Psalm 96

God Rules!

Introduction

You guys know the song, HAPPY? “Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof”? Yeah, you know it. I need to be honest with you, I think it’s just okay, BUT even with that grouchy opinion, if I’m switching the radio and I hear it, I lose control of my body and something is forcing me to start to dance and sing along. There’s something about it that is like pure joy. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the music video, but it is literally just that: clips of all kinds of random people walking down the street, doing their jobs, singing and dancing along: “because I’m happy”! I don’t know how Pharell did it, but he took the feeling of happiness and he extracted it and put it in a song.

The Psalm that we’re going to read today has the same kind of quality. It is pure joy, pure worship. It’s like the Psalmist extracted the concepts of joy and worship and put them in a song. We’re in a series right now called Summer of Psalms, and one of the things we’ve talked about is how Psalms is great because it gives us the whole range of human emotion—the lowest lows and the highest highs. We’ve talked about sin and righteousness, about how all things belong to God. Last week, Elizabeth taught from Psalm 84 about how we worship God in everyday life, including the Valley of Tears. Today, however, our Psalms is all joy. It’s a pure celebration of God’s goodness and glory. So, we’re gonna have some fun this morning. Y'all ready?

Let’s turn to Psalm 96.

As your turning there, let me tell you that this Psalm is part of a group of Psalms about God as King, called Enthronement Psalms, because he’s sitting on his throne, and when God sits on his throne, he is ruling over everything, so I made the title of the sermon: God Rules!

GOD RULES

Because he literally rules over the world, but also he rules in the colloquial sense, like God rules, dude, because he’s so awesome.

Okay, Psalm 96.

Psalm 96 NLT

Sing a new song to the Lord! Let the whole earth sing to the Lord! Sing to the Lord; praise his name. Each day proclaim the good news that he saves. Publish his glorious deeds among the nations. Tell everyone about the amazing things he does. Great is the Lord! He is most worthy of praise! He is to be feared above all gods. The gods of other nations are mere idols, but the Lord made the heavens! Honor and majesty surround him; strength and beauty fill his sanctuary. O nations of the world, recognize the Lord; recognize that the Lord is glorious and strong. Give to the Lord the glory he deserves! Bring your offering and come into his courts. Worship the Lord in all his holy splendor. Let all the earth tremble before him. Tell all the nations, “The Lord reigns!” The world stands firm and cannot be shaken. He will judge all peoples fairly. Let the heavens be glad, and the earth rejoice! Let the sea and everything in it shout his praise! Let the fields and their crops burst out with joy! Let the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord, for he is coming! He is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with justice, and the nations with his truth.

SING A NEW SONG

The Psalm opens with this command: Sing a new song to the Lord. It repeat it 3 times: SING to the Lord. God is so good that we respond with singing. When you’re a Christian, and you’re always seeing what God is doing, your life is like a musical—you’re just walking along and you see the goodness of God and you can’t help but break out into song and dance. Jazz hands.

Now, I know somebody is like, “nah, I’m good. If I gotta sing, then I’m out.” I don’t think the Psalmist means that you LITERALLY should be breaking out in song randomly during your day.

Why do we sing? Music is about feeling more than anything else. We sing because we feel something—pain, joy, love, loneliness, everything—and we need a way to respond, to find a creative outlet for that feeling. Of course, our feelings are fickle and sometimes they can lead us away from God, but God created us with feelings, and we should honor them and enter into them and, with the proper guidance of the truth of scripture, let them lead us in response to God. Christianity is not only about your brain; it’s about your heart. So, when the Psalmist is calling you to sing to the Lord, he calling you to worship God with your whole self, heart, mind, and soul—and you can do that through singing (that’s why we do it every Sunday) but you can also do that through quiet meditation, or creative expression, or telling someone else about what God’s doing in your life.

So, we sing to the Lord, and what do we sing? a NEW song. There’s something interesting I’ve noticed about the Bible: God is always doing something NEW.

This Psalm is actually one of the songs that is sung in 1 Chronicles 16 when David brings the ark back into Jerusalem. The people of Israel had Saul as their king and he had not followed God, and the Philistines had stolen the ark of the covenant, which represented God’s presence in Israel, eventually, Israel got it back, but they left it in the countryside. David says that “we neglected it in the time of Saul.” But when David became king, God was doing something NEW. He was bringing his people back to himself, and his presence was filling the nation of Israel again. And that’s what God is always doing.

Every time we stray from God, run from God, get sidetracked by whatever circumstances are in front of us, God does something new to pursue us, to bring us back to him, and so we sing a new song. Jesus is the ultimate example of this. When Jesus was born, that was something NEW, never been done before, God in the flesh. When Jesus taught, the people said, what is this NEW teaching. Then, Jesus sacrificed his life for us, and then came back from the dead—that was for sure NEW! Then he poured out his spirit on his people, that was NEW. So, we wrote a whole new set of books of scripture and all new songs to sing to him.

Sometimes, we’re hanging on to those old things God did for us because it’s all we feel like we have, and that’s okay for a while, but maybe if we look closely, we can see what new thing God is doing today. Our praise should always be fresh, because God’s spirit is always fresh.

GOD IS AMAZING

And why do we do all this singing of new songs: Well, because God is amazing, of course. This is the bulk of the message of this Psalm. It’s simple: God is amazing.

WORSHIP GOD