Praise Him with Everything at Your Disposal

Morning.

Glad to see everybody here.

Holiday weekend.

It was a little rainy when I first woke up this morning.

I know there was the temptation to stay in bed, so applause for everyone who got out.

Yeah.

I'm really excited to see what God can do with his word this morning.

So let's not hesitate.

Let's just dig right into Psalm 150, right?

Psalm 150 is the last psalm of the book of Psalms, and it is exuberant.

Read with me.

Praise the Lord.

Praise God in his sanctuary.

Praise him in his mighty heavens.

Praise him for his mighty deeds.

Praise him according to his excellent greatness.

Praise him with trumpet sound.

Praise him with lute and harp.

Praise him with tambourine and dance.

Praise him with strings and pipe.

Praise him with sounding symbols.

Praise him with loud clashing symbols.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Lord, we ask that by the end of this time in your word that our hearts will have been touched to sing your praises.

That you would take us and shape us and move us to see your excellent deeds, that we would realize your goodness supersedes all circumstances life can throw at us.

And that there is always cause to praise you.

Be with us in the power of your spirit.

In Jesus' name, amen.

All summer long, I've been working with the idea that I got to close our series in the Psalm, and I was kind of excited about that.

We studied the book of Psalms this summer, for any of you who don't know.

We went through, we called it the Summer of Psalms.

And I happened to get to preach the first sermon in the series and the last sermon in the series, which gives me a little bit of power in some ways, right?

And so I could start thinking, how would I best use my time and what psalms would reflect nicely?

And I thought, you know what?

I'm just gonna book into this thing.

And so if you don't remember, I started in Psalm 1 and I'm ending in Psalm 150.

So the first and the last psalm, and the first and the last sermon was what I was working towards all summer long, thinking I get this great opportunity to kind of bookend the whole book of the Psalms.

And I thought it was kind of fun.

And so I've been working towards that, thinking this would be our last sermon in the Psalm.

And then Dave came back and said he wanted to preach one in the Psalms too.

So next week you're gonna have Dave, but here's the way we need to look at this.

I just today is the series finale of the summer in the Psalms, and next week Dave's gonna release previously unreleased behind-the-scenes footage.

That's the way we're gonna look at this.

Because I've been working on a finale all summer long.

So that's just the bonus DVD, is the way we're gonna look at it.

Because so when I start talking about enrapturing and capturing the whole book, that's why.

So today we're ending it.

No.

Um, in all seriousness, I want to take a look at how the book of Psalms, it was laid out in a specific way.

There's 150 Psalms that were chosen to be a part of God's word from the history of God's people, that cover things written from Moses through David and forward and on, and put these historic praises of God's people that were sung in times of Israel's strife as a people, as it were go look at the heart of individuals in Israel's life, that look at all sorts of different things, and we have all of this in there, and and yet it ends with exuberant praise of the God of the universe.

We started the book of Psalms in Psalm 1 with a look at God's word.

And I thought, how fitting before we spend the summer in the word to start with a challenge to meditate on his word.

And Psalm 1 looked at the fact that the man who meditates on God's word day and night and who finds his delight in God's word, that man, that person is like a tree firmly planted by waters, whose roots are constantly dipped in the life-giving source of God's word, and they draw strength from God's word in a way that takes that person and makes them comparable to an immovable tree that nothing can shake or uproot.

And as we start with the life-giving power of God's word and end with exuberant praise of God, we have this amazing bookend to an awesome summer of praising the Lord.

Look at the pattern within this psalm itself.

Look at the general outline.

It's just six verses.

It's just six verses.

But it starts, there's a call for God's people to praise him as they gather in the sanctuary, along with an acknowledgement that he's also to be praised in heaven above.

Then there's a recognition that we should praise him for his mighty deeds, and we spent a lot of time talking about this last week in Psalm 78, where it said, make known the mighty deeds of God to the next generation.

And we talked about how his mighty deeds were seen even in the failures of Israel.

But it says, praise him for his mighty deeds and his excellent greatness, and then it goes through a list of basically saying, praise him with everything in the arsenal, every instrument known to man.

It says, I mean, the idea behind this is praise, don't leave anything out.

Use everything at your disposal.

Take everything before you and lift God up with it.

Praise him with the trumpet sound and with the lute and the harp and the tambourine and dance.

Praise him with the strings and the pipe with the sounding symbols, praise him with the loud clashing symbols.

And some of you are like, I don't like that.

But you know what?

The scripture is saying, use it all.

You know, if you have a harmonica, use it.

If you got a washboard that you can scratch on, scratch on that.

Everything you got, throw it in there and praise him.

And after telling you to use everything at your disposal, it then says, let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

This psalm is seriously focused on praising God.

Twelve times in six small verses it says to praise him specifically.

It's exuberant.

It's joyful.

It acknowledges his goodness.

And I thought, what if I'm not joyful?

What if I'm not joyful?

And maybe you think that right now.

What if you're not joyful?

You got this loud, exuberant praise to just take everything and play all the instruments at once and praise him in heaven and in his sanctuary and everything on earth.

Praise him and you're going, I don't feel like it.

What then?

What then?

See, sometimes life is hard.

Maybe you're filled with hurt and confusion today.

Maybe you're under attack in some area of your life.

Maybe your loved ones are sick.

Maybe you're trapped in repetitive sin.

And maybe you're going.

How do I praise him in the middle of all that?

The truth is life is hard.

And these aren't hypothetical situations.

The loved ones being sick and the being under attack and trapped in repetitive sin.

These aren't hypothetical.

These are things we face every day, are they not?

Every day.

Can I just be honest with you and tell you I had a hard week?

Can I just be honest and say that my week was stressful?

For those that might not know, I want to let you know something going on in our body right now because it's not a secret.

We talked about it at our quarterly business meeting this past Wednesday, but not everybody got to make it there.

But our church is kind of going through a little bit of a hard time right now.

Our church is going through a little bit of a hard time.

For those who who weren't at the congregational meeting might not know, let me go through a couple of details.

I don't want to get bogged down, but let me just want to say a few things for those of you that might be hearing this for the first time so that you're like, what is he talking about, right?

First off, let me just say that it's we've got some struggles amongst our staff right now, but it's not an issue of sin for those who might be going, What's going on?

It's not an issue of sin.

We have an amazing staff that loves God and is passionate about ministry.

It's just that taking different personalities with different passions and different gifts and getting everyone lined up in the same direction can be a challenge at times.

And when you throw our humanity into the equation, things can get a little bit messy.

We happen to be working through a little bit of that kind of messiness right now, and we talked about it at our quarterly business meeting this week.

And I know some people were like, ooh, that that's hard stuff.

And it is.

I'm gonna be honest with you, when you're going through that and people are talking about that, and you feel like eyes are on you, and you're trying to be transparent and honest about what God can do in the middle of a mess, it can be hard to write a sermon on a psalm that says exuberantly praise Him 12 times in six small verses.

Just honest.

And as I prepared today's message, which I was working towards all summer, I sat in my office and I felt spiritually blocked.

Just spiritually blocked.

And I looked at the tone of the psalm.

Praise him, praise him, praise him, yay! And it didn't ring true in my heart.

It didn't ring true.

Then I remembered something.

The rest of the book of Psalms.

The rest of the book of Psalms.

You see, I'm not just preaching Psalm 150, I'm closing a sermon series in the Psalms.

And if you look at the Psalms in their entirety, the Psalms in their entirety speak exactly to the hurt and pain and confusion and messiness of life that I was struggling with as I was trying to prepare a sermon on Psalm 150 this week.

They speak to all of that mess.

Guess what we've seen in this summer we spent in the Psalms?

We've seen people dealing with their own sin and how to confess it honestly.

We've seen devout followers of God frustrated at the prosperity of the wicked around them.

We've seen people weary from the journey.

We've seen people under attack.

We've seen people hurt and confused.

We've seen the messiness of life in the Psalms.

And I noticed a pattern at work.

And I noticed that the book of the Psalms say it follows the same pattern as many individual psalms.

And that's it, though there might be mess and sin and junk and strife and hurt and pain and sickness and attack and confusion throughout the meat of every psalm.

They end in glorious, exuberant praise of our Father.

And I began to ask myself, why do we see this pattern at work?

Why does God start with pain and end with praise?

And so many of the psalms.

Do you have any idea how many of the psalms start with pain and end with praise?

I'm gonna name just a few.

You can jot them down, you can try to turn to them quickly, but I'm just gonna name a few because we couldn't do it.

We'd be here all day if I tried to do them all.

There's 150 Psalms, and there's a lot that do this.

Psalm 77 starts with I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me.

In the day of my trouble, I seek the Lord, and the night my hand is stretched out without wearying, my soul refuses to be comforted.

And yet it ends by saying, You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

And in certainty of God it ends, knowing he's in control and leading.

Psalm 60 starts with, Oh God, you've rejected us, broken our defenses, you've been angry.

And it ends with, with God we shall do valiantly.

It is he who will tread down our foes.

Deliver me from those who will work evil and save me from bloodthirsty men.

And it ends with, Oh my strength, I will sing praises to you.

Oh God, you are my fortress, the God who shows me steadfast love.

So many more psalms, so many more psalms end with amazement and praise of God despite the trials of those writing them.

And there's a pattern at work.

A pattern at work, and though we start the book of Psalms with an acknowledgement of the life-giving power of God's word and end it in exuberant praise of our Father, the entire book in the middle is filled with the junk of people's lives.

And all of a sudden I began to realize that this does speak exactly to where I'm at.

Here's what's funny though.

That begin with pain and end with praise, sort of thing.

The praise doesn't simply come at the end because somewhere in the middle of the psalm the circumstances have worked themselves out.

It doesn't, in the middle, it doesn't go, oh wait, now my problems are fixed.

I guess I'll praise you.

The writer is still in the middle of a mess.

When he ends the psalm with a deep acknowledgement of God's worthiness of our praise.

We see the same thing outside of the Psalms.

Job, when he loses all of his children, he cries out, The Lord gave and the Lord is taken away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

David was in the middle of the mess with Goliath when he said, The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.

Daniel praised God from within the lion's den.

Paul praise God from within the jail cell.

The circumstances weren't fixed.

The entire Bible is full of people praising God in the middle of horrible circumstances, and you like me may be asking, why?

Why?

If life stinks, why are these people praising God?

Because it doesn't make sense to our human minds.

I'll tell you why.

I'll tell you why.

Because our God is bigger than our circumstances.

The God of the universe, the creator of all, the lover of man, the savor of our souls is bigger than any circumstance you can face.

Our circumstances do not have a bearing on God's goodness.

God's goodness has a bearing on our circumstances.

And it's something that we need to remember.

And this psalm and the book of Psalms and the entire Bible points us there.

That God comes to bear on our circumstances, not our circumstances on his goodness.

See, we have a tendency to think if God was good, he would not let this happen.

If God was good, he would not let my loved ones die.

If God was good, we wouldn't face this mess.

And that's just not true.

God is bigger than our circumstances.

That is why Job and David and Daniel and Esther and Joshua and Paul and everyone in Scripture can praise him in the midst of horrible circumstances.

That is why the Psalms start in despair and end in praise, and that is why we can praise him no matter what we face.

Whether it be the struggles you face as an individual believer right now, the struggles our church is going through right now, or the persecution of our brothers and sisters who claim the name of Christ in the Middle East and all over the world, we can look at God and say He is good and worthy to be praised.

Amen.

He's good.

No matter what.

We don't praise him for the circumstances he gives us.

We praise him for his character.

We praise him for his undying love.

We praise him for his holiness.

We praise him because we know the battle is won at the end of the ages.

We praise him because he loved us when we did not love him.

And it's because of those things that we can endure and persevere through any trial that he gives us.

It's because of that, that in the midst of the trial, that in the depths of the lion's den we can say he is good.

You know, I was looking at this, I think I was talking to, I think it was Connolly, Scott Connolly, who was talking about that the pattern goes even further.

And though the book of Psalm ends in exuberant praise of God, the entire Bible ends in exuberant praise of God.

When you look at the last scenes of Revelation, at the end of everything, it ends in exuberant praise.

And after he said that, I realized, you know, the beginning kind of starts the same way the beginning of the Psalm does, too.

With God's word bringing life.

We start with God's word bringing life.

It says over and over again in Genesis, God said, Let there be light.

God said, God said, God said, and his word brings life.

He says, God said, let us make man.

And there was man.

And God's word brings life.

It's the very life-giving substance from which we came.

Just like Psalm 1 says that God's word is our source of life, that if we put our roots in it, we will draw strength from it and become like an immovable tree planted by the waters.

We see that at the beginning of time, God spoke and his word brought life.

And at the end of his book, despite all the mess of all the sin and all the failure and all the confusion and all the attack, God's book ends in praise of him.

John 1 connects the word at the beginning of creation to the living word, Jesus, who is himself the word of life.

It says, in the beginning was a word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things were made through him.

And without him was not anything made that was made.

In him was life.

And the life was the light of men.

See, the word brings life.

The word brings life.

In Psalm 1, we see that the Word of God, the written word of God brings life.

In Genesis 1, we see that the spoken word of God brings life.

In John 1, we see the living word of God brings life.

And Jesus and His Word are so tied up together they cannot be separated.

They are one and the same.

Jesus calls himself the living water.

And just as we picture a tree by the waters in the book of Psalms at the beginning, we get this picture of Jesus, the living water, running through his people at the end of time.

And at the book of Revelation, it says in 22, verse 1 Then the angel showed me the River of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city also, and on either side of the river the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit yielding its fruit each month.

The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.

They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads, and night will be no more.

They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

And the pattern of the book of the Psalms is the same as the pattern of many individual Psalms, same of what is displayed in the lives of our heroes of the Bible and the pattern of the entire book.

We start with the life-giving power of God's word, and we end with exuberant praise of the God who is bigger than our circumstances.

Yeah, life is rough at times.

As a church, we're going through a little bit of that right now.

And maybe in your individual life you're going through that right now.

On planes we don't even know about.

But our God is good and worthy to be praised.

He has proven himself bigger than our sin.

He has proven himself bigger than our circumstances, and we don't have to wait for the mess to go away to praise him.

And my challenge to us today, as a body and as individuals, is to practice today what we will be doing for eternity.

Praising him.

Let's start with the word and end in praise.

Let's see the life-giving power of God's word come to bear in our hearts.

And as a result, no matter what is happening, let's praise him, knowing that's what we're bound to do for the rest of eternity anyway.

Knowing that he deserves our praise in the middle of every trial.

And knowing that though we may go through hard times here on earth, he has won the battle in the end, and ultimately we will live in painless glory with the one who has set all things right.

And that the tree of life that grows from the living word, its leaves are for our healing.

As Revelation says.

In the meantime, let's start each day clinging to the life-giving substance of his word.

How do we get through our trials?

By standing on the rock, by looking at his word.

Last week at the college group, we looked at Jesus' temptation in the desert.

And when Satan tried to distract Jesus, when Satan laid temptation in front of him, he responded to the trial with God's word.

He quoted Scripture Adam.

He simply stood on the word and knew its certainty and knew that it brings life and knew that its promise will not go unfulfilled.

And he stood through the trial.

That's our call.

That's where we end.

In praise.

Standing on the word.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for who you are.

We thank you for your glorious deeds.

We thank you that we can use everything at our disposal in your praise and feel confident about it.

We thank you that we don't have to wait for the circumstances to get better to be convinced of your goodness.

Send us from this place with a certainty that only can be explained to your life, death, and resurrection.

In Jesus' name, amen.