PSALM 100 - Thankful Gladness

Introduction

It is a mark of God’s kindness to us as a church family that we get to partner together with families as they raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the LORD. (One visitor remarked about the number of kids running around and babies being passed from one set of arms to another that she couldn’t tell whose child was whose!)

Even the little things about teaching children to be polite and respectful—which moms and dads, I have to tell you as someone who hands out candy each week, I hear a lot of please and thank you from your kids! Sometimes the littles have to be prompted with “What do you say?”, but they are all well on their way in learning to express gratitude.

I am convinced that cultivating a heart of real gratitude is an absolutely essential part of developing not just a considerate, well-rounded polite individual, but that gratitude sits at the heart of the Christian life. In a real sense, our entire lives as believers are meant to be an increasing understanding of our New Birth in Christ and our deliverance from the penalty and power of sin and the sweetness of His presence with us and the certain hope of our eternal home with Him free from the weakness and pain and futility of this broken world.

And what we find here in our psalm this morning is that gratitude—thanksgiving—is absolutely essential in cultivating true worship of God. Psalm 100 includes a title (as many psalms do). The title “A psalm of thanksgiving”—it is the only psalm in the entire psalter that is specifically set aside for thanksgiving. And if you look carefully at this psalm you see that the context of that thanksgiving is in the gathered worship of God’s people:

Psalm 100:4 LSB

Enter His gates with thanksgiving And His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name.

This psalm is a call to authentic Biblical worship that is grounded in gratitude:

Psalm 100:2 LSB

Serve Yahweh with gladness; Come before Him with joyful songs.

Look back through your Christian experience at times when the gathered worship of God’s people has been particularly powerful, when there has been a feeling sense of the greatness of God and that He has been rightly honored and exalted by your praise. The mistake is to evaluate that worship on the basis of superficial things like a particular music style or environment. But it is just as possible to see dead, lifeless worship conducted by a five piece praise band with a fog machine just as much as in a cavernous mahogany sanctuary with a pipe organ in the loft. And powerful, God-honoring worship among His gathered people can take place in either place. What is it that makes the difference?

I want to submit to you, on the basis of this psalm, that the essential element of genuine worship of God is our thankfulness for what He has done for us. I believe that the message of Psalm 100—what we are called to do here in these verses—is to

Worship God with GLAD GRATITUDE for His FAITHFULNESS

Look with me first of all at what Verses 1-2 tell us about

I. HOW we are to thank God (Psalm 100:1-2)

Psalm 100:1–2 LSB

Make a loud shout to Yahweh, all the earth. Serve Yahweh with gladness; Come before Him with joyful songs.

When we come into God’s presence to worship, what is the first thing we are called to do? Verse 1 says

We are to SHOUT (v. 1)

The Hebrew word for “shout” here is used different ways in the Old Testament—the idea is of a victorious or glad shout—like a rallying war cry in battle, or the shout of a people who are rejoicing over their King’s coronation. Charles Spurgeon said of this verse,

Our happy God should be worshipped by a happy people; a cheerful spirit is in keeping with his nature, his acts, and the gratitude which we should cherish for his mercies. (Quoted in Boice, J. M. (2005). Psalms 42–106: An Expositional Commentary (p. 811). Baker Books.)

To gather for worship with shouting does not mean pandemonium or wild unrestrained emotion—

1 Corinthians 14:33 LSB

for God is not a God of confusion but of peace...

But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that we are to be like the old joke about the conservative Baptist church that wanted to save money by installing motion-sensor lights in the sanctuary (the lights kept turning off halfway through the service...) What we are aiming for is a glad and robust response to the goodness of God in our salvation. That comes out in the way we sing, in the way we pray, in the way we attend to the Scriptures as they are opened and the way we gather at the Table together. One of my favorite memories of growing up here at Bethel—and I know I’ve told this story before—is sitting out on the stoop out there on a summer evening when Mom and Dad were in choir practice when a couple of townspeople walked by one of the open windows—one said to the other, “Wow, can those Baptists ever sing!”

Make a shout of glad gratitude to God in worship—we are to shout, and

We are to SERVE (v. 2, cp. Matt. 25:35-36)

Psalm 100:2 LSB

Serve Yahweh with gladness; Come before Him with joyful songs.

Some translations say “Worship” the LORD with gladness”; the Hebrew word here has a connotation of the kind of service that includes bowing down—one of the primary meanings of the word is to “till” the ground or “toil”. To serve the Lord means to do the kind of work that invests for a future result.

So what does that mean? How do we serve the Lord with gladness in this way? Let me suggest that the way we serve the Lord as an investment in the future is to serve people.

Jesus made this very point in Matthew 25, when He said

Matthew 25:35–36 LSB

‘For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’

Matthew 25:40 LSB

“And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’

So another essential element of our worship in gratitude is to serve those in need around us. We seek to do that with events like the backpack giveaway, the community day coming up; we give to ministries like The Door and the Punxsy Women’s Clinic; we’ve traveled to Kentucky and Costa Rica, we take the Gospel message through Five Day Clubs to unchurched children throughout Jefferson County through CEF—all of these things are good, but is that all we can do? Where else can we look? Where can we find ways to serve the least and the lowest in our community? When we are serving them with gladness and gratitude, we are serving Christ.

Psalm 100 calls us to shout our glad worship to God, to serve Him with gladness, and the end of verse 2 tells us that

We are to COME (v. 2b)

into His presence for worship.

Psalm 100:2 LSB

Serve Yahweh with gladness; Come before Him with joyful songs.

Once again we take notice of the context of this psalm—though God is present everywhere, and there is nowhere we can go to be away from His presence, the Scriptures clearly teach that there is a sense in which we are particularly in His presence when we are called together to worship. In the immediate context of this psalm, coming into God’s presence meant coming to the Temple on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem.

As important as it is to be serving others in Christ’s Name, there is no substitute for gathered worship before God with His people. Gratitude to God for His faithfulness—real gratitude for what He has done for you—will necessarily draw you to gathered worship, so that you can join with your brothers and sisters in Christ who are bringing their won joyful gratitude to worship. We see this over and over in the psalms:

Psalm 40:9–10 LSB

I proclaim good news of righteousness in the great assembly; Behold, I do not restrain my lips, O Yahweh, You know. I do not conceal Your righteousness within my heart; I speak of Your faithfulness and Your salvation; I do not hide Your lovingkindness and Your truth from the great assembly.

Psalm 35:18 LSB

I will give You thanks in the great assembly; I will praise You among a mighty people.

Psalm 111:1 LSB

Praise Yah! I will give thanks to Yahweh with all my heart, In the council of the upright and in the congregation.

See what the Scriptures are saying—real gratitude to God will always draw you to gathered worship in His presence. And so the opposite is also true—a churchless life reveals a thankless heart.

Psalm 100 calls us to worship God with glad gratitude for His faithfulness. We see how we are to worship in verses 1-2, and in verse 3 we are called to

II. Thank God for WHAT He has done (Psalm 100:3)

The first two verses of Psalm 100 tell us how we are to thank God, but here in verse 3 we find some specific reasons for our gratitude.

Psalm 100:3 LSB

Know that Yahweh, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.

The first reason we are called to praise YHWH is because

He is our CREATOR (cp. Eccl. 3:12-13)

He has made us. This is good news indeed—because it means that we are not self-made men! We are not in the position of having to make our own way, create our own reality, forge our own existence. No matter what the philosophy teachers tell us, existentialism is a miserable philosophy! It is exhausting having to be the commander of your own destiny, the captain of your own life.

The man who believes that he is a cosmic accident borne of time and chance acting on matter is burdened with the knowledge that he is meaningless unless he somehow creates meaning for himself. Such a man can never know the great gift of God that the Preacher writes about in Ecclesiastes 3:12-13

Ecclesiastes 3:12–13 LSB

I know that there is nothing better for them than to be glad and to do good in one’s lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks and sees good in all his labor—it is the gift of God.

A self-made man cannot have this gift, because he does not recognize God as his creator. But the great comfort and peace that we have is to know that God has made us, and not we ourselves!

We thank God for what He has done—He is our creator, and

He is our REDEEMER (cp. Ps. 23:1; John 10:11-12; 14-16)

Psalm 100:3 LSB

Know that Yahweh, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.

We are not self-made men—and we are not self-justified men. God created us, but by our rebellion against Him we fell away from Him and became His enemies. But here is the great grace and undeserved favor of God: When we were still His enemies, He provided for our redemption! The psalmist calls us “the sheep of His pasture”. There are at least three ways that God’s people are described as sheep in the Bible:

First, the Bible says that we are straying sheep:

Isaiah 53:6 LSB

All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But Yahweh has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him.

When we had gone astray, God applied the blood of His covenant to us to redeem us from our sins.

In Psalm 23, we are sheep who are provided for:

Psalm 23:1 LSB

Yahweh is my shepherd, I shall not want.

And in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells us that His sheep are protected by Him:

John 10:14–15 LSB

“I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.

True worship of God flows from genuine gratitude for what He has done for you in making you a member of His covenant people. You do not come into worship to be noticed; you don’t come to be told what an exciting and wonderful person you are; you don’t come to be made much of—you come to make much of God for what He has done for you!

Psalm 100 calls us to worship God with glad gratitude for what He has done for you. Thank Him for what He has done for you, and verses 4-5 of Psalm 100 call you to

III. Thank God for WHO He IS (Psalm 100:4-5)

Psalm 100:4–5 LSB

Enter His gates with thanksgiving And His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. For Yahweh is good; His lovingkindness endures forever And His faithfulness, generation unto generation.

When we come into His presence in gathered worship, we come with thankfulness and praise because of what we know of God’s character. First, see here that

He is GOOD (cp. Psalm 34:8)

The goodness of our God is a great reason for our grateful worship. Think of the gods of the nations around Israel as they sang this psalm—Baal and Asherah, who had to be constantly appeased so that the rains would fall and the crops would grow. Molech, represented by a bull-headed bronze idol with an altar fashioned from the god’s outstretched arms. The statue would be heated to a dull red glow by an internal furnace so that worshippers could place their infant sons on its arms where they would be roasted alive.

But the gods of our own day are no less violent and bloodthirsty—the secular gods of money, sex and power have shed more innocent blood than Molech could ever have dreamed. Fifty million children have been sacrificed on the altar of career and convenience; millions of others sell themselves to their career, their wealth or their pursuit of pleasure. And all of those false gods eventually destroy their worshippers.

But YHWH our God is good! The one who takes refuge in Him is blessed! (Ps. 34:8). The one who puts his trust in YHWH will never be ashamed (Rom. 10:11). Even when His goodness rises so far beyond our understanding that the good gift He gives us sure looks like a snake instead of a fish (Matthew 7:9-11), we know that there is no calamity or pain or loss that can befall us that does not pass through His goodness on its way to us!

We come into the presence of God to worship with glad gratitude because He is good, and we come to worship Him because

He is FAITHFUL (cp. Ps:23:6)

The goodness of YHWH is not a once-in-a-while occurrence. We do not have a few times here or there when God is good to us, do we? Christian, you know, don’t you, that His goodness and mercy follows you all the days of your life! That is the word here—His hesed love—His steadfast, faithful, tender covenant-keeping love for you will never fail. His mercies never come to an end. His lovingkindness will pursue you. There is no expiration date on His mercy; no cutoff switch on His love; no prorated payout of His lovingkindness. Because once He has set His covenant love on you, beloved, He will never rescind it!

Psalm 100:5 LSB

For Yahweh is good; His lovingkindness endures forever And His faithfulness, generation unto generation.

Thank God for Who He is—He is good, He is faithful, and

He is UNCHANGING (cp. Heb. 13:8)

God’s steadfast covenant love for you does not change. When you belong to God’s covenant people through faith in Christ’s work on the Cross, you are an eternal recipient of His steadfast love! There is nothing that can happen to you, nothing that you can do, nothing that can change in your life, that will cause Him to remove His love and faithfulness from you! As He was faithful to Abraham and Moses and David and Elijah and Peter and Paul, so is He faithful to you!

Do you fret over what the future will hold for your children and grandchildren? Then look at all of the faithfulness of God to you throughout your life—He will not change! As He was faithful to your fathers, so your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will find Him just as faithful!

See here in God’s Word, beloved, how genuine worship is fueled by glad gratitude to God for all His faithfulness! Do you want to make this place known for genuine, powerful worship? We don’t need some flashy worship band or some great orchestra; we don’t need all the trappings of a rock concert or the atmosphere of a symphony hall—what we need is to come into His presence with thanksgiving! When we saturate our worship with gratitude to God for His faithful grace, we have everything we need for powerful. God-honoring worship. To worship among a grateful people is to breathe the air of Heaven’s throne room.

Are you growing in gratitude for God’s faithfulness in your life? Are you discovering more and more His grace and mercy to you through what Christ has done for you? Have you seen the evidences of the Holy Spirit’s work in your life? Then let that gratitude drive your worship!

Starting tomorrow morning, take note of one thing each day where you see God’s steadfast faithfulness to you. Perhaps His Word speaks to you in a powerful way one day; perhaps you have a remarkable opportunity to share the Gospel with a co-worker. Perhaps you experience an unusually strong victory over one of your besetting sins—whatever it is, write down one of those remarkable instances of God’s faithfulness to you each day, and on Sunday morning before you come to church read through that list—put it in your Bible and bring it with you. And let the gratitude for those wonderful works of God in your life fuel your delight and joy in your worship!

What is it that drew you to worship here this morning? Were you drawn here out of the sheer delight in praising God for His faithfulness? Have you come into the courts of YHWH today for His praise, or for your own? Is your presence here a way for others to think highly of you? Are you here because being a church-going individual fits your self-image of who you are making yourself out to be? Do you believe that you are who you are because of the choices that you make, and making the choice to come to church makes you a good person? Have you come into the presence of God this morning to bless His Name, or to polish up your name and your reputation?

If this isn’t about your relationship with God so much as it is about the relationships you’re trying to build with others, then you need to understand something—no matter what the world tells you, there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. You are not the captain of your own destiny; you cannot use the appearance of a Christian to carve out the kind of life for yourself that you want.

Listen again to the words of God from Psalm 100:3:

Psalm 100:3 LSB

Know that Yahweh, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.

You are not your own God—you are not going to “make your own future” any more than you could have made yourself into existence in the first place. The truth is, you are dependent on God for your very existence—He made you, and He is the one Who keeps you alive moment to moment.

And not only did you not create your own life, but there is no way to save your own life from the just and righteous demands of God’s holiness. Your attendance in church, your Bible reading, your acts of mercy for the least and the lowest, your Christian demeanor and religious reputation will accomplish nothing in justifying you before God. You cannot make yourself one of His people like a wedding crasher can sneak into the reception by saying, “Oh, I’m here with ‘Uncle Bob’...”

The only way into a covenant with God is through blood—blood that pays for your sin. You could pay with your own blood, but the problem is that God requires all of it. Because the penalty for your sin against Him is death. The only way to enter the covenant of eternal lovingkindness and faithfulness with YHWH is through the blood of another—His Son, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

So here is the invitation before you today—come into the presence of YHWH to be cleansed by the blood of Christ. Only He can make you fit for His courts; only He can wash away the stains of your wickedness and shame and guilt. Only He can transform your cold, dead heart of stone into a heart that leaps with delight for Him, that overflows with gratitude for His faithfulness, that shouts for joy at its rescue from death and the promise of eternal life in His presence.

This can be yours today—confess before Him all of the sin, all of the rottenness and malice and lust and bitterness and unbelief and pride. You cannot enter His courts wearing those rags—He will gladly exchange all of your filth for His purity, all of your wickedness for His righteousness. He will cleanse you, He will change you, and He will bring you into His presence with gladness and joyful songs for the rest of your life here and for all eternity in the next. Give thanks to Him, bless His Name, for He is good, and His lovingkindness to you endures forever because of the work of His Son—your Savior—Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION:

Hebrews 13:20–21 LSB

Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, our Lord Jesus, equip you in every good thing to do His will, by doing in us what is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

What does it mean to bring our worship to God with a “shout”? How are we to show proper enthusiasm and joy in our worship, while at the same time coming before God with respect and reverence?

Why does the psalmist point specifically to the fact that we are creatures of God? How does acknowledging God as your Creator shape the way you understand your life and your purpose? How is this different from someone who considers themself a “self-made man”?

Of the three attributes of God listed in Verse 5 of Psalm 100—His goodness, His faithfulness, His unchangingness—which of these is most precious to you in your life? Write down some specific reasons why you are thankful for that attribute of God this week, and let them fuel your worship next Sunday!

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________