Thanksgiving and Praise

The steadfast love of the Lord.

Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous.

Praise befits the upright.

Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre.

Make melody to him with the harp of ten strings.

Sing to him a new song.

Play skillfully on the strings with loud shouts.

For the Lord, for the word of the Lord is upright, and all his works are done in faithfulness.

He loves righteous and justice, righteousness and justice.

The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

He gathers the water of the sea as the heap.

He puts the deep in storehouses.

Let all the earth fear the Lord.

Let the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

For he spoke, and it came to be.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.

The Lord looks down from heaven.

He sees all the children of man from where he sits enthroned.

He looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, he who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds.

The king is not saved by his great army.

A warrior is not delivered by his great strength.

The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by his great might it cannot rescue.

Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, and those who hope in his steadfast love, that he may deliver their soul from death and keep them alive in famine.

Our soul waits for the Lord.

He is our help and our shield, for our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.

Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you.

It's a privilege to open the scriptures up with you and lead us in a reflection on this psalm of thanksgiving and praise.

The book of Psalms is a unique collection of poetry in the Old Testament that we will likely come to cherish and resonate with more and more the older we get in this fallen world.

I don't think a lot of teenagers are necessarily really pumped to read the Psalms, but I think a lot of older folks really, really are.

Your parents and your grandparents, I think, would likely live in the Psalms, and there's a good reason for that.

All through the centuries, the Psalms have played a vital role in the worship of God's people, whether it was the Old Testament, people of Israel, or in the church.

And the Psalms often functioned as a kind of hymnal.

In some of the different festival days that they had, these psalms were actually sung, much like we would pull a hymnal out and sing them.

But even more than that, these poems, this collection of poems, were meant to function as portraits for the people of God all through the ages of what genuine faith and trust in God actually looks like in our souls, in our inner man in a broken world.

And so the Psalms are a very gutsy, a very raw place that you find expressions very oftentimes that are just out there from the people of God who are in all kinds of places, disoriented and reoriented.

Well, since this is Thanksgiving weekend, I'd like to begin our time with a question for you.

And it's a question about thankfulness.

I don't know what your what your practice was this weekend, but in the various gatherings that you were, or perhaps prior to that, I wondered if you spent some time thinking about or reflecting on being thankful.

A lot of people do try to do that.

If you did, how did that go for you?

That's your question.

How did that time go for you?

Um, where did your heart go when you sat down to reflect on thankfulness?

Was that something that was easy for you?

I really wish we had the time, and it would think it would be very useful for us to have a discussion here as a community or in small groups about what that experience was like for you, to kind of put that out on the table of where you went and what you might have enjoyed or what you might have struggled with.

But it would be especially helpful to compare that time with what we find in Psalm 33, because this is one of those psalms that was designed by the Lord to call each of us to the thanksgiving and praise of Him.

And there's a lot in this psalm that the Lord wants to teach us.

A couple of things before we get going here is that thanksgiving and praise, I realize these are distinct ideas, but they often appear in the Psalms, as they do in this one, as kind of Siamese twins.

They're joined at the hip, they have a lot of overlap, and they really go together well.

Where you have the one truly and fully, there you have the other as well.

Well, I'd like to help us navigate um our reflection this morning with three questions.

Uh the first question is what does thanksgiving and praise to God look like?

What does that look like?

What does God envision that looking like?

Secondly, what reasons do we have to be thankful to God?

Um the first one encompassed verses 1 through 3.

I wanted to point that out, kind of an opening book in.

The reasons we have to be thankful to God, you'll find that in the body of this psalm.

It's most of it, verses 4 through 19.

And then finally, the third question What do we do with our struggles with thanksgiving and praise?

And this is the kind of final book in, the last uh three verses of the psalm.

So let's begin then with our first question: what does thanksgiving and praise to God, what does it look like?

Well, when I started thinking of this, I thought of children.

And as kids, we learn to express gratitude and uh and praise, right?

We we do learn that, and we hopefully we do.

As parents, we seek to instill that into our children.

And um we come to find out that it's it's actually shocking uh how how unthankful children are just by nature, and it doesn't say anything about children.

If you're if you're a child here today, that has more to do with humanity, just being people.

There's something in us that by nature um we are not very thankful creatures.

And um, we have to be trained hard to learn to say thank you.

And uh now some kids have learned to pick up on this really quickly, and they have learned the habit of how to say thank you.

Maybe they are the envy of all the parents around.

They're like, oh, what's wrong with you?

I mean, you know, uh Marcelo's kids say thank you and they get things.

What about you guys, you know?

And um, but it's interesting, I think we need to point out a distinction at this point.

There's a very important distinction between expressing thanks and being thankful.

Those two things are very different.

They they do go together, um, they were intended to go together, but they don't always go together.

It would be easy for us as parents uh to forget that our training of our children needs to push into the state of their being and not just their expression of thanks.

We're not out just to control behavior, we're out to try to lead them into places to really be thankful in their hearts.

Um it's much in functions the same way when we talk about um apologies and and and uh being sorry.

How often does it grieve our hearts when one of our, say one of our children are squabbling with the other, and you, you know, there's a there's a fight that breaks out, there's a uh an injury that happens, and the one who caused it maybe says uh sorry.

You know, it's really dissatisfying, really disappointing that that's that's really all we could have at that moment was just a simple quick expression that was perfunctory and um wasn't something that was really entered into.

I think as parents, we would want to help that child enter into what real sorrow looks like and um to at least point them in that direction.

Well, in a sense, this psalm is giving us uh a rich portrait of thanksgiving and praise to God.

And it's a portrait that God invites us to enter into.

And I want to look at a couple of aspects with you.

The first is that a true Thanksgiving and praise is an expression of the reality in our heart.

At least that's the direction that God intends for Thanksgiving to go.

That's the fullness of thanksgiving.

God's training of us about Thanksgiving may begin with commandments.

And it does.

There are commandments to be thankful and to praise the Lord.

But like a good relational parent, God is pushing us further than that.

And he's doing that in this Psalm.

He's doing it in these first three verses.

He wants us to enter into a state of being in which thanksgiving erupts from our hearts and flows from us back to Him.

I want you to look at the kind of expressions that are used here.

Shouting for joy.

Shouting for joy, playing with great fervor, musical instruments, and loud shouts to him.

Now, I don't think the Lord is really after here, encouraging us just to have high volume.

I think what's really being shown here is there's something that is emanating out of, that is erupting out of, that cannot be contained within us, that is going out to the Lord here in praise and in thanksgiving to Him.

I'd like for you a moment to think of a place where you've been, where you've heard such spontaneous eruptions breaking out all around you.

Can you think of any place where that has happened?

I'm guessing most of you would be thinking of a sporting event.

Maybe some of you are thinking about a worship service that you were at.

I was thinking of a UND hockey game.

I'm not a big hockey fan, but I do enjoy a hockey game.

And one of the things that is really striking is that when the Sioux score a goal, the place erupts.

I mean, if you're not used to what's going to happen when that happens, you might be really startled.

There is just an eruption of not only fireworks, but people are on their feet spontaneously.

And why is that?

You know, did I miss the sign at the beginning of the hockey game up on the whatever you call that thing hanging down that said that said, fans, when the goal is scored, please rise to your feet and shout praises to the team.

You know, that didn't have to happen.

It didn't have to be instruction for the Sioux fans to let loose.

Nobody had to tell them that.

I wonder what drives that.

We're gonna come to that a little more in a moment.

But at this point, it's it's important to see that there's something really robust here in this psalm that's being pictured for us.

At the very end of the psalm in verse 21, the Lord says this even directly.

He says that the psalmist, through the psalmist, says that our hearts, the deepest parts of us, are glad in Him.

The main thing I want to get across, which is this first question, is that this is God's call and design for us.

It's a robust, true, inner expression of deep thanks.

And I would like us to know that this is his gift to us as well.

This is what we were made for.

He does not want you or me to settle for less, although we will experience less much of the time.

But he doesn't want us to settle for less.

We were made for whole hearted worship.

It's the end goal of our faith.

There is a second thing about this thanksgiving and praise and this picture that we're given.

And that is that praise and thanksgiving are enhanced by creativity.

They're enhanced by creativity.

So if praise and thanksgiving is something that just erupts from us, if you notice in the words of this text, there is an actual call to do something.

There is a call to use skill to play instruments, if that's your your your gifting.

There is a call to sing a new song, a song that has to be created and formed, and where our creative image of God that we bear is put to use.

I wonder how we might use creativity in thanking or praising God.

I know we give that kind of thought in our marriages, those of you who are married, and if you're not, you would do it in other ways, but just think of your anniversary.

Think of the effort that hopefully you put into an anniversary celebration when the focus point of that celebration would likely be an expression of your heart, however, that might be done in your marriage, whether it be a card or just a time of face-to-face where you get to express what your spouse really means to you.

And I think we work at being creative at that.

We don't just do the same thing every year, do we?

I hope we don't.

I hope there's creativity, because creativity shows honor and it shows delight in, and we're going to use something deep within us to put effort into showing our appreciation.

And I think we find that kind of idea right here in this portrait of what it looks like to praise the Lord.

So, how can we use creativity to praise the Lord?

Um, I don't know.

I don't know how God's formed you.

If you're gifted in singing, um, I'm thinking maybe you could you can sing, you can come up with songs that you can sing for him.

Um I'm thinking maybe we can serve.

Maybe we can offer God some service before him, maybe something we talk to him about, something that we, when we come to grips and are especially struck and are moved from his word by what he's done for us, that we offer to him a service that we're going to do.

Maybe it's something we do where we journal and write him out something.

There's an Old Testament example of this with a slave girl, a Gentile slave girl named Hagar, who was a servant in Abraham's house uh 4,000 years ago.

And um she became pregnant with one of Abraham's child, and um through a long story, she was sent out into the in uh into the desert, and um it would very likely she would have perished out there, but the Lord showed up.

An angel of the Lord appeared to her and gave a blessing to her and told her that God had seen her and that he was going to um take care of her.

And she gave him a name.

She gave him a name, uh El Roy.

It means the God who sees me.

And to this day we're teaching our kids one of the names of God is uh El Roy, the God who sees me.

But there was a way that Hagar entered into uh her thanksgiving and praise by coming up with a name for God that uh became inscripturated because it was true and good.

Well, let's move on to our second question.

What reasons do we have to be thankful to God?

It's interesting that in uh in the very first verse here of this psalm, the opening, the opening words, the psalmist says is that praise and thanksgiving are befitting for us.

For the people of God, the righteous, uh, they're called in here, the upright, the people God chose as his treasured possession from all the peoples of the earth, the people that were going to be his heritage.

And the psalmist says it's fitting for us to praise him.

And it is right out of the shoot because we didn't have any of those blessings by our own doing.

We're not righteous in ourselves, we're not upright in our own hearts by nature.

God has given us the gift of righteousness that's in Christ Jesus, and he's made us his people by what his son has done for us.

And so, yes, praise is in fact fitting.

But the psalmist goes on to say so much more than that.

If you look at verse 4, this begins with a word for.

For.

Signaling to us there is a list of reasons coming for why we give praise to the Lord, why it's fitting for us to give praise to Him.

I'd like to look at this list with you rather briefly.

And um as we do, I'd like to say, you know, it would be very easy to just read through this list quickly and to see them as kind of high and lofty theological truths, which they are.

They're deep and profound truths of Scripture, but they are so much more than that.

They are very practical reasons that affect us very deeply when we can just get our mind around them.

C.

S.

Lewis, um Famous Christian author, perhaps the one of the most famous Christian authors, at least in recent centuries, he goes on record and describes a struggle that he had early on with the idea of why God would have us praise him.

And he was really like, what?

What is up with that?

Like, why would God have us do that?

That doesn't seem like a very noble thing.

And of course, C.S.

Lewis at that point did not have a grip on the majesty and the splendor of God, and that God was in fact worthy of that.

But he did begin to notice something that I think was helpful to him and will be helpful to us as we think about these reasons that are listed here.

He came to see that all real deep enjoyment in life overflows into praise unless it was deliberately prevented so.

And he said, he noticed this within lovers, one to another, that where there was deep enjoyment, there was, unless it was held back, there was an overflow of that into praise and thanksgiving for one another, honor for one another.

He said, citizens would do this with their heroes and so forth.

And he came down to the idea that we delight to praise what we enjoy.

Because the praise not only expresses but completes the enjoyment.

It is its appointed consummation.

I want you to think back to the hockey game with me.

Why do the Sioux fans erupt after a goal?

It's the consummation of their enjoyment.

Think about it the next time you're on your feet and shouting and just hooping and enjoying that.

There is something in that shouting and expression that completes your deep enjoyment of what just happened.

And so Lewis is really kind of putting out there that the key to entering thanksgiving and praise with God is a deep enjoyment of God.

And this is where I think our author has given us a list of reasons.

He could have listed many, but I think he picks reasons here that are in key ways.

There's some of the core things that as the people of God we love about God.

There's some of the core things that we can get our hands around about enjoying God and who he is and his character.

So let's look at some of these with me.

We'll begin in verse 4, and I'll just kind of loosely go through them here.

He begins by saying, the psalmist begins by saying that God is absolutely flawless in his integrity and faithfulness.

Absolutely flawless.

This is one of the things that ruins and spoils and causes strife and conflict in our human relationships.

Is that we in fact are not flawless in either our integrity or our word or our loyalty and faithfulness.

In fact, our life's journey is about coming up against failures in those very areas again and again, whether it's with our spouse or with our parents or with our friends.

But God is not that way.

His word is amazing and it's true, and it never fails.

It never fails in what it says, it never fails to do what it sets out to do.

But the psalmist builds on this.

He goes on to say that God's heart is beautiful.

God is more beautiful than we could ever imagine.

He is stunning, and I don't mean that in appearance.

He's a spirit being, and uh, but his character is stunning.

And the psalmist here highlights the fact that God loves whatever is good.

He loves only whatever is good.

He hates what's evil, and he brings about goodness in our lives in all kinds of ways through redemption and through his working and his fashioning of our hearts.

He hates injustice at any level.

I'd like for you to think about this at a kind of personal level here.

I mean, it's easy for us to just kind of think God is good kind of out there.

But I wonder if we really take time to get a grip on God is good in your life.

Wherever you are, in whatever your circumstances, as Walt often reminds us, God is good in our lives.

The whole earth, the psalmist says, is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.

That's kind of an interesting expression.

We live in a broken world where if you based your vision of the world on the media, you would just say the world is full of injustice, and the world is full of evil, and this world is spiraling down, culture after culture, to the ground, and there's no hope.

And yet the Lord is full of the loyal love of the Lord.

And one of the places that where that is so evident and where we get to see that is in the goodness of God in the lives of his people.

The Lord who's fashioning our hearts, each of us, he is writing the story of our lives.

And we enter into that by our own choices and directions.

But ultimately, in a sovereign way, he stands over our stories.

And it's not just Ruth in the Old Testament or Abraham or Moses or Joseph that has these kinds of rich stories of redemption where there's twists and turns, and all of a sudden you're blown away by what the Lord has done and how he brought out deliverance and rescue.

He does that in your life.

And maybe we don't take the time to really look at that.

Maybe we don't take the time to sit with each other and tell the stories of our lives of how God has moved and raised things up, unearthed things, brought devastating, shattering dreams, but brought redemption that came and how He had us on the anvil for a long period, and it felt like we were being hammered into oblivion, but out of the ashes rose an amazing redemption.

That is the goodness of the Lord.

And as a community of God, we're meant to sing songs to each other and to remind each other and to fellowship with each other of the goodness of God, of what he's doing in our lives now, and what he has been doing.

The psalmist says more than this.

He goes on to say that God is transcendent beyond comprehension.

Would we want it any other way?

Not that we got to pick.

Can you imagine a God that we could get our mind wrapped around?

But the living God, the only one that is, is so far above what we can even begin to get our mind around, that really the only appropriate posture for us is one of awe and fear, of reverence and humility.

Because we only know a little bit of what he's told us about himself.

And we can't begin to see what he sees.

And the psalmist speaks about the kind of creative things that he's done that are just staggering.

He just spoke creation into being.

Now I hope you make time in your busy life to go out in a dark place and lie on your back and stare at the stars.

There is something so humbling and amazing about that.

Somebody told me at the break that they're just were undone by doing that.

There's really no words when you begin to see the vastness of the galaxies and the solar systems and the stars and the planets, and that God just upholds it and made it with a mere word.

And yet this God is good to me.

Another reason that we're given is that the Lord is the determiner of all history and every victory.

I love the way he puts this.

He says in verse 10 and following.

He said, the Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing.

Just think of how the nations right now in our world are squabbling, and the kinds of plans that are in scheming that's being made to control this and stop this and start this.

The kinds of things that nations put their trust in, and that as people we get sucked into the same thing, putting our trust in.

We put our trust in aircraft carriers and fighter pilots and atomic bombs.

And the psalmist says, you know, the counsel of the Lord and the plans of his heart, that's what stands firm through all generations, from beginning to end.

That's the kind of God that reigns.

And it's no use trying to wear yourself out to protect yourself with this or with that.

Victory comes from the Lord.

And he's good to his people.

And so we have a great reason to be thankful to him.

Finally, the one final reason I want to look at, and this reason really comes down and gets very personal.

After making it clear that God sees all the inhabitants of the earth, he sees us to the very core of our being.

In fact, in some sense, his hand fashions us to the inside out.

But yeah, this psalm goes on to say in verse 18 that the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him and who hope in his steadfast love.

And his eye is on them for good.

His eye is on them to deliver them and to uphold them and to keep them as he sees fit.

The Lord is really bent toward his people.

He delights in us because of his son.

He delights in you and me, if we're in Christ, because of his son.

And this is really a reason to not only enjoy God, but to express that in thanksgiving and praise.

Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where we could just stop with the first two questions and go and do it?

The problem is we live in between the already and the not yet.

The fallen world is a rich reality for us every day.

The brokenness of us from the fall that we've inherited from Adam, our remainders of indwelling sin are so profound, they affect us deeply.

And there are going to be challenges in this life to our praise of God and our thanksgiving of Him.

And you get a hint of this at the very end, the last verses.

You know, there's going to be famines, there's going to be death to be endured, there's going to be deliverance that's needed that we need to wait on God for.

And hope.

Hope is expectation, confident, but expectation of something that's yet coming, but's not here yet.

And so there's struggle, there's mess in the here and now.

And really, it's important to point this out.

We don't do ourselves any favor by neglecting our real inner life in this area as well as any other area.

It doesn't do us any good to just stuff down or not pay attention to what's going on on the inside.

There are battles that are going to keep us cold.

There are battles of our heart that will move us in places where we feel a million miles from praising God and distracted deeply.

This can come from all kinds of things.

It can come from a deep sense of entitlement or just dullness from having maybe too much in life or too much to do.

And sometimes it takes something like a visit to a hospital intensive care waiting room to see the trauma that's unfolding in that kind of place for someone else to realize, wow, wow, I'm glad that wasn't me.

I'm glad this isn't my family that's in this right now.

And the Lord sometimes awakens us to the kinds of things that we're really dull to naturally.

At other times in life, we're just maybe disoriented with life and with God by our own sin or by shattered dreams that God is using to shape us and to move us.

Our lives might be unraveled and we might be deeply distracted.

Again, C.S.

Lewis had something that was really helpful here.

He talked about that some of the biggest labor in the Christian life is that we are like men and women who are digging trenches in the desert for water to flow down them.

And occasionally there is a small trickle or flow of water that comes that we can relish.

But we're looking forward to a time when that channel will be filled with water.

But in the here and now we look through a glass dimly.

And a psalm like this is not meant to put you in a place of saying, why don't you praise God perfectly on the inside?

The psalm here is meant to have you sit with God and really, in some, at one level, even grieve with Him, but rejoice that a day is coming, Lord, when what you have in the first few verses here is going to be a reality for me every single day of my life.

And it's going to be in the community of your people, it's going to be a worship service on the earth into eternity like we've never enjoyed before.

Because we were meant to enjoy God and we're going to get to enjoy Him.

And that enjoyment will be completed by our praise and thanksgiving of Him day after day.

So there's a sense in which this passage is meant for us to long for that.

It's meant for us to push into it now.

It's meant for us not to settle for the status quo.

It's meant for you to open up yourself to the Lord and just acknowledge, as I did when I sang here a little bit ago.

I'm just like, you know, I'm so distracted here this morning, Lord.

I love this music, I love these songs, and I my heart feels like it's in the moment in which I was trying to sing, it's just it was just stalling.

And um, ah, Father, I look forward to the day, and I long for now for your Holy Spirit to fill me and to give me the power and move in my life to do that.

We wait in hope and we worship in hope.

And that's where this passage ends.

And that's what I'd like us to leave with, and where the Lord uh would have us to leave at the end of this psalm.

Our lot now is to be in confident expectation of not only what the Lord does in our life now, in the here and now through his spirit, but in the day that's coming.

And may we never settle for perfunctory.

Uh will you join me as I close in a prayer?

Our Father, we do thank you.

You are good.

We thank you for these words that really give us a perspective on life that is good.

Father, forgive us for the ground level perspective that we wallow in so often.

Lord, we do ask for your spirit to move in our midst and for you to do a greater work of growth and goodness and redemption in each of our lives, that the praise and thanksgiving of you might be deeper and well up higher, and might flow out of a greater enjoyment of you.

And we ask it in Christ's name.

Amen.