A Call to Praise, A Word of Warning

As we've been covering Hebrews chapter 3 and 4, the author of Hebrews there quotes from

Hebrews 3 · chapter mention

Psalm 95 quite frequently.

But we will look at the beginning few verses tonight.

We won't talk too much about those last few verses simply because we've kind of talked

about them in good detail in the last couple of Sunday sermons.

But the first few verses of this psalm are beautiful.

And so while Psalm 95 is fresh on our mind and while we are in the midst of Thanksgiving,

which is part of what this psalm is about, it seems like a good time for us to look at

it.

So we will.

It's a short little psalm.

We'll look at all of it tonight.

So let's pray and we'll get started.

Father God, we come to you.

We thank you for the goodness of your word.

And I pray, dear Lord, that we just would find joy in you tonight, that you would be

the rock of our life, that we would be thankful to you, dear Lord.

We have a lot to be thankful for, that we would trust you above all else, that we would

seek to be the sheep of your pasture and that we would just find comfort and security in

your care.

And I ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Psalm 95 verse 1.

Psalms 95:1

Come, let us shout joyfully to the Lord.

Shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation.

Now, this is beautiful language that we see throughout the scriptures.

The idea that God is the rock of our salvation, that he's a rock that we can stand on and

rocks cannot be moved, as Jesus points out in the story in the Sermon on the Mount, where

he talks about the guy who built this house on sand.

And when the storm came and the waters raged, the sand washed away and the house went with

it.

But for those who build on a firm foundation, for those who are built on the rock, the storms

that come and the rains that come will not blow it away.

It doesn't mean that the storms won't come, but it means that what is built on the rock

will be able to withstand the storm.

And that's the same language we see here.

Let us shout joyfully to the Lord.

How often do we rejoice in the Lord and shout joyfully to the Lord and just kind of bask

in the joy of the Lord and kind of take a break from the stresses of the world and remember,

hey, God is pretty good.

And even though life's sometimes stressful, there are many things we have to be thankful

for and there are many things that we can rejoice in.

And that's what he says here in the next verse, verse two.

Let us enter his presence with thanksgiving.

Let us shout triumphantly to him in song.

Well, that's what we just did.

We just sang out to the Lord.

Perhaps sometimes we do that even as individuals, just at home or a quiet place.

Perhaps we find ourselves just praising God or singing out to God.

And what does it say here?

Let us enter his presence with what?

With thanksgiving.

We certainly have much to be thankful for.

We are reminded of that every time this time of year comes around with thanksgiving being

tomorrow.

Sometimes we need to stop for a minute and realize that we do have much to be thankful

for.

Sometimes we see the bad and the things that aren't going so well and we think man's life's

tough and nothing's working out.

And sometimes the bad things overshadow the good things.

But perhaps if we take a second and kind of shift our focus, we may realize that we have

a lot to be thankful for.

Even on some of our worst days, we still got it pretty good.

Even in some of our darkest times, God is still the light of our life.

And so we need to remember to thank God.

Perhaps we do.

Hopefully we thank God every day.

But maybe we don't.

Sometimes perhaps that falls through the crack and we need to see verses like this to be

reminded.

We need to thank God for the things he does and not overlook the things that he does.

Maybe there are little things that he does every day and we need to be thankful for those

little things as well as the big things.

Verse 3, for the Lord is a great God.

Amen.

He is a great God.

A great King above all gods.

He is a God who is undefeated.

In the Old Testament we see, especially in that time in history, there were lots of people

and they worshiped lots of different gods.

They had a God for this and a God for that.

And this God they would pray to and that God they would pray to.

And, oh, we didn't get enough rain.

We must have made our rain god mad or whatever it may be.

There were all these different gods, but they were meaningless.

They were non-existent other than in the minds of those who worship them.

But when the God of Israel shown himself, when Yahweh made himself known to the nations,

there was no question that the God that we come here and serve tonight is the God of

all gods.

He is the King of all kings.

There are no other gods of this world that will stand up to him, our man-made gods.

However real people may think they are, there is but one God and he is victorious in all

things.

He is undefeated and he will reign and rule forever.

Verse four, the depths of the earth are in his hand and the mountain peaks are his.

The sea is his.

He made it.

His hands formed the dry land.

So here we see this language where it talks about God's hands and God is a spirit.

He probably doesn't have hands, but there's this language that we see in scripture that

we connect to, that we give these attributes of our human bodies, our hands or our feet

or whatever it may be and we apply those things to God and here the author does that and says,

hey, God is big.

That's what he's saying here.

God is big.

You think about all the things that we see in this world.

He gives us some examples.

He said the depths of the earth.

So from the deepest ocean and there are some deep oceans in this world, it goes down for

miles and miles sometimes into the middle of the ocean.

From the deepest spot you can get to the highest peak you can get.

Think about some of the tallest mountains that there are in this world, Mount Everest

and Kilimanjaro and all these mountains that are huge, that their peaks soar up into the

clouds.

They disappear into the sky.

They are so tall and yet we serve a God who created those mountains.

He created the highest peak that we see and the lowest depth that there is, places that

we can not even get to, places that humans can barely get to and yet God created all

of them.

They are too big for us.

They are too deep for us.

They are too high for us but yet we serve a God who created these things and for us they

are big but for God they are something that can fit in the palm of his hand.

What does it say here?

The seas, the sea is his.

He made it.

His hands formed the dry land.

Think about that.

Think about how big this planet is.

Not just the depths of the ocean and the highest peaks but yet the whole world, the whole universe,

every bit of it, God made, all of the water in the sea, God made, all of the dry land

that there is, God made.

Everything that there is, God has made and for God it is something that can merely fit

in his hand.

That reminds us and it shows us, the writer here is saying, look at how big God is.

The God that we serve is so much bigger than everything else that we know.

That's important for us to remember because we see this world, we think about how big

and awesome it is, we see the problems of this world that we are up against and others

are up against and we say, man, how could we ever overcome such big problems and big

struggles in our life?

Well, it's easy because the God we serve is far bigger than the problems that we are up

against and it is that God who is with us as we go through those struggles.

The same God who created this earth is the same God as with us as we walk through this

earth and all the things that we may come up against.

The author of Psalm 95 here, David, reminds us, hey, wait, look at how big God is.

The things that are so big to us are nothing to God and so that's the one who we want to

trust in is the one who made all things and can help us overcome them.

Verse 6, come, let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our God.

How often do we just take a moment and worship the Lord and do what he says here?

Do we bow down before the Lord and kneel before the Lord?

Perhaps we should do that more than we do.

Maybe we do it every day.

Maybe you kneel down and bow before the Lord every day, but maybe you don't.

Maybe that's a good practice for Christians to remember to do, to spend some time and

just kneel in reverence and prayer and thankfulness before the Lord.

For he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his care.

Beautiful imagery, same imagery that we see in Psalm 23.

The Lord is our shepherd.

We shall not want or there is nothing that we lack.

There's nothing that we need.

He's with us.

He lets us lie down in green pastures.

He leads us beside the still waters.

What beautiful imagery that God is our shepherd and that we are his sheep and David uses the

same language here.

For he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his care.

Now, we need to realize that if we are God's people and we trust God, then we are right

where we need to be.

We are in a good pasture.

However, there's that temptation that the grass is always greener on the other side

of the fence.

We know God's word and perhaps we try to live by God's word and do the right thing, but

those temptations come, right?

We talked about that a couple of Sundays ago.

Those temptations come and we say, well, things have been pretty good here in the presence

of God, but well, man, the grass looks pretty green over there.

If I could just go over there and do this or do that or get involved in this thing,

but we find very quickly when we leave the Lord's pasture that that grass that looked

good across the fence, once we get over there, we find out it is as dead and nasty and bad

as any grass we've ever seen.

So we need to realize that if we are in God's presence, if God is our shepherd and we are

his sheep, then we need to stay in the pasture of security and abundance.

That is only with the Lord.

The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence.

Perhaps we have all learned that in one way or another throughout our lives.

And so that's where the praise and the thanksgiving and the worship of the Lord stops in that

part of the Psalm.

And then David ends the Psalm with a word of warning.

So he says, look, God is good.

God is great.

God is big.

You need to be thankful to God and rejoice in God and remember that he is your shepherd

and you're the sheep of his pasture.

But then he gives a warning.

And he says that at the end of verse seven, he says, today, if you hear his voice, do

not harden your hearts as it Miraba as on that day at Massa in the wilderness where

your fathers tested me.

They tried me though they had seen what I did for 40 years.

I was disgusted with that generation.

I said, they are a people whose hearts go astray.

They do not know my ways.

So I swore in my anger, they will not enter my rest.

So David says here of all the greatness of God that we see in the first seven and three

quarters verses, this is who God is.

God is great.

God is good.

Stand in his presence and rejoice in him today.

Today recognize who God is and live for God and trust in him and don't be like those people

in the past.

And then he gives a word of warning.

Hey, God is good, but pay attention.

We have to seek God.

We have to follow God.

We have to be faithful to God.

We have to be obedient to God because there were some folks back in the day and they didn't

listen to God.

And God said, Hey, they're not going to enter into my rest.

And that's what we've talked about as we've been going through the book of Hebrews, but

we don't want to be those who fail to enter the rest and the peace of God.

We want to be those in the first seven verses here that are like David, that recognize the

greatness of God, that put faith in Jesus Christ and receive that salvation that comes

through Christ alone and stand on the rock of our salvation that is Jesus and rejoice

in a God who is bigger than anything that we are up against and never forget that we

are the sheep of his pasture and he watches over us.

Let's pray.

Father God, we thank you for these good words and I pray that you would help us just to

rejoice in them.

God, you are good.

And sometimes maybe your goodness is overshadowed by all the stuff we see in this world and

the stuff we kind of have to put up with day in and day out.

But let us be reminded of your greatness through Psalms like these, dear Lord, that we would

rejoice in you tonight, that we would be those who praise you for all that you have given

us, dear Lord.

We have much to be thankful for and I pray as this season of thanksgiving is among us

that we do not fail to realize it.

We thank you most of all for Jesus Christ, for grace, for mercy, and that we have a reason

to come here and worship tonight and that we have a hope for the future.

In Jesus' name I pray it.

Amen.