Worship Isn't About Me

The Psalms on Worship Worship Isn’t About Me Psalm 145 Pastor Pat Damiani September 1, 2019 NOTE: This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript. “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us”. Those are the opening words of one of the most influential books in my journey as a disciple of Jesus – The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer. Although he wrote that book in 1961, shortly before his death, that book may very well be more relevant for us today than the day it was written. In the Preface, Tozer wrote these insightful words: The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has done not deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge, and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic. I am certain that this is even more true today than when Tozer wrote those words nearly 60 years ago. In a world that has largely made religion about us and about how we can benefit personally from it, we have largely forgotten that worship is not about us at all – it is entirely about God. And unfortunately even those of us who are disciples of Jesus are not immune to that kind of thinking. So the message this morning is one that all of us, and that includes me, need to hear in order to be reminded of why we worship. This morning, as we continue in our series, The Psalms on Worship, we will be taking a look at Psalm 145. Before we read that Psalm, let me give you a little bit of background. This is the last of the Psalms specifically identified as a Psalm of David. And it is the only Psalm with the title “A Song of Praise”. Interestingly, in Hebrew that is just a single word that literally means “of praise”. It is another of the Hebrew words of praise that we’ve been learning about in this series – the Hebrew word “tehillah”. This Hebrew word is used 56 times in the Old Testament and it means “to vocalize and sing praise”. It pictures the declaring the name and character of the one we love and worship. It is singing that leaves no doubt that the star in the room is God alone. This Psalm is also the last of 8 acrostic Psalms, where each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So we could say that this Psalm is literally the A to Z of worship. Although this isn’t the shortest Psalm we’ve studied so far, I think one of the best ways for us to get a feel for it is to read it out loud together. So will you read it with me? The words will be on the screen. [Read Psalm 145] Because this Psalm is an acrostic poem, it really doesn’t lend itself to a simple outline. In fact, you’ll notice that David frequently goes back and forth between the first person – “I” and “my” – and the third person – “they” and “all”. And when referring to God, he alternates between speaking to God and speaking about God. And because he is trying to fit all this into the acrostic form, there isn’t really any noticeable pattern for us to follow here. So we need to look at this Psalm more as a whole and see if we can identify the big ideas that are found here. We’ll begin with the main idea of the Psalm: If you aren’t already doing so, I’d highly recommend that you follow Ryan Fregoso’s daily posts on his Bible reading that cover one chapter of the Bible every day. The easiest way to do that is to just check our church Faithlife page each day. Right now, he is in the Psalms, and if you’ve been following his posts, you know that the Psalms often begin with the author looking at his own circumstances and praying about them to God. But Psalm 145 serves as a major turning point in the book of Psalms. We see here that David isn’t concerned about his circumstances at all. He is only concerned with praising God for who He is and what He does. And the last 5 Psalms that follow are all filled with praise for God and void of any reference at all to the circumstances of the author, too. It appears that when the Psalms were collected into one book, they were intentionally arranged like that to remind us that our worship is never to be dependent on our circumstances, but rather it is always to be based on God’s character. Since the purpose of this series is to learn about how we can worship God more effectively, both as individuals and as a body, we’re going to spend most of our time talking about that aspect of this Psalm. But there is a sense in which we would completely miss the main idea of this Psalm if we didn’t also take some time to just meditate on the character of God as it is revealed in this Psalm. So we’ll take some time to do that, too. HOW TO WORSHIP GOD REGARDLESS OF CIRCUMSTANCES 1. Make God “my God” It may very well be that the most important word in this entire Psalm is the pronoun “my” in verse 1. To David, God is not just “a god” and “a king”. He is David’s personal God and King. So let me ask you a question this morning, is God Your God and your King? The Bible is clear that there is only one way for that to be the case – to put your faith in Jesus alone and to yield control of your life to Him. We often speak of that as making Jesus both your Lord and Savior. Obviously David didn’t have a full and complete understanding of that process because the idea of Jesus as the Messiah still wasn’t fully developed at that time. But what we do see in the life of David is that He did have faith in God. Whenever he found himself in danger, which was quite often, he consistently put himself in God’s hands and abandoned himself completely to the will of God. That is why God calls him a man after God’s own heart. Today, on this side of the cross, we understand that we are all sinners who are separated from God as a result of our sin. And the only way that we can ever have a personal relationship with God is by clothing ourselves with the righteousness of Jesus that comes when we put our faith in Him alone. That is the idea Paul is expressing in this familiar verse: For our sake he made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV) Until you make God your God and your King through faith in Jesus, not only can you not worship God in spite of your circumstances, you can’t worship Him period because you are separated from a holy God by your sin. So if you’ve never taken that first step, I want to encourage you to do that this morning and we’ll be giving you the opportunity to do that a little later. 2. Get to know God in His Word Some of what David expresses about the character of God in this Psalm undoubtedly came from seeing how God worked in his life. But there is also no doubt that much, or even most, of what David knew about God came from the Scriptures. One reason we know that is the case is because in verse 8 David quotes Exodus 34:6. The same is true for us. We can get to know God to some extent through the way that He works personally in our lives. But we primarily get to know the character of God as He reveals that to us in His Word. So if we really want to worship God in truth, the only way we can do that is to be spending time in the Bible on a consistent basis and asking God to reveal Himself to us through the pages of Scripture. So let’s take a moment to practice that right now. If you don’t already have your Bibles open to Psalm 145, you need to go ahead and do that right now. Once you do that, take a few minutes to read through the Psalm and jot down some of the attributes of God that you find. Some attributes of God in this Psalm: [Give people time to write down what they find] There is a lot there isn’t there? As you read the Bible I want to encourage you to approach your reading not just for the purpose of information, or even just for application, as important as that is. Make sure that you are looking for what the Bible is revealing about the nature of God and take some time to meditate on that. That will prepare you to take the next step that we’re going to talk about this morning… 3. Praise God always Notice how verse 2 begins: “Every day…” As we’ve talked about frequently in this series, worship is not just something we do on Sunday mornings. It is to be a lifestyle. So every day we need to take some time to bless God and praise His name. But that is not the only phrase David uses that expresses the idea of praising God always. Three times in this Psalm – in verses 1, 2 and 21 - David uses the phrase “forever and ever”. Our worship will not end when we leave this earth. It is going to continue on for eternity. So it seems to me that it’s probably a good idea to be practicing the praise of God as much as we possibly can right now in order to be well prepared for eternity. There are a couple of ways to incorporate praise into our daily lives: • First, we should do that in a formal, planned way as part of our prayer life. Far too often we just jump into our prayers by asking God for things without first taking some time just to praise Him for who He is and what He has done. And if you don’t really know how to do that a great place to start would be to just pray the words of this Psalm back to God. • Then there are those informal moments throughout the day, where, if we’re looking, we will see God manifest who He is in the world around us. That might be a beautiful sunset that reminds us that God is creative and full of beauty. It might be observing how nature operates and being reminded that God is a God of order. It might be seeing a child play and being reminded of God’s tender mercy that allows us to come to Him with childlike faith. And when those moments happen, we need to pause and praise God. We’ll develop this idea some more in our next step. 4. Look for God’s hand in every area of my life I want to focus for a moment on verse 5: On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. David says here that he will meditate on the wondrous works of God. The verb that David uses there can have a wide variety of meanings. It can mean to ponder, muse, pray, or even complain. So it could be thought of as the kind of meditation that consumes our complaints. It describes the process of looking at our circumstances from God’s perspective and acknowledging the blessing of God’s mercy and grace. That doesn’t mean that we are always going to be able to figure out what God is doing through those circumstances. But it does mean that we will view those circumstances in light of Romans 8:28 and trust that God is going to bring good out of that situation. And when we do that, it gets our eyes off of ourselves and our circumstances and onto God and it makes it possible to worship and praise God regardless of our circumstances. 5. Boast in the Lord This Psalm is full of verbs that describe how David is going to tell others about all the great works of the Lord: • …shall declare your mighty acts (v. 4) • They shall speak… (v. 6) • I will declare… (v. 6) • They shall pour forth… (v.7) • …shall sing aloud… (v. 7) • …speak…tell… (v. 11) • …make known… (v. 12) • My mouth will speak… (v. 21) Since we don’t have time to look at every one of those verbs in detail, I’m going to focus on one verb that essentially sums up all of these ideas. It’s found in verse 4: One generation shall commend your works to another… This is another of those important Hebrew words for worship that we’ve been learning about during this series. The Hebrew word “shabach” means “to proclaim with a loud voice”. So it is actually translated “praise” in many English translations here in verse 4. It conveys the idea of testimony that is unashamed. It’s similar to the way that we might cheer on our favorite sports team when they make a great play or win a game. That is just one manifestation of how we have a natural human tendency to boast about human accomplishment rather than boast in the Lord. In our flesh, we are all prone to boasting about human achievement, either our own or that of family members or friends or even our favorite sports team. So we brag about completing our degree or getting a promotion or raise at work, or about some material possession we have acquired. One of the best Biblical illustrations of that tendency is found in Daniel 4. One day King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was walking around on the roof of the royal palace and uttered these words: “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30 ESV) And immediately after he spoke those words, God carried out the punishment he had warned Nebuchadnezzar about in a dream and he was forced to live like a beast of the field for seven years. At the end of that time, Nebuchadnezzar had apparently learned the importance of boasting in God rather than in his own achievements: Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise (shabach) and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just; and those who walk in pride he is able to humble. (Daniel 4:37 ESV) The fact is that there is not one thing that you have, not one thing that you’ve accomplished in your life that is not from the hand of God. So rather than boasting in our accomplishments, we must always be careful to boast only in the God who makes them possible. Although this is a general principle for all of us, it’s important to note here that David writes specifically of commending or boasting in the works of God from one generation to another. This is obviously an important principle for those of us who are parents, or even grandparents. But it’s also an important exhortation to us as a church. We have been very blessed by God with the addition of several families with children here at TFC. But with that blessing comes the responsibility to do all that we can to commend the works of God to them. And that requires more workers than we have right now. I’m extremely grateful to those of you who are already serving in our children’s ministry, whether in the nursery, or in children’s church or in teaching classes during the 11:00 hour. But we are at a place where we need to start some new classes in addition to making sure that our nursery and children’s church are adequately staffed every week. And that means we have a critical need for some more people who are willing to serve. So I want to ask all of you to pray about whether God might be calling you to serve there. And if He is, would you please see me or Mary after the service and we’ll help you get plugged in. 6. Read “The Knowledge of the Holy” I began the message this morning with the opening words of this book because it is a book that has been instrumental in helping me develop my understanding of who God is. It is obviously not substitute for reading the Bible, but it’s a great tool that takes the Scriptures about who God is and summarizes them in a way that makes them easier to understand. I don’t normally recommend books as part of my sermon, but I’m making an exception this morning because this one is such a treasure. In fact, one of the commitments I’ve made this week as I was preparing this message is that I’m going to read it again over the next few weeks. And the good news is that because this book is now public domain, you don’t even have to buy it. You can find free versions in both print and audio forms. I’ll share some links with you in my newsletter this week. It’s really exciting to think about how our worship, both personal and corporate, would be transformed if we could just learn to apply this one principle. Can you imagine how dynamic and powerful our worship would be if we came to God both personally and as a body focused on His greatness rather than our circumstances and needs? That is the kind of worship I want to be a part of. Don’t you? [Prayer] ACTION Every week we give you an opportunity to respond to God as we close our worship time. And there might be several ways you want to do that this morning. The most important way you could respond today is to make sure that you don’t leave here without knowing for sure that God is not just “a god” and “a king” , but that He is “your God” and “your king”. As we talked about earlier the way you do that is to put your faith in Jesus alone. And if you’ve never done that before we want to encourage you to do that today. And if you’ve made that decision or you’d like to talk to someone more about how to do that. Some of our Elders will be in the front and the back of the room during the response time. Once again this week, I also want to call your attention to our discipleship path, which is intended to help you take your next step in your relationship with Jesus. This week I want to focus for a moment on the “Serve” component of that path. I’ve already mentioned the need we have for children’s workers, but we also have many other opportunities for you to serve. I know in particular that Ryan could use some more help with the Hospitality ministry, so if that’s of interest, please speak to him. If you’d like to serve, but don’t really know where, talk to me or one of the other elders and we’ll help get you plugged in. You’ll also find some other suggestions of how you might want to respond to God this morning on the back of your sermon outline. We’ll begin our response time with our offering and then we’ll give you a few minutes to respond as God leads as the music continues to play quietly. Discussion questions for Bible Roundtable 1. What are some practical steps I can take to make sure that I praise God “every day”? 2. What are some of the attributes of God we find in this Psalm? 3. According to this Psalm, how are worship and witness connected? What implications does that have for our lives? 4. How do we overcome our natural tendency to boast in ourselves rather than in the Lord? 5. In verse 19, God promise to fulfill the desires of those who “fear him”. In verse 20, He promises to preserve those who “love him”. How is it possible to both fear and love God at the same time?