A Conquering Shout in the Lord's Courts (Psalm 100)
Notes
Transcript
Call to Worship:
Call to Worship:
2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. 3 Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. 4 So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands.
Reading #1, for perspective:
Reading #1, for perspective:
20 So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted a great shout, and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they captured the city.
Reading #2, main text:
Reading #2, main text:
A Psalm for giving thanks. 1 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! 2 Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! 3 Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! 5 For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
Intro.1
I remember Joe Stowell telling a story on Moody Radio when I was a kid, and it was of a Pentecostal who was visiting a Baptist church while he was on vacation.
And as a Pentecostal, this visitor was really more vocal and loud in that Baptist service than any of the old Baptists were used to being.
So a member would come up to the pulpit and give the announcements—and the Pentecostal would say “AMEN!”
And the song leader would give the page number that a hymn was on—and the Pentecostal would say “THAT’S RIGHT!”
And the pastor would barely be in the middle of a sentence of his sermon—and the Pentecostal would shout, “PREACH!” or “DRIVE IT HOME!” or “COME ON NOW!”
Well, it was really irking the people of this Baptist church that this Pentecostal visitor would be so loud and animated during their services.
And they would twitch at him when he shouted, or turn and look at him. But he was unmoved by their signs of dismay!
So finally Sister Mary Ellen, the head of the Baptist Church Ladies Auxiliary, eventually got up from her own pew and approached the Pentecostal visitor in his pew, and she asked him to quiet himself down so that the people could have their service in peace.
Well, the Pentecostal man was surprised by Sister Mary Ellen coming over and correcting him like this—and he said, “I’m just doing what I was taught to do!”
To which Sister Mary Ellen gave the reply, “Well—you didn’t learn it here!”
Intro.2
Or I remember the Babylon Bee satire and comedy article from 2016, of the Presbyterian church that was reconsidering its cost-saving motion-sensor lights that they had installed to save money and energy in the sanctuary—because at last Sunday’s service, during the opening hymns and prayers, the motion sensors had thought the room was empty…and the lights had shut off in the middle of service!
https://babylonbee.com/news/motion-activated-lights-turn-off-presbyterian-worship-service
I.
We have a passage tonight that moves and shouts.
You see it there that it goes from a “general calling” of the “earth” to come sing praises—and then in the end, it’s a specific call for the “church” and the “congregation” to gather together.
II.
The psalmist is giving us a very telling word for our worship and praise tonight, calling all creation when he says,
1 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
“Joyful noise” there is a word dripping with dimension.
We’ll have 7 verbs…actions…commands that the psalmist is going to give us before we finish studying this passage:
And here, our first verb is “make a joyful noise”.
It’s a word to the collective, a command that’s given to in the “plural sense.” —> Y’all make a joyful noise.
And in Hebrew, the context of the word lets us expand the meaning to be:
y’all shout
y’all raise a song
Here are some other uses of the word in the ESV:
Psalm 47:1 “1 Clap your hands, all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy!”
Then Psalm 65 considers the bounty and wonders of creation: Psalm 65:13 “13 the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.”
Psalm 66:1 “1 Shout for joy to God, all the earth;”
And Psalm 98:4 ,6 “4 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises!” ,“6 With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord!”
Isaiah 44:23 too “23 Sing, O heavens, for the Lord has done it; shout, O depths of the earth; break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it! For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and will be glorified in Israel.”
* * *
Do you realize the clamor and reverb that’s going on here—and you’re being invited to do it IN CHURCH??
The first time the word is used, it’s in Numbers 10 (especially 10:9) and it’s the “alarm” that the people are instructed to raise in battle—and in Psalm 100, you’re told to do the same caliber of shouting and noise-making in your worship!
Numbers 10:9,
9 And when you go to war in your land against the adversary who oppresses you, then you shall sound an alarm with the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the Lord your God, and you shall be saved from your enemies.
Going into battle…get the attention of God.
Make him remember you.
Rouse him (stir him) up, so that he comes and gives you the victory.
It’s why we read the Jericho verse from Joshua 6:20, as well, to start this message.
4x in Joshua 6 is the word used, which is the most times in the Bible that the word is used in a single chapter.
And you know what the shouting did for the people at Jericho, in battle. — The problem is, the people of Jericho DIDN’T echo the shouts of the Israelites to the Lord and join the shouts!
Six days the people marched around the Jericho walls, silently. But on the seventh day they marched—and they shouted, and they blew their trumpets. And then the LORD worked mightily on that day, and the walls of Jericho came crumbling down—and the people entered into Jericho, and they conquered the city!
II.
So that’s the first verb— “shout.” And are you already uncomfortable with that worship idea?? :)
* * *
So now we come to the second and third worship verbs and action words, and those are verse 2:
And maybe these two words bring us back to our worship “comfort zones,” the verbs Serve and Come,
2 Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!
* * *
The first there, “serve,” is a toil word:
Genesis 2:5, 2:15 “5 there was no man to work the ground,” and “15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and (keep) it.”
It’s a word, pre-Fall into sin and post-Fall.
Service to God existed before sin of course, and it continues after sin. — But now we need the reminder, the coaxing, and the call to continue the serving of God!
We need the summons to serve, though we were created to do it naturally and without grumbling!
Now we need the reminder that service can be in “gladness” and mirth. We can DELIGHT in serving God—we can have PLEASURE and CHEER in that service!
But we need the reminder.
Service in the Hebrew implies submission. It implies you’re “hitching your wagon” to something, or someone.
Are you willing to do that tonight?
It’s a good pulse-check for us, a good diagnostic.
You were “bought with a price,” Paul says (1 Cor. 6:20), so “you are not your own.”
You’re redeemed, set free from bondage to sin and death.
But are you entirely free—your own owner and sovereign and ruler-in-charge?
No—Psalm 100 reminds us we’re called to serve.
We are submitted to Christ, and Christ has bought us to make us joyful and willing servants of the God who has purchased us to himself!
III.
But we’re also called to come (v.2).
Psalm 100:2c “2 Come into his presence with singing!”
Psalm 63 is the only other Psalm to use this word for song:
5 My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
(“Joyful” there is the word.)
Come with this sort of singing—which again has volume and a raised voice.
Joyful singing
Triumphant shouting
Ringing cries
It’s not the joy of the godless that Job talks about, using the same word, “(which lasts) but for a moment” (Job 20:5).
* * *
But you read these calls to worship, and reverence, and awe, and thanksgiving—and you realize the godless are in the mix. “All the earth.” And John Piper’s words immediately come to my mind, from his Let the Nations Be Glad book on missions:
Piper writes, somewhat famously,
“Missions exist, because worship doesn’t!”
The earth is being called here by the psalmist to sing the Lord’s praises…to serve the Lord gladly (and not to look at him as a taskmaster and a slavedriver!)…to come with singing (and not with judgment or unbelief or defiance). And the world, again and again, many times over, defies this call—and ignores it—and pushes it to the side!
There’s NOT a willingness to serve the Lord among “all” the creation: a willingness to honor his name, or to praise him for the things he’s done—
Missions exist, because worship doesn’t!
But the call is there nonetheless. And as many will testify, there are those out of all the creation who have answered the call.
They have willingly answered the call to worship. And so we use the rest of the psalm to ask us, how?
How have we come to answer the call?
IV.
Well, the fourth verb becomes so integral, particularly to get where the Psalm is going later in the “gates” and “courts” of the Lord.
The fourth verb is KNOWING:
3 Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Knowing is what is going to transform this psalm. It’s the centerpoint of the psalmist’s writing, as we’ll see; and it will be the transitional point, taking the psalm from the general call of creation that we’ve seen (in vv. 1 and 2) and making it more particular and concentrated to the very people of God.
The transition from all of creation, to being more concentrated as focused instead on the congregation in vv. 4 and 5.
* * *
Calvin’s Institutes starts off, in fact, with a whole discussion of the knowledge of God, and he writes something in Book I that just fits so perfectly with this—because it’s knowledge of God as it relates to people knowing themselves…and that’s exactly what we have in verse 3.
Calvin writes:
Institutes of the Christian Religion Chapter I: The Knowledge of God and of Ourselves Mutually Connected—Nature of the Connection
man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he have previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.
So here we have in the psalm a recognition of God as he’s “maker” and as “possessor.”
He made us and we are his.
Making us is the language of course of Genesis 1. He’s Elohim, God, and from his voice and command he created everything that exists (remember John 1:3, too).
But in Genesis 2 Elohim also becomes known as the LORD, YHWH, Jehovah.
Psalm 100:3 a “3 Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.”
God says “Let us MAKE man in our image” (Gen. 1:26)—but then he goes further: “MAKE man, in our image, after our likeness.”
That’s making us, but it’s also identifying with us (identifying US with HIM).
3 I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he grazes among the lilies.
It’s mutual possession, mutual identity, and mutual relationship. — And “grazes” there is the word actually for “shepherd,” bringing a tie more closely to our Psalm 100.
He shepherds among the lilies, he leads sheep among the lilies.
And we are “his people, the SHEEP of his pasture.”
Or:
38 And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
Jesus continues this language too, when he says he is the Good Shepherd in John 10:
4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.
Or in Matthew 25 too, at the last judgment—Jesus is the keeper of the sheep (who know him) AND he is also keeper of the goats:
32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.
V.
So then the fifth verb, verse 4 “enter”, is moving us into the specific presence of God—his gates and his courts.
Verse 2 already issued us into God’s “presence,” generally. And from the word, we can remember that God is, theologically, omnipresent (everywhere present)—just as the call there to worship was to everyone “across the earth.”
But here, verse 4, the psalmist gives us an address to find the Lord.
4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!
The Lord “owns the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10). But here, we’re pointed to THE hill—the holy hill of Zion.
We’re given an address. We know God—and now we’re invited and called to come into his home.
All the earth is told to come into his neighborhood, his “presence,” his “countenance” (the same word as Aaron’s benediction).
But here we’re called into his gates and into his courts. This is temple language! This is Zion language! This is entering, beyond the place of humanity, into the place of the congregation and into the place of the chosen people!
Psalm 100:4 again
4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!
* * *
The New Testament gives an amazing narrative account of this psalm being acted out, in Acts 3.
A man is born lame, and for 40 years he’s unable to walk or move, beyond being carried and ferried from one place to another.
And every day, in Acts 3, he’s set at the temple’s gate, called “Beautiful,” while the rest of the believers pass him by and enter through the gate into Israel’s Court and the last remaining court before reaching the Holy of Holies.
And Peter and John encounter this man who is lame and begging alms at the Gate called “Beautiful”—and Peter commands the man to get up and walk.
And the man gets up—and we get an amazing account and echo of Psalm 100,
8 And leaping up, he stood and began to walk, and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. 9 And all the people saw him walking and praising God, 10 and recognized him as the one who sat at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, asking for alms. And they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.
* * *
Now the psalmist says enter with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. The man in Acts 3 does just that! And he had never ever walked a day in his life…he had never toddled…he had never crawled.
But he “entered the temple” with them, “walking and leaping and praising God.” What an amazing echo and application of Psalm 100 and the entry into God’s presence of his gates and courts!
VI.
And the sixth and seventh verbs remain in the congregation:
Psalm 100:4b “4 Give thanks to him; bless his name!”
These are words of the congregation—the people who have entered the Zion presence of God, who have met the Lord at his mercyseat, and who are willing to shout and to turn back the praise and the submission for all that they have found the Lord doing for us.
Give thanks to him. The Catechism is divided into “sin, salvation, and service.” Thanks here is LAUD and PRAISE.
And bless his name. This is bending the knee (“bless” and “knee” having the same Hebrew root and base meaning). It’s knowing the Lord as Savior and as Lord of our lives. It’s bowing the knee in submission, and giving not only our hearts but also our whole lives. We “adore” him. Psalm 95:6 “6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!”
VII.
And verse 5 gives us the “so what,” the reason and the motivation for why we put all this into motion for our worship:
5 For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
* * *
Do you see him tonight as “good?” Do you see his “steadfast love”—his mercy, his kindness—reaching even to this generation and this day?
Psalm 23:6 “6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Psalm 118:1 “1 Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!”
Do you see this—and does it make us, as the congregation, SHOUT and SERVE and COME and GIVE THANKS and TURN OUR LIVES IN SUBMISSION?
All these verbs in Psalm 100 are action words in the plural.
The old hymn says, “Bold I approach th’eternal throne.” But Psalm 100 makes it “bold WE approach” that throne,” and it makes the idea much less Western and individualistic.
The verbs in Psalm 100 are all commands and imperatives given to the collective—to the earth, but then to the church and to the chosen people who actually will obey and who will know God’s grace and come willingly!
So we hear echoes of Psalm 100 in the man healed from his lameness.
And we also hear echoes of course in the Book of Hebrews, which draws us to the greatest address we have of the Lord’s heavenly presence with his people in eternity!
19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
And Hebrews 13 takes outside the courts, where Jesus was mocked, and tried, and beaten—and it reminds us that there, at Calvary, is where we are atoned and made to see God’s faithfulness…and Jesus’ lowest point of submission and service, to God and to us:
13 Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.
Conclusion
Do you have a shout tonight to your worship—as a congregation and as a body of worshipers gathered in this place?
It’s as my seminary friend and classmate Jim Oord reminded his congregation just last week on the other side of town, at First Reformed Church (and maybe you saw it too on First Church’s social media):
Jim reminded the congregation of the three parts of worship:
We hear God calling us and praise him in reorienting our hearts toward him.
We receive nourishment from God’s presence and teaching from his Word.
We’re equipped to reenter the world as Kingdom ambassadors.
“All the earth” still exists and operates out these doors. Missions exist because worship doesn’t. So we have a message to shout in this room, but we need to carry it out the doors as well—and make it famous and well-known to our world and to our neighbors who hear it.
Let’s make it a point, as a body, to live that out this week!
Amen.
Parting blessing:
Parting blessing:
24 The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; 26 the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
Translation/notes:
Translation/notes:
A psalm for thanksgiving/praise-for-past-deeds
Y’all shout (a Jericho noise gathering the assembly, Num. 10:7; Josh. 6:5,10,16,20; Ps. 60:8, 108:9) to YHWH, all the earth/land/world!
Y’all serve/slave-for/labor-for/work-for YHWH with joy/mirth/gladness/delight/exceeding-joy/festival/cheer/glad-heart/pleasure;
Y’all come to his face/presence/countenance (word; mouth) with singing/joyful-voice/triumphant-song/shouting/ringing-cry.
Y’all know that YHWH, he is God—he made/brought/fashioned (Gen. 1:7, etc.) us, and we are his. We are his people/nation/countrymen/kindred and the flock/(collective)sheep of his pasture.
Y’all come to his gates/city-doors/entries with thanksgiving/praise-for-past-deeds, his courts/enclosures/towns with (loud/telling-forth/shouting)praise/adoration. Y’all give-thanks/-laud/-praise to him, y’all bless/salute/kneel-to his name/renown/fame/report/repute/reputation/high-status.
For YHWH is good/pleasant/morally-good/pleasant/prosperous/beautiful/handsome; to eternity is his hesed/goodness/kindness/mercy/love/steadfastness/loyalty/favor, and to generation and generation is his faithfulness/firmness/steadfastness/fidelity/steadiness/dependability.