A Call to Thanksgiving

TEXT: Psalm 100

TOPIC: A Call to Thanksgiving

Pastor Bobby Earls, Northgate Baptist Church, Florence, SC

Sunday morning, November 21, 2021

(A message by Dr. Alan Carr of Lenior, NC, as footnoted)

Psalm 100:1–5 (NKJV)

1 Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands! 2 Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing. 3 Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. 4 Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. 5 For the Lordis good; His mercy is everlasting, And His truth endures to all generations.

Intro: This Psalm concludes a series of Psalms that began with Psalm 91 which looks ahead to the advent and coronation of the King, the Lord Jesus Christ. It speaks of a time in the future when Christ will reign over all of creation. A time when His praises will fill the earth as they should at all times. That blessed time will be a time when the glory of Jesus will literally fill all the earth. Thank God, you and I that are saved will get to share in that glorious Kingdom someday.

So, Psalm 100 is a call to Thanksgiving. The title literally reads, “A Psalm of Shouting.” Verse 1 tells us to “Make a joyful shout to the Lord!”

This week, we will carry out a tradition that is as old as America. In 1621, after a terrible year in which half their number died of starvation or disease, the Pilgrims set aside 3 days in December to praise the Lord for a bountiful corn harvest. Many years later in 1789, President George Washington proclaimed November 26 as a National Day of Thanksgiving unto the Lord. This was in response to God’s granting America independence from Britain. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln revived this old tradition of rendering thanks unto the Lord, and finally in 1941, the United States Congress decreed that the fourth Thursday in November was to be a National Day of Thanksgiving unto the Lord God.

For many, Thanksgiving Day will merely be a day when family gathers together, eats an enormous meal, watches football on TV, and, most important of all, it is a day when they do not have to go to work. I hope that it will mean more to us than that!

The reality is we should never allow our thanks to wait until Thanksgiving to be expressed!We are to be thankful to the Lord every day of our lives. God goes so far as to say that being thankful to Him is His will for our lives.

1 Thessalonians 5:18 (NKJV) tells us, “in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Since this is the week of Thanksgiving, I want us to take a few minutes this morning to look at this 100th Psalm and hopefully leave having clearly understood both the challenge and “The Call to Thanksgiving.”

I. OUR ENTRANCE INTO HIS PRESENCE, Psalm 100:1-2

1 Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands! 2 Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing.

The Psalmist opens this Psalm by issuing a call to worship and praise before the Lord. He teaches us how we are to come into God’s presence. By the way, nothing brings us into the presence of the Lord like lifting His Name! He promises us that He will “inhabit the praises of His people”, Psalm 22:3.

Notice 3 ways great manifestations of praise bring us into the presence of God.)

A. V. 1 Enter with Shouting—“Make a joyful noise” comes from one Hebrew word which means “to shout.” Vocal praise unto the Lord is out of fashion in our modern, reserved church world, but it is still in vogue as far as God is concerned! When we verbally declare our praise for Him, it glorifies His name and brings us into His presence. May God give us all a shout in the soul that will find expression on the lips!

B. V. 2a Enter with Service—We are challenged to “serve the Lord with gladness.”That is, we are to never allow our labor for the Lord to become a drudgery. We are not to grow weary in well doing—Gal. 6:9. The word “gladness”literally means “joyfulness.” That is, we are to look upon our service to the Lord as a cause for rejoicing, instead of seeing it a chore.

When is the last time you saw someone excited about going to church? It’s not “I got to go to church.” It should be, “I get to go to church!”

Ill. David was glad when church time came—Psa. 122:1; David was glad to perform even the most menial of tasks at the Lord’s House—Psa. 84:10; Paul said that our giving should be an exercise in praise—2 Cor. 9:7 (Ill. “Cheerful” = hilarious—Lit. Paul is saying that our giving ought to be a thing of extreme joy!)

C. V. 2b Enter with Singing, (This word literally means “a ringing cry”.) Lifting our souls unto the Lord through song is a tremendous way to bless His name and to exalt Him. In fact, every child of God ought to possess a song in the soul, for we are commanded to sing our songs of praise unto Him—Ps 68:32, “Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; O sing praises unto the Lord;”

II. OUR ENLIGHTENMENT CONCERNING HIS PERSON, Psalm 100:3

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

Every truth learned about the Person of the Lord results in a new reason for praise and adoration! God help us that we never reach the place where we fail to be amazed at the Person of God! Because everything we do, very thing we are, everything in our lives rises or falls on our perception of just who God is. Therefore, it is imperative that we never forget who we are serving. We are the servants of the Living God. No better than that, we are the children of the Living God. Let us then learn all we can about Him and rejoice in all that we learn.

There is:

A. A Word about His Power— It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; This reminds us of the creative power of God. We are in this world because the Lord, in His great power, formed man in His image. That is something for which to praise Him. However, beyond His great creative power, there is also His great re-creative power. When we were marred by the stains of sin, thank God, He redeemed us and remade us afresh and anew!

B. A Word About His Purchase—The Psalmist says that “we are His people.” That is, we are His personal possession, Titus 2:14. We are His by virtue of the fact that He paid the price to redeem us from our sins. When we were sold under sin, He came and died for us paying the price to set us free.

C. A Word About His Provisions— the sheep of His pasture. This verse reminds us that we are His flock. As such, we are under the protective oversight of the Good Shepherd.

Remember the words of David as recorded in the 23rd Psalm. “The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want.”

III. OUR EXPRESSION OF HIS PRAISES, Psalm 100:4-5

4 Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. 5 For the Lordis good; His mercy is everlasting, And His truth endures to all generations.

These verses give us three great ways that we can express our praises for the Lord. Three wonderful ways that we can employ in glorifying the Lord.

A. Praise Should Be Visible—The Psalmist said that we are to enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. This isn’t an activity that was to be done in a corner where one could be hidden from the view of others. Simply put, there should be no shame attached to our worship of the Lord.

(Ill. It may help us to look at Hebrew worship practices and see how they visibly praised the Lord.

1. Clapping—Psalm 47:1, “O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.” This does not convey the idea of applause, but of a sudden, loud clap that draws attention to the fact that God is receiving praise from a worshiper.

2. Lifting of Hands—Psalm 63:4, “Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name.”; Psalm 134:2, “Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD.” When the hands were lifted toward Heaven, it was a sign of adoration and praise. It was symbolic of lifting up the Lord and glorifying Him.

3. Dancing—2 Samuel 6:14, “And David danced before the LORD with all his might.” When David contemplated the presence and greatness of the Lord, he got a case of happy feet and praised the Lord unashamedly before all those present.

B. Praise Should Be Vocal—In verses 1 and 2, the Psalmist used words like “noise” (which means to shout) and “singing”. Neither of these can be done in silence! True praise to God manifests itself in a vocal expression! There is nothing wrong with being vocal in our praise for Him! Actually, I kind of imagine the Lord likes it!

(Ill. Billy Bray was an old cockney sinner outside London, England that God saved by His grace. Billy used to praise the Lord everywhere he went. Once, he was praising the Lord as he usually did, when someone came up and told him that he needed to calm himself down. They said it wasn’t proper for a preacher to be shouting all the time. Billy Bray responded by saying, “I can’t help myself. You see, I put down my right foot and it says, “Hallelujah.” I put down my left foot and it says, “Amen.” With that, he marched down the street shouting a chorus of “hallelujah’s” and “Amen’s.”)

C. Praise Should Be Volitional—That is, praise is to be an act of the will. According to verse 5, God is good, He is faithful and His truth will stand forever. When these things are considered then we are to make a rational decision to praise His Name because of the reality of who He is.

What I mean by all that is this, praise the Lord, because of who He is to you and for what He has done for you. Praise Him for who He is. Praise Him because He is God. Do it but do it because you love Him and He will bless your praise life.

Conclusion: A good example of praise is set forth for us by the prayer of an elderly saint of God at a prayer meeting one evening. He said, “O Lord, we will praise Thee; we will praise Thee with an instrument of ten strings!” People wondered what he meant, but understood when he continued, “We will praise Thee with our two eyes by looking only unto Thee. We will exalt Thee with our two ears by listening only to Thy voice. We will extol Thee with our two hands by working in Thy service. We will honor Thee with our own two feet by walking in the way of Thy statutes. We will magnify Thee with our tongue by bearing testimony to Thy loving kindness. We will worship Thee with our heart by loving only Thee. We thank Thee for this instrument, Lord; keep it in tune. Play upon it as Thou wilt and ring out the melodies of Thy grace! May its harmonies always express Thy glory!”[1]

[1] Alan Carr, “A Call to Thanksgiving (Psa. 100:1–5),” in The Sermon Notebook: Old Testament(Lenoir, NC: Alan Carr, 2015), 1602–1605.