Psalm 95 (Psalms Series)

Today we are beginning a brand new sermon series on the Book of Psalms. Many of you know that the Book of Psalms is basically a collection of 150 different individual psalms, and so with let's see, 150, 52 weeks in a year, one psalm each Sunday. So this will be a three-year sermon series that we're starting today. No, that's not what this is going to be. Now we did spend a whole year in Acts, as you recently know, but we're basically going to do a six-week series. We're going to highlight certain psalms, and we may come back and do a much deeper dive at some point. But again, as many of you know, the Psalms are basically like like prayers. They're they're prayers and and praises to God. Where the psalmists are basically pouring out their hearts to God. They're pouring out their hearts in praise and and song. They're pouring out their hearts through through prayers of thanksgiving, they're pouring out their hearts even sometimes through prayers of lament. They're they're expressing deep sorrow for the things that they're going through or that the people are going through. But they give us such great insight to who God is and how to how to worship Him and pray to him and just be in relationship with him. N.T. Wright says it this way about the Psalms. He says the Psalms are inexhaustible and deserve to be read, said, sung, chanted, whispered, learned by heart, and even shouted from the rooftops, they express all the emotions we are ever likely to feel, including some we hope we may not, and they lay them raw and open in the presence of God. I think He captures so well a lot of the essence of what the Psalms really are and how they can they can truly impact our lives. Many of us who are familiar with our Bibles, we study our Bibles. We like to sit and meditate on the Psalms, and we like to read them slowly, and we like to sit alone and just kind of pray them to God ourselves, and that is just fine. I do the same thing in my quiet time, and it's a worthy way to spend our time in God's Word. But one of the things that we miss when we just study the Psalms in that way is what the Psalms were originally written for. Gerald Wilson, in his commentary, captures what I'm talking about really well in the introduction to his commentary. He says scholars generally agree today that most of the psalms, and some say all of the psalms, were composed not for private prayer but for public performance in the temple worship of ancient Israel, if this is so, then the individual psalms were not composed, he says, simply for private use, but were intended to be presented within the community of worship. In other words, the original intention of the behind the psalms being written was so that they would be read or sung in the community of worship together. We talked last week about how we are really better together, and one of the things that we need to know about the psalms as we begin this six week series together, we need to know that they are better when we read them, when we pray them, and even when we sing them together. And so that is why we're focusing on this as kind of our first sermon series, coming out of our next chapter series, and and coming together as one church, worshiping in one service and uniting together around the same mission. If you have your Bibles with you and you want to follow along with me in your own Bible, we're going to be in Psalm 95 today. But before we dive into that, one other thing that we need to remember is that the Book of Psalms is in the Old Testament of our Bibles, that means that these were originally written, as Gerald Wilson says here, for ancient Israel, those who were living under the old covenant with God. They lived under the Mosaic Law. They were required under that covenant to make sacrifices for the atonement of their sins, but you and I, we do not live under the old covenant. We live under the new covenant, where Jesus has made atonement for all of our sins through His once-for-all sacrifice on the cross. So.

We don't live under the Mosaic Law anymore. Romans seven talks about that. We no longer live, Paul says, by the written code, which is a reference to the law. We live by, he says, the Spirit, God Himself dwelling in us, guiding us and empowering us in His ways as he expresses his life through us, and so when we when we read the Psalms, when we're studying the Psalms together, we're going to study them in their original context and process them through the differences of now living under the new covenant. But of course, even with that being said, there is just still so much that we can learn about the nature and the character of God, and as I said earlier, how we can experience a relationship with Him even even more intimately than the psalmist could, because they didn't have the same Holy Spirit dwelling in them permanently like you and I do, when we put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ for salvation. So let's jump in and look at Psalm 95 together. Starts off in verses one and two, and the psalmist says, "Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation, let us come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with music and song. The first thing that I want to highlight is all of the community language. Let us sing for joy. Let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with praise. Again, you can see what we just mentioned earlier. This was intended for the community. We're talking about us together, the community of God coming together to do these particular things, and the psalmist is letting us know that when we do come together for worship, what proper expressions of worship actually are. And there's four things in here. So he says, "Come, let us first of all sing for joy to the Lord, a proper expression of worshiping the Lord is to be moved emotionally to where we're singing for joy. We're expressing joy in the way that we sing to our Lord. Another proper expression, the second one is to shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. When is it that you tend to shout in your life? A lot of us shout when we are really excited about things. We shout at a television screen when the Dallas Cowboys are winning or they're losing, right? We we get excited and we we shout, or if if someone is saying something that we're really passionate about and it's something that we agree with, we shout something like, "Yes, that's true, that's right, I believe what that person is saying there. When we we get behind something and we're ready to unite, and someone's given a powerful speech about something, we we shout, "Let's go! I'm in it! Let's do it! Right, and so these are the kind of things that we we do when we're excited about that, and that is a proper expression of worship for us to shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. The third thing he says is to come before him with thanksgiving when we worship. A proper way to worship is to give thanks for who God is and what it is that He's done, and we have even more to be thankful for than they did at that time, because we live on the other side of the cross. Jesus's finished work, and so we give thanks for the complete forgiveness of all of our sins, and that we have every spiritual blessing that there is to have, as Paul wrote in Ephesians one through three, and then finally, a proper expression of worship is to extol him with music and song, to to praise him with music and song. Now, now one thing I want you to notice here is it says to extol him with with hymns and more hymns. Does it say any kind of style of worship? Doesn't say anything about the type of music. Doesn't say anything about the type of songs that we sing. Just extol Him, praise Him with music, right? And so the style doesn't matter. The types of song we sing doesn't matter. We gather together to praise. Him though through music and through singing.

Now sometimes that means doing what we did earlier when we stood or when you sat in the band and the choir were up here and they were leading us in the songs and we were singing them and doing all of these kinds of things together. But sometimes we do this within our hearts and in our minds, and not quite as much vocally, if you will. For example, there are some of you who are very used to the way we've worshiped during the first service, which means that we often started a service with the choir singing a choir special. Many of you who are coming to the second service, that's not generally a way that we started our worship service, and so some of you had questions about that. And it feels in some way like, well, that feels like a performance. Like they they're just performing for us, and we're not really worshiping because we're not participating in it and singing necessarily with them, but let me ask you a question: Are you participating with me right now as I'm preaching? Of course you are, but you're not saying anything. You're not saying anything along with me saying anything out loud, but that doesn't mean that you're not engaging with me and listening, and every now and then, although not very many of you yet, are shouting "Amen" in agreement with what it is that I'm saying in this moment. And we do the same thing when, for example, our choir is leading us with special music, and we're paying attention to the words, and we're we're agreeing with what it is that they're seeing, and we're allowing ourselves to be moved emotionally because they sing well, and and and I don't, and so I appreciate that when the Lord uses their gifts and abilities to point me to Him, and that's the same kind of thing that we do here. So we sing for joy to the Lord. We shout aloud when we gather for worship. We come before Him with thanksgiving, and we extol Him with song. Now, He's told us the expressions of worship, and now He tells us why these are proper expressions for worship. Verses three through five. For the Lord is the great God. So four is the language because. Why are these proper expressions of worship? Because the Lord is the great God, the King above all gods, and in His hand are the depths of the earth and the mountain peaks. They belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. So, so remember, this was originally written, as we said, to ancient Israel, a community of faith, his gathered people, and during that time, there they were surrounded by various cultures. They were surrounded by different groups of people who believed in all kinds of lowercase g gods. The psalmist is saying because he knows that they're familiar with what other people are saying are gods around them, and declaring that these are proper expressions of worship because you worship the one and only true God, and He covers from one end of the earth to the other to just show off. In case you are wondering how big of a God He is, I mean, He's the one who created all the way down to the depths of the sea, all the way up to the the mountains and the waters and the the land. He's the Creator of all things. He made it with his own hands, if you will, and he continues to hold all things together, which is also what we're told in the New Testament, the new under the new covenant about Jesus Christ. Remember, Paul says this in Colossians one, beginning of verse 15: the Son, a reference to Jesus, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. Listen to this: For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authority. All things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I thought I heard someone say it over here, but it's going to be a while if we didn't get a response to that. I wasn't going to be able to continue.

This is why we sing for joy while we shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. While we extol Him with praise and give thanks, we worship Him because He's the only one worthy of praise. He sits high and exalted above all people and all things because He's the Creator. Of all people and all things, and as our Creator, and as the the one who continues to hold all things in His hands, then the proper response for us as His creation is to come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with music and song and shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation. Okay, so verses one and two, he gives us expressions of worship and then justifies why those are appropriate. Now that he's done that, he comes back and he's going to give us one more proper expression of worship for someone who is our Creator. So, verse six says, "Come once again. Let us. There's the communal language we see again, and let us bow down in worship, and let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. Proper expressions of worship to one who is the Creator of all things is to bow down and to kneel before Him, bowing of course is first and foremost a posture of humility. When we bow or we kneel before someone, we're recognizing that this person is greater than we are, of more value and worth. Right, the Creator is more valuable than the creation, and so we we bow low, we kneel before Him to say, "You're our great God and King, exalted high and above, far above who we are. But bowing and kneeling is also a posture of submission. We we bow before a king, if you will, to say, "Oh king, you are the one in charge. You are the one in control of our lives. So these are proper expressions of worship. We bow, we kneel to express humility before Him, but also submission. And now we're told why, just like he told us why, with the other expressions, for because we bow and kneel because he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. That this, of course, is the image of a shepherd, that God is our shepherd, right? And so that means we are the flock, we are the sheep, and the people of His pasture, being the people of the pasture of the shepherd, really conveys two different things, and we need to talk about those first and foremost, it proclaims authority. Right, the sheep are not in control. The sheep are not in charge. The shepherd is in charge of the sheep. The shepherd decides which direction the sheep will go and where he's going to move them and lead them and when he's going to do so. They don't get a say in the matter, and so that's the first thing that we recognize about shepherd and sheep. But the second thing is that we, being the sheep, are under his care, as it says at the end of the verse. If he's our creator, then the shepherd knows what's best for us, he knows the best way to care for us, and he knows when we need what it is that we need, and so he's our provider. And out of his compassion, the shepherd cares for us. So we come together on Sunday mornings during this time as His church, as the people under His care. He is our shepherd, and we bow down and we kneel before Him because He is our authority, and we submit to Him, caring for us in His ways of caring for us, and whatever it is that that looks like, we declare it's best for us. Even when you and I tend to think differently, we don't come before Him and say, "This is what you need to do, because this is what I need in my life right now. We come before Him and we kneel and we bow in submission. Now, up to this point, things are flowing. We're getting expressions of worship. We're getting the reason why. And all of a sudden, in verse 7b and through the rest of the end of it, it takes a dramatic shift, a turn in tone, and in many times you might just be going. This doesn't even make sense.

Like where did this come from? Let me show you what it is that I mean. But we will unpack it, and it will make sense after we get finished. So verse 7b says, "Today, if only you would hear his voice. Do not hold." Harden your hearts as you did in Maribah, as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness, where your ancestors tested me. They tried me, though they had seen what I did for 40 years. I was angry with that generation, and I said, "They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways, so I declared an oath in my anger: they shall never enter my rest. You see what I mean? It just is like all of a sudden flowing along, and then that. What are what are we supposed to do with that? The references to Meribah and Massa are found in Exodus chapter 17. Exodus chapter 17 is when God was leading the Israelites out of Egypt. He was their shepherd. He had rescued them. He was the rock of their salvation. They were in bondage. They were under the influence and power and control of the Egyptians, and the Shepherd, the Rock of their salvation, saved them from the Egyptians. And then, what was he doing? As the Shepherd, he was leading them where to the Promised Land. He was caring for them. He was providing for them. He was leading them towards a land flowing with milk and honey. He was going to give them rest. He was going to provide security and freedom from the bondage they were in. And he knew, as the shepherd, as their creator, how they were created. He knew what was best for them, and he was providing for them. But when the people began to experience some light and momentary troubles, they began to grumble. They began to grumble. They were no longer shouting or singing for joy to the Lord and the Rock of their salvation, they were no longer expressing thanksgiving for leading them into the promised land. They were no longer bowing before Him as the authority and the Creator and submission going your ways are best. No, no, no, no. They became their own gods in that moment. We know what's best for us, God, and you should be giving us what we are telling you that we need, and when we think we need it. Right. This is what they began to do, and so the psalmist is saying to us in this way, let's not be like them. Let's not be like them. Let's not mistake his character and his goodness just because we don't see it in our situations and circumstances. Right? Let's not discount and mistake his character and goodness just because we don't see it in our situations and circumstances. Let's go back to the very beginning of this. In verse six, he said, "Come, let us bow down in worship. Again, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, the flock under His care. Remember, remember submission and authority, right? And then He says, "Today, if only you would hear His voice. He is not talking about just listening. Like, if only you could learn to to listen and detect his voice at times. What he's saying in this context is to hear to hear the voice of the shepherd is to kneel before him as the expression of worship. That is a proper thing to do as the one who is your shepherd, the flock under his care, showing and declaring when kneeling and bowing that you trust him and you trust his ways. That's what it means to hear his voice. If only you would do this. If only we would keep doing this, and not grumbling and arguing and taking things. And so when we kneel before him and we we we bow before Him, we trust Him, and therefore we obey Him and follow Him where it is that He is leading. So when we gather together for worship, it's not just singing, it's not just shouting for joy, it's not just expressing thanksgiving. It is certainly doing those things, but it is also trusting our King and our Shepherd and obeying Him because we are the flock under His care. This is what He's saying.

Exodus 17 · chapter mention Exodus 17 · chapter mention

So these are the things that we see here. In Psalm 95, and of course they apply to us today. I mean, Jesus shows up on the scene, and in His earthly ministry, He declares that I am the good shepherd, and you are the people, the flock that's under my care. As New Covenant Christians, those who believe in Jesus, we are His church. We are also the people of His pasture. We are the flock under His care, and so when we come together, being the flock under His care, we sing for joy to the Lord. We shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. We come before Him with thanksgiving, and we extol Him with music and song. We bow down in worship. We kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our great God, and we are the people of His pasture, the flock under his care. This is who we are, and so as we look at this today, we we just ask the question then in response: What what's the Lord saying to us? What's the Lord saying to me? What's the Lord saying to you? Because there's also something that he's not just saying collectively, but but is individual that apply to us collectively, and so maybe he's he's showing you first and foremost a little bit more about the singing part of it. In a proper expression, is to sing for joy. And when the band and Jerry and those are up here leading us and singing. Your lips are like this, so maybe he's working on that aspect of a proper expression of worship. Maybe you're singing, but there's just kind of a frown on your face. There's no real joy in it. You're not allowing the Lord to move you emotionally in any way. You're trying to let that happen, maybe he's working on you shouting out loud. Some of you are really comfortable and good, and allow the Spirit to move you to say Amen and to declare things when you're hearing it through singing or you're hearing it through the teaching and preaching of His Word. And others are like, I don't know if I should say anything. Well, if the Spirit's leading you to say something, then say something, right? So maybe He's opening you in that way. Maybe it's to gosh, I need to I need to approach this with being more thankful. What I'm doing a lot of times is coming in and just griping and arguing and grumbling about the different things that are going on or the way that they're doing them, and and He's working on me as a proper expression of worship to come in and thank Him for who He is and what He's done, or to extol and praise Him, or or maybe He's leading you more in the way of bowing down and and kneeling to say you're the authority, your ways are not my ways, and so I've been living my life, and as we come in here trying to hope that you're leading our church, or I'm going to use my voice to lead us in a certain direction, and I'm not the shepherd, though you're the shepherd. You've shown me that this morning. I'm the sheep, and so I'm looking to you for where you're taking us as a church and where you're taking me individually. And so I submit, submit to your ways. And so maybe that's the way he's leading you this morning, or maybe he's showing you today that you've you've never trusted in Jesus for salvation? You're not part of the flock under His care, and He's leading you to take that step of faith today. Make Him your Lord and Savior. Let Him forgive your sins. Have the Holy Spirit come dwell in you and unite us together as brothers and sisters in Christ, and so there's always an an individual response to some of these things, but there's also a way that we respond to this as His community, and so I'm going to go ahead and invite the band to begin to make their way up here before they lead us in our time of response and invitation, and what we are going to do, since this was read or sung by the community of worship, we're going to read. We're going to declare this psalm together. At least the first seven verses.

I need that, guys. Sorry, you jumped the gun a little bit. We're still on this, Matthias. Whoever's doing the switcher here. All right, so so I'm going to have the first seven verses come up on the screen, and we are going to say it together, and then I will close us in prayer, and then we will enter into our song of response, which is an appropriate. I surrender all. You are my shepherd, my king. I bow before you. I kneel before you, and trust you, and surrender my life to you. I will obey. Wherever it is that you are leading, so I want to go ahead and invite you to stand. Let's declare this together before we sing. We ready? 123, Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before Him with thanksgiving, and extol Him with music and song. For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. In His hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to Him. The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Come, let us bow down and worship. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, the flock under His care. God, this is who we are. Jesus, You are our great Shepherd. We are the flock under your care, and so we come before you as your people, and we sing, and we shout, and we give thanks, and we bow in submission to you. You are our King, and so we surrender all in Jesus' name, Amen.