrisy among a few other things when He made the statement we find in (Matt 26:10) referring to the poor. It was after Judas had griped about the waste of costly fragrant oil which a certain woman used in her worship of the Lord Jesus, implying that her sacrifice could have been put to better use that Jesus said those words to Judas,

At that time, people could literally worship Jesus to His face; they could thank Him, praise Him and sacrificially honor Him like the woman did in (Matt. 26:6-7) but most of them did not. In His statement, Jesus was pointing to the fact that He was returning to His Father (see John 13:3, John 16:28, John 20:17) but He was also pointing to times like those in which we live, where our worship of Him is most often carried out in sacrificial service towards others who are often less fortunate than ourselves.

Once upon a time I was like many people in my community, largely because I did not understand or really care to understand the plight of the homeless. I saw them as panhandlers and manipulators, as people who weren’t trying hard enough. In those days, even as a Christian I avoided them.

Now, my primary area of service IS to that same community. My heart hurts for them and I long to see them recieve Jesus as Lord and Savior and then to be transformed by the renewing of their minds through His Holy Scriptures.

Would you be Christ to the least of these? Dont sweep them under the rug, so to speak; don’t treat them as a nuisance to be rid of – treat them as people for whom Christ died; do for them what you’d have done for yourself if the shoe was on the other foot.