It is Good to Praise God

Psalm 92.

We don't know exactly who wrote this psalm.

It's not crucial that we know who wrote it.

It's pretty general.

A psalm of praise for God's faithfulness.

The superscription of the psalm says, a psalm, a song for the Sabbath day.

So this psalm would have likely been sung on the Sabbath day.

Let's pray and we'll go through the psalm and talk about it.

God, we come to you.

We thank you for your good word.

I pray dear Lord that you be with us tonight, that we would be focused on you.

We thank you for the rain that you've given us in the last few days.

We thank you for the freedom to come here tonight.

I pray God that you would hide me behind the cross, that I would be able to preach and

teach in a way that brings glory and honor to you.

Take away any pride or nerves that I may have tonight, dear Lord, that I would do a good

job to present your word.

I pray that we would listen to it and that we would be those, God, who don't forget to

praise you, that we would be those who are firmly planted in your word and in your commands

and just live for you, dear Lord.

I ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Psalm 92 verse 1, it is good to praise Yahweh.

Psalms 92:1

Now we can stop there for a second before we go any further.

We could really just stop there.

That's a powerful thing.

That's a powerful reminder to us.

It is good to praise God.

Hopefully we do praise God.

Maybe sometimes we have to be reminded to praise God.

Maybe you're like me sometimes, and sometimes your prayer life is more about asking God

for something than it is about just praising who God is and being thankful to God for something.

Now we have a lot of requests, and we make those requests known to God, and we should.

That's not a bad thing.

God wants us to bring our requests to him, and we want to pray to God and ask him to

heal us and ask him for the things that we need and that we desire.

But we need to remember to praise God for all that he's done for us, for all the good

that he does for us, for the ways that he blesses us, ways that we may sometimes overlook.

We have so much.

We are blessed in so many ways that sometimes perhaps we're not as grateful as we should

be for the things that we have.

I think that we take them for granted.

Things like air conditioning and things like cars and simple things that we all have and

we all get up every day and we crank our car and we drive to our job and we eat food at

some point during the day and we come home and have heaters in the winter and air in

the summer.

These things, we've had them for all of our life pretty much for most of us, and we just

kind of take them for granted.

Sometimes we forget how blessed we are and how good God is that he is taking care of

us and blessed us in the ways that he has.

That's not to say that God has answered every prayer that we've ever prayed.

Some might not have been his will, but perhaps God has done more for us than we realize.

Sometimes maybe we have memory loss there.

God does something we prayed for and we're soon to forget about it and we're quick to

move on to the next thing.

But maybe we just need to take time and praise God, not just for what he's done for us, but

just for the fact that he is God, that he is good, that he is the creator of the heavens

and the earth.

That is worthy of our praise regardless of what he has done for us or what he will do

for us if he does nothing else for us for the rest of our life.

He is a God who is good and he is a God who is worthy of our praise.

And so the psalmist says, it is good to praise God.

To sing praise to your name, most high, to declare your faithful love in the morning

and your faithfulness at night with a 10-string harp and the music of a lyre.

For you have made me rejoice, Lord, by what you have done.

I will shout for joy because of the work of your hands.

And so here we see the psalmist pointing out, in the morning, remember God's love.

In the night, remember God's faithfulness.

Rejoice in the Lord.

Shout for joy for what the Lord has done for the works of God's hands.

And so there is certainly a lot to praise God for.

And sometimes we forget that.

Sometimes people get hung up on the few things that God didn't do for them, the few things

that didn't work out the way they want.

And they hold those few things against God all the while overlooking and forgetting just

how good God is.

And the psalmist here starts off on the right note.

This is a good psalm for us to look at, that we need to remember that we want to be those

who offer a good praise to God because he is a good God.

Now something we see here in this psalm in verse 3 is he mentions these instruments here

with 10-string harp and the music of a lyre.

We see that language in the Old Testament.

We see it in the Psalms, this idea of using instruments to praise God.

We used a string instrument tonight.

We don't think about the piano as a string instrument, but you open up the back of it

and it's a bunch of strings that get hit that make these noises.

And so we're certainly aware of praising God with the string instruments.

And we see here the mention of a 10-string harp or a lyre.

Now those things are pretty similar, harps and lyres.

There's some difference there.

They're not the same, but they're a string instrument nonetheless that you kind of hold

up and you kind of play.

Now one thing maybe that we forget or don't think about too much when we read these psalms

is they were songs.

So these were things that would have been sung.

And you can do a quick Google, I mean a YouTube search, and you can find a lot of people that

have written music to sing some of these psalms and it's beautiful when you hear some of these

psalms put to words.

So what I wanted to do tonight, since so many of these psalms are sung, and in particularly

here the mention of the lyre and the harp, is I wanted us to listen to what that kind

of would have sounded like maybe back in the days when this psalm would have been written.

So I got this video that I found.

It's a few minutes long, it's not very long, where this guy sings through Psalm 23, which

we're probably all familiar with, and he plays a 10-string lyre and he sings the 23rd psalm

in Hebrew.

So we'll check that out and it'll kind of give us an idea of maybe how that would have

been sung back years ago when David wrote that psalm.

I wonder, dayum Great

So that might kind of give you guys an idea when you read through these Psalms of how

they were, how they would have been performed when they were written, it kind of, kind of

puts it in a whole different perspective.

You know, we just read through it and they're beautiful, but when you hear it, you know,

accompanied by music and somebody singing it, it's certainly more beautiful.

And some of that gets lost when we, when we, when we don't sing them and we don't, because

we don't really know how they were written and how they were sung, but perhaps very similar

to what we just saw there.

So anyway, hopefully that was something that was, that it was, it was fun for us to consider.

All right.

Verse five.

How magnificent are your works, Lord?

How profound your thoughts.

A stupid person does not know.

A fool does not understand this.

Though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be eternally

destroyed.

But you Lord are exalted forever.

For indeed Lord, your enemies, indeed your enemies will perish.

All evildoers will be scattered.

So here we see at the beginning of this Psalm, just a praise to God for his goodness and

the fact that God is magnificent.

But then we see a brief section here about the evildoers and those that come against

God or those that come against God's people, people that, that even today there are people

that come against God.

They're, they're, they're people we encounter.

We face opposition to the truth of God's word.

And even though it appears as though those evildoers are flourishing, they sprout up

like grass, but they don't, they don't last long.

They are soon destroyed.

They're not eternal.

The author makes that point here in this part of the passage.

But as for those who trust in God, he says in verse 10, you have lifted up my horn like

that of a wild ox.

I have been anointed with oil.

My eyes look down on my enemies.

My ears hear evildoers when they attack me.

Now we talked about this a few months ago, we had a, had a reference to horn.

That's a, that's a symbolic language for strength.

When he says you have lifted my horn, that is you have strengthened me.

You have, you have given me the power to overcome my enemies.

And so our strength comes from God.

So the enemies, they rise up quickly, but they're not well rooted in anything.

They're only rooted in evil.

And so even though our enemies may rise up quickly and God's enemies may rise up quickly,

they will soon be destroyed by, by the power and the goodness of God.

But what of the righteous person?

Well, that's what we see here in the next verse.

The righteous thrive like a palm tree and grow like a cedar tree in Lebanon.

Planted in the house of the Lord, they thrive in the courts of our God.

Now I've got here a couple of pictures.

On the left, you see a cedar of Lebanon and on the right you see a palm trees.

These are trees that are mentioned on occasion in the old Testament and particularly the,

the cedars of Lebanon.

If you go back and you read about Solomon's temple, you will see that the wood of the

cedars of Lebanon was, was the main wood that was used there in the temple.

You'll also see when you read about the temple that inscribed, engraved into the walls of

the temple were palm trees and the palm trees were symbolic too.

They were tall, they were strong, they were beautiful, they were, they were, they were

straight up and down.

They produce fruit, they produce dates.

And so when we, when we see these references to trees, which sometimes we do in the old

Testament, symbolic for, for people saying that people are like trees.

Well, these trees are used for a purpose because these are strong and beautiful trees, especially

the cedar of Lebanon.

Now those are predominantly found natively in that area of the Middle East.

However, they do grow here in the United States.

They had, there have been some that have been brought here and in certain parts of the United

States, they grow really well.

Hot Springs, Arkansas being one of those.

And there are several spots around the U S which they grow these cedars of Lebanon and

they're good trees for several reasons.

One, there's no knots in them.

Two, they're not affected by insects and they're, they're very resistant to decay.

So it's a wood that will last a long, long time.

So these trees can get old, they can get big and they are very strong.

And that's the illustration here.

That's the symbolism.

He talks about the righteous.

He says the righteous thrive like a palm tree and grow like a cedar tree in Lebanon.

And so he uses that symbolic language to say, look, those who trust in the Lord are going

to be strong.

They're going to be beautiful.

They're going to be mature.

They're not easily going to be going to be affected by the things around them, but only

if they are well-rooted.

Now those evil people, they're like grass that shoots up, but it's not going to last.

But you look at a cedar of Lebanon or palm tree, these are trees that can grow old.

These are trees that can grow big.

These are trees that are beautiful and that are strong and that are not easily destroyed.

And so it is for those who trust in the Lord.

He says those who are planted in the house of the Lord, they thrive in the courts of

the Lord.

So, so what are we rooted in?

What are we planted in?

Are we planted in the, in the house of the Lord?

Are we planted in the word of God?

Are we planted in obedience to the commands of God?

Because if we are planted in the Lord, then we will be like that.

But if we're not planted in the Lord, then we're not going to be any better than those

evil doers.

We're going to be like that grass that it shoots up quick, but it doesn't last a long

time.

So do you want to be grass or do you want to be a cedar of Lebanon?

Well, you look at these trees, these are, these are beautiful, majestic trees.

And these are the illustrations that are used by the Psalmist here to say, Hey, look, this

is what, this is what you want to be like.

And these would have been trees that the people in the middle East, in this part of the world

would have certainly known about the goodness of these trees.

Verse 14, they will still bear fruit in old age, healthy and green.

So isn't that a beautiful thing that they still bear fruit in their old age?

And perhaps that's a good reminder to us that as we begin to age, that we are still useful

to God, that if we trust God, if we are planted in God, if we are rooted in God, that God

can still use us, that we can still produce fruit.

And that's a good thing for us to always be checking when we're young, as we get older,

even if we're near the end of life, we need to be those who ask ourselves and say, is

there some fruit that I'm producing for the Lord?

Now maybe when you're younger, you can do a lot more things physically, but that doesn't

mean that the things we do when we get older are any less important.

They may be just as important, if not more important.

So the fruit that we produce might change the things that we do when we're younger may

may look different than the things that we do with, then we're older, but one's not better

than the other.

That's just the cycle of life.

But those who are, who are rooted in the Lord are those who are going to continue to produce

good fruit, even in their old age, to declare the Lord is just, he is my rock and there

is no unrighteousness in him.

And so he closes here on a beautiful note with similar language that we see throughout

the scripture and that is God is our rock.

And so we have to answer that question tonight, is God our rock?

Well, hopefully he is our rock.

If he's not our rock, then we're in trouble because everything else is like quicksand.

Everything else that we could stand on is just going to suck us down with it.

But when we stand on the rock, Jesus Christ, it is unmovable and that's where our strength

needs to come from.

So we need to be rooted in Jesus Christ.

We need to be those who praise God because he is good.

And that's what this Psalm tells us tonight.

Let's pray.

God of God, we come to you, we thank you for your good word.

I pray God that we would not just be those who always ask and ask and ask you for things.

Dear Lord, we want to do that and that's good.

But God, let us not overlook and forget about the good things that you've already done,

the things that you continue to do, the blessings that you bless us with, the prayers that you've

answered God.

And regardless of what you do, you're worthy of praise because you are God, dear Lord.

And so I pray, dear Lord, that we would stand in fear and in reverence to you, dear Lord,

that we would be those who worship you and thank you for your goodness and thank you

for your faithfulness and thank you for your love, dear Lord.

Just as this Psalm calls us to, let us praise you, dear Lord.

Let us be those who are planted in you.

Let us be like that cedar of Lebanon and like that palm, dear Lord, those strong and mature

trees that can withstand whatever comes at them.

God, let us be those people in our life.

That we'd be rooted in you, that we'd withstand the sin and the temptations and the struggles

of this world, that we would praise you.

And I ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.