Psalm 95
Amen. Turn in your Bibles to
Psalm 95. We’ll read together and hear
from God’s word. This is one of the great worship
songs. And it’s a song, as we’ve noted
several times today, that has a strong warning to us. And that warning is that if you
do not hear God’s voice, you will not enter his heavenly rest. Psalm 95 beginning at verse one
says this. Oh come, let us sing to the Lord.
Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let
us come into his presence with thanksgiving. Let us make a joyful
noise to him with songs of praise. For the Lord is a great God,
and a great king above all gods. In his hand are the depths of
the earth. The heights of the mountains are his also. The sea
is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow
down. Let us kneel before the Lord,
our maker. For he is our God, and we are
the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Today,
if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massa in the wilderness, when your fathers
put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had
seen my work. For 40 years, I loathed that
generation and said, they are a people who go astray in their
heart. They have not known my ways. Therefore, I swore in my
wrath, they shall not come into my rest. Amen. This is God’s holy, inspired,
and inerrant word. May he give us his great blessings. Something shifted in the worship
world, and it’s hard to say when it shifted, but it shifted probably
somewhere in the 1800s and 1900s. And worship shifted in this way. it turned into a show, it turned
into a spectator activity. And you may think that that’s
happened more so in the last 20 or 30 years, but it really
began to take place in the period of time where revivals and revivalism
hit the American scene. A preacher would make his way
around and hold these revivals. He would have a wonderful set
of musicians, a really loud and popular sounding choir. And the
people would come and they would sit and they would listen to
the music. They would listen to the emotion, they would listen
to others singing, and then they would hear God’s word. Nothing
wrong with those things. But worship in the church shifted
in that direction. And so now as we enter the worship
of God in the 21st century, we see that strong influence in
many of American churches. But what did it change from?
Well, it changed from this. It changed from a divine dialogue. You’ll notice in our form of
worship in our church, which is basically old school Southern
Presbyterian order of worship, it reaches back to the Reformation. You’ll understand what I mean
when you see what we do in worship. It’s a dialogue between God and
his people. There’s the congregation and
there’s the minister. And the minister mediating or
speaking for God greets his people. Grace to you and peace from him
who is and who was and who is to come. And from the seven spirits
who are before his throne and from Christ Jesus, the faithful
witness, the firstborn from among the dead. That’s God’s greeting. And then he calls us to worship.
Oh, come, let us worship. Let us bow down before our maker. for he is our God and we are
the sheep of his pasture. And then we respond to his dialogue
to us. We sing a hymn of adoration.
We recite our creed. We have prayers of adoration.
We confess our sins. He assures us of pardon. We sing
a hymn of redemption. We hear from the old covenant.
We hear from the new covenant. We have a sermon, which insofar
as it’s faithfully read, the word is faithfully read and proclaimed,
it is the voice of Jesus himself. We understand Paul’s words to
the Thessalonians. that when the word of God is
faithfully preached, it is not the word of men, but it is the
very voice of God coming through his ministers, his mediators. And then there’s a response to
God’s word. It’s a song. It’s the Lord’s supper. I have
decided to follow Jesus. It’s be thou my vision. It’s
something of that nature. And then God speaks again. He
gives us his benediction, his blessing to go into the world
and to serve him. But something has shifted in
worship. And we need to see a reformation
of worship. We need to see a shift back to
worship that is right. And one thing that is Pretty
interesting, pretty peculiar thing to study is this. We, a
couple years ago in another congregation, embarked on a sanctuary remodel. Instead of just fixing it up
like it was, it was not our church, it was a building we purchased,
we said, what would be the best way to design this sacred space
for worship? And so we went back, not going
to modern architects and what would we do in the 21st century,
we went back and said, look at Christ in architecture. Look
at the Reformation in architecture. After the Reformation and the
recovery of worship, what did sanctuaries look like? Well,
they were simply a room for God’s people to meet with their God. And so we designed and we put
together, we implemented in our construction a room where the
congregation could gather and God’s servant, his mediator,
could speak as he led worship, as he preached the word. And
we really need to see a recovery of that in church architecture
these days. Sanctuaries are just not that
anymore. They’re concert halls, they’re auditoriums, they are
nightclubs if you look at some today. They’re dark places where
people, not a congregation, but people sit and something is done
for them and to them and they do not indeed have a divine dialogue
with Almighty God. Well, Psalm 95 can help us see
this wonderful picture of what worship ought to look like. And
there’s a handful of things it says to us. The first is this.
It simply says, come. Notice throughout Psalm 95. Oh, come, verse one. Let us sing
to the Lord. Skip on down to verse six. Oh,
come, let us worship and bow down. That come word is important. It’s a it’s a command. It’s an
imperative. And some of you will scratch
your heads and say, well, I can worship God anywhere. I don’t
have to come to worship. Well. You’ve got a wrong understanding
of worship, if that’s how you are thinking. There’s three ways
we look at worship in the Christian faith. One is we worship privately
or with a family. We read our Bibles, we may sing
together, or we may do it personally. We have our devotions, we might
call it. Our worship is private. A second
way to look at worship is it’s all of life. Everything we do,
every day, every breath we take, every task we do, is an act of
divine worship to Almighty God. But then there’s the third definition
of worship, and this is what Psalm 95 is getting at. It’s
corporate worship. It’s the body coming together
to worship. God’s people have always assembled
together, the Lord’s people in the Lord’s house on the Lord’s
day to worship the Lord and to hear from him. And so when we
think of worship in the sense of Psalm 95, we want to think
of it in the sense of corporate worship. And so we must come,
we must keep the Sabbath. We must gather together, or as
the book of Hebrew says, while it is still today, we must not
forsake the assembling together of the saints. You know, we,
at our new Presbytery, we’re talking yesterday about how we
would, how we would let men who were coming for their ordination,
how we would let them take exceptions to the confession of faith and
catechisms. And one common exception is some
men will believe that the larger catechism on the Sabbath is a
little too restrictive. It simply says something like
this, we should honor set times for worship. We should honor
and sanctify the Sabbath day. It should be different than all
other days. We should cease from our labors,
we should worship God, we should be with God’s people. And the
only work we should really do is works of necessity, we gotta
eat. We may have to pick up a spill
or something like that, but we ought to rest that day, a holy
and sanctified resting, because it is a little picture of what
we will be doing forever in heaven, which is resting from our labors
and worshiping Almighty God. And so for many of us in America
today, the Sabbath that we observe, is really nothing like heaven
will be. It’s another busy day, another frenetic day, another
scheduled day where so much that we can do during the week is
done and we are flat tired and exhausted because we give ourselves
no margin, no room for rest. Yet God has given us one whole
day in seven. And so as we think about worship
and this command to come, we must link it with the command
to keep the Sabbath day holy. We must unless providentially
hindered, be in the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day with the Lord’s
people. One of our dear saints, Dottie
Latta, told me one time, maybe it was in the last couple of
years, she said, I had a minister in my younger days who said,
unless providentially hindered, you’ve got to be in the house
of the Lord. So we were chatting the other
night, was with her when she was in the hospital, about Psalm
42. Psalm 42 says this, as the deer
pants for living water, so does my soul long for you. And so when this command to come
and to worship, to enter God’s house, to be in the Lord’s house
on the Lord’s day with the Lord’s people, you ask yourself this,
does my heart pant? for the living waters? Is it
what my soul needs? And do I go? Do I obey that command
to come? Well, the second thing this passage
teaches us, we’ll frame it this way. If the first command is
to come, well, the second thing we wanna think about is come
and do what? What do we do if we go to church?
This weekend at Presbytery, we sang a lot and we had a piano
player. And the men, there were probably
60 men on Friday night at the worship service, probably a few
less the next day. But when you get a group of men,
especially ministers and elders in a room singing, there’s pretty
much no use for a piano because you can’t hear it. And so you
read through the commands of Psalm 95. If we’re going to come,
what are we going to do? We’re going to sing. We’re going
to shout. We’re going to make music. We’re going to make a
joyful noise. We’re going to sing songs of
praise. We’re going to bow down. We’re going to kneel. and we
are going to hear God’s word. Come, let us sing to the Lord.
Let us make a joyful noise. Let us come into his presence
with thanksgiving. Let us sing songs of praise. Let us bow down. Let us kneel down. So if we’re
gonna come, we’re gonna come and do what? Well, there’s lots
to do. Now, sometimes in the Bible,
we read some things like David dancing before the ark of the
Lord. And so sometimes we scratch our heads and say, should we
do everything in worship that was done in the Bible? And we
often differentiate between what is normative and then what is
described in the Bible. So just because David danced
before the ark, and maybe if you look at the response of his
wife, Michael, who was looking out the window and kind of embarrassed,
Maybe he was a little too exuberant. But does that mean that because
David danced before the ark, we should dance in church? Or
does it mean just because there’s trumpets, we need to go hire
trumpeters if nobody was in band in the high school? Does it mean
that… Whatever was done in this period,
whatever was done in that period, that ought to be done in the
Bible. Well, the answer is, of course, no. We ought to do what
God commands, what He prescribes. And so in worship, we ought to
sing. And if we can make music, that’s a wonderful thing. We
ought to shout. We ought to make a joyful noise
to Almighty God. I don’t know about some of you,
but I can’t sing, but when I get to church, I like to sing. And
it’s nice when the music swells, and it’s nice when the congregation’s
voices raise up, because then I’m able to turn my microphone
off, thank the Lord for that, and sing loud. We ought to be
so full of air that we can’t help but get it out of our pipes
when that hymn book opens, and when that organ begins to play,
and the piano leads us through our hymns, because God has saved
us through Christ. We ought to make a joyful noise,
so come. and do what? Well, we sing, we make noise,
we make music. Well, the third thing is if we’re
gonna come and do what? The third thing is another good
question, and do it how? Well, God has made us as beings
who are thinkers and feelers and doers. And if we’re a well-rounded
Christian in worship, we’ll do all three, we will think, We
will feel and we will do. Now the problem is, is some of
us like to feel. And so we might come to church
and say, I didn’t get anything out of it. I didn’t feel much
today. Well, why didn’t you feel much today? It’s because you
didn’t think much today. We show up to worship. And we
got to show up knowing something. Who is God? What is he like? What has he done for me? And
that knowledge wells up feelings in our hearts. Y’all know our
family has a favorite local college team. We won’t mention it by
name, but they are Blue Devils. And we go to some of their football
games. We go to some of their basketball
games. And when you go, you get a program. You get a program
and you look through it and you see their numbers, you see their
names, you see their faces, you see what year they are in school,
how much they weigh. We go to the football games,
there’s a fella from Milan, Tennessee where Mandy’s parents live and
so we got a little Milan connection, we love to cheer on. Jacob, I
think, is his name. He’s a Milan boy. That’s Mandy’s
family. And so we can cheer a little
bit more special. They played in a bowl game a
month or so ago, and the kid from Milan got in. And because
we knew who he was, what his number was, we could cheer a
little louder. And you see it’s the same in
worship. When you’ve read your Bibles, when you’ve understood
who God is and what he’s done in your life, but in the history
of his people, with that knowledge, you can think and you can worship
better. That thinking then leads to your
feelings. Isn’t God good? He led his Israelites
out of Egypt. He pulled back the sea and they
crossed on dry land. He has opened a new way by sending
his own son into this world to die and to be the minister and
mediator of a new covenant. Our sins are covered. Our sins
are paid for. You see, when you think, when you know, when you
understand, and some people in this day and age say, oh, oh,
don’t, don’t do too much thinking. Don’t too much reading. It’s
all about feeling. How do you feel? Well, you can’t feel much
if you don’t think much. And then there’s the do. What
do we do for God? We leave and we serve Him. We
leave church each week. We serve our neighbors. We do in worship. We have action
in worship. And all three are a balanced
way to worship. It’s why in this last year, when
we purchased our new Psalter Hymnal, we wanted to pick a book
that helped us think, feel, and do in church. You know, if you
go to a lot of churches today, guess what they’re doing a lot
of? It’s a lot of feeling. And how far will feelings get
you, dear friends? Not too far, your feelings will fail you.
And so we want to worship God in a well-rounded or a full-orbed
way. We want to worship God in the
way he has made us to worship him. And so we have helpful aids
in our Psalter, Hymnal, in our Bibles, and in our forms of worship
to help us think, feel, and do rightly in worship. And so we
can do what it’s commanded of us in Psalm 95. The question
is, and do it how? Well, we do it joyfully. Come,
let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise. When we see a brother and sister
in church just sitting back with their head down and their arms
crossed, it makes you really want to say this to them. Have
you not been redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus? Have
you not been rescued from sin and misery? Have you not been
brought up out of the land of Egypt, out from under the tyranny
of Pharaoh? or rather Satan himself, have you not been bought off
the auction block? And you come into the house of
God and you fold your arms and you grump. Now I get it, some
days we just don’t feel good. I get it, some days it’s not easy to be in church.
I get it that some days there’s just those things. But consistently,
week after week, when you see someone sit in church grumping,
you see them unhappy, and you wonder, has not the Lord saved
them? And do they not know it and feel great joy? We should
worship God joyfully. We should worship God thankfully.
I don’t know if you’ve caught this as we’ve made our way through
at least 95 Psalms now over the last couple of years. It says
something like this in a lot of Psalms. I’m in a hard spot. God has rescued me, or I pray
that God will rescue me. And when he does, I will go into
church, I will go into the assembly, and I will tell everybody who
will hear me, guess what God has done for me? We come and
we sit and we grump. And we don’t sing, we don’t thank
God, the Redeemer, for the redemption. But then we don’t even begin
to think about what he’s done for us this week. We had air
to breathe. We had lungs to receive it. We had blood that pumped.
We had hearts that sent the blood through our system. And we can
be so ungrateful, yet sitting in the place, sitting in the
place where God has shown us the most grace and mercy. And
that’s why there’s a warning in Psalm 95. Today, if you hear
God’s voice, do not harden your hearts as they did at Meribah.
What did they whine about at Meribah? We want water. There’s
no water. God, you brought us out of Egypt.
And yes, the tyranny, the slavery was awful. But there we had leeks
and onions, there we had fish to eat, there we had blah, blah,
blah. And so two months ago, the Israelites
were whining and wanted salvation. Now he’s rescuing them. He’s
in the middle of it. He’s got them in the wilderness and he’s
saying, trust me. And they’re whining about water. And they
angered God. And God is issuing a warning
and saying, don’t have a hard heart when you’re in my presence.
Don’t whine, don’t. Fuss, don’t be a grump like they
were. The word Massa is a name of the
area where they were and it simply means testing. It was named after
they were tested. The word Meribah is a word for
grumbling. And when God names a place after
something took place there and it’s not a good name, like this
is the city called Grumbling, This is the area in the wilderness
called testing. Those are not good names and
you did not do good things there. You don’t want to get in that
position because God is a terrible, awesome and fearful God. And it is a terrible things to
fall into his hands. And he’s saying here, if you
don’t hear my voice, you’re not getting into my heaven. You can
fold your arms, you can be ungrateful, you can be unthankful, and you
can disregard what I have to say. And as he ends there at
verse 11, I’ll swear in my wrath, you’re not getting into my heaven.
That’s a terrible warning, isn’t it? But it’s the same one that
Noah preached in his day, as he hammered and nailed for a
hundred years, as he made his ark of gopher wood, as he put
tar and pitch and put in the stalls and the food bins. did
all that work a hundred years, people ridiculed him. But one
day God sent Noah and his family in the ark. And guess what God
did after that? He closed the door and you can
hear the sound of the door closing. And God is saying, today, today,
there’s, there may not be a tomorrow. Night is coming. And so we want
to take heed of his warning. We come to worship and do it
how? We do it joyfully. We do it thankfully. We do it
without a hard heart. As the deer pants for the living
water, so our soul does long for him. Or as the psalmist says
elsewhere, I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the
house of the Lord. For the last thing this passage
teaches us, it answers the question, why? We’re to come. We’re to come and do what? Well,
that’s sing and make joyful noise and all that. We’re to do it
how? Joyfully, thankfully, without a hard heart. Why? Well, look
at verses three to five. For the Lord is a great God.
For the Lord is a great king above all gods. For in his hand
are the depths of the earth. For the heights of the mountains
are his also, for the sea is his, he made it. So why worship
God? Because he is God, he is creator,
he is sustainer, and he is redeemer. Why worship God? Well, for all
those reasons. He is God, he is creator, he
is sustainer, and he is redeemer. There is no one like him, no
one else to be worshiped. Well, there’s another answer
to the question, why? And you find it in verses six
and seven. Oh, come, let us worship and
bow down. Let us kneel before who? The Lord, our maker, for
he is our God. So there’s that creator, sustainer,
but he, we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of
his hand. Why did God choose Israel? It wasn’t because they
were great. It wasn’t because they were mighty.
It was simply because of this, God set his affection on them.
So why does God love his church? Why did God send Christ to die
for his church? Was it because he saw that Daryl’s
and Esther’s and Mandy’s and Rick’s and Robert’s and we name
each one of us by name? Is it because he saw something
in us and said, boy, those are just some really fine people
in Burlington, North Carolina. And they’re going to become associate
reform Presbyterians and that makes it even better. And I’m
just going to love them to death because of that. No. It’s because
he wanted to form a people for himself and to rescue them out
of sin and misery and to bring them into a state of salvation
by a redeemer, his only son, and to let them worship him and
adore him in this life and forever in the life to come. That’s why.
So why do we worship him? Why on Sunday when we can extend
our weekend, when we can have a Saturday part two? Why when
we maybe have the children say, why do we have to go to church
tomorrow? Why when there are options like soccer club and
the shopping centers are now open? Well, it’s because he’s
worthy. It’s because he commands us.
And it’s most of all because he’s the shepherd. And if we
love him and we hear his voice and we know him as our shepherd,
we will come and we’ll come quickly and we will come willingly. But
I wanna remind us again of this warning. Today, verse seven and
eight tells us, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. Let us pray together. Our Lord
and God, we thank you that in your mercy, you love us. And
in your mercy, you warn us and you warn us in the context of
worship, not to forget what you have done for your people, not
to forget that you rescued Israel out of Egypt, not to forget that
you have rescued your church from the tyranny of the devil
and enslavement to sin and misery and a life of service to not
the Christ but the the evil one and an eternity forever without
you we thank you that you’ve rescued us and that you’ve warned
us and help us as long as it is today not to love and serve
you we pray all this in the name of Christ amen