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Psalm 95, "Let Us Worship", Pastor Nathan Williams · Clifford Baptist

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  Speaker A: Welcome to the May 31 sermon from Clifford Baptist Church, 635 Fletcher's Level Road in Amherst. Today's scripture is Psalm 95, and the sermon is entitled Let Us Worship, delivered today by Associate Pastor Nathan Williams.
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  Speaker B: Good morning. It is an honor always to open up God's Word whenever I'm called, to have an opportunity to do that. If you will go ahead and find a copy of God's Word and be flipping to the book of Psalms, we'll be in chapter 95, the 95th Psalm, and we're going to be talking about the topic of worship. And worship is one of those commands in Scripture that I think is often misunderstood, because I don't think it's that far of a stretch of the imagination to understand that some commands or some things we ought to do are really the most natural and the best for us. Think about health, for example, maybe exercising. That terrible word, exercising, eating healthy. These things that our doctors always nag us about or our spouses might nag us about. I don't know. Those are actually things that are good for us. If we take care of our bodies, we actually live a flourishing and good life. It doesn't take away from our life. And while we live in a fallen world where, whether it's genetics or certain circumstances or some of the things we run into, our health isn't always pristine. I think we can agree that eating healthy and exercising and taking care of your body is a good thing that leads to our flourishing. In the same way, there's some commands in Scripture, many commands, if not all commands in Scripture, that if we put into practice, they're not these burdens that we have to heap onto our walk with Christ, but they're the essential, vibrant core of. Of a flourishing life with Him. And worship is one of those things. And in Psalm 95, we see a very clear call for us to worship our Lord. And before I dive into it, I kind of want to pause and reflect on what worship is. Because when you hear the word worship, all of us have something that pop into our mind. And I want us to make sure that as we work through this, it's essential for us to understand how worship is for our good. We understand what it is. And it's not merely a song. It's not merely a time of a week, but I think it's a state or a way of living in being in relationship with God. The technical dictionary understanding would be expressing, admiring the worth of something, expressing the worth in something. You see, maybe it's that sports team that Just won the, the Super Bowl. You express and admire its worth. And the definition I want to kind of use today is the overflow of our heart's delight. The overflow of our heart's delight. And it looks many different ways in praising. It's the overflow of your delight in something. It's not just the vocal pitch of your voice or the location of your singing. It's. It's the orientation of your heart as you admire and express just how great and how good God is. And our hearts are made to worship. They actually can't do anything but worship. They're always worshiping something. And when I was a kid, we had an emergency radio that if the power went out, we would bring it out. And you had to sit there and turn the radio, get it going, and it had a few simple dials. If you got the charge going, you had AM and FM and then you had a knob for the volume and the amplifier and then another one to tune what frequency the radio would pick up. And I am no electrical engineer, but I know inside a radio is a variable capacitor that when a frequency hits, resonates with, can't help it. When the frequency hits it, it resonates and then it amplifies the sound for people to hear. And whatever you tune that radio to, it's just going to resonate and amplify that sound. It's just going to happen in the same way. I believe worship from the heart is the same thing. Whatever our hearts are tuned to delight in is what our souls are going to amplify in life and worship here, it doesn't matter what it is. Maybe you care nothing about God, but your heart is tuned to a frequency or to something that you delight in, and the overflow of that is what you worship. And today we see in Psalm chapter 95 a call to make sure we're in tune to worshiping the right thing. And that is God our Lord. So. So if you will look at Psalm 95, I'm going to read the whole psalm and pray over before we look through it. So in Psalm 95, beginning in verse 1, the Psalmist says, 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 form the dry land. In verse six. Oh, 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 and they have not known my ways. Therefore I swore in my wrath they shall not enter my rest. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, Lord, you are a holy, holy God. I pray, Lord, as we study your word and your scripture, Lord, that your spirit will be at work in our hearts for us to see who you are, to delight in who you are, Lord, and to live authentic lives of worship to where it cannot be said of us that our worship is in vain because our lips are near you while our hearts are far from you. Lord, stir us up into a heart and the spirit of worship in this place today and in all of our lives. And may you sanctify us in your truth, Lord, for your word is truth in Jesus name. Amen. The point of this psalm is for us. Let us worship God from the heart. Let us worship God from the heart, and it shows us how we can worship God from the heart. It says, let us worship God. And here's the key phrase. By delighting in his goodness, by delighting in his greatness, and by delighting in his gifts. True worship cannot occur if our heart is not resonating with who God is and delighting in it. And in the first few verses, we see this first point to let us worship God by delighting in his greatness. The thing with the poetry and the psalms is they're very structured. If you're a structured person, you. You'll love some psalms, the poetry, they have very repetitive, clear patterns. And in this psalm there's a very clear pattern of a call to something, what we're called to, and then the reason why. And then it repeats a reminder to call to something, what it looks like, and then the reason why, and then it repeats three times. And each of these calls, each of these reminders instruct us in how to worship. And the first one is to let us worship by delighting in his greatness. Look at verse one. Again. It says, oh, come. Literally to move, get into action, let Us sing to the Lord. Let us make 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. It just sounds like an ordinary psalm that we're used to reading. But in it is a call to cry with all you have out to shout of the greatness of who God is. And there's a few descriptive words here that I think make clear the nature of our shouting and our singing and our praise. It says, to make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. When you see the rock of your salvation, you just have joy in shouting out to it. Let us come into his presence not in agony, but with what, with thanksgiving. Thankful that we can meet his face and we can know him and be in relationship with Him. Let us make a joyful noise to him. The type of worship, the type of praise should be one that is full of delight and joy in who God is. And if there's no joyful noise and it's just noise, well, then we're just making some sound waves and that's that. But if from the heart we delight in our rock, our salvation, and who God is and how great he is, it overflows into what true worship is. And I'm not. I can't know everyone's heart. But we just sang some great songs. And I heard a lot of people singing. But if we were just singing, but in our heart, there was no delight in the truth of what we were talking about. There was no joy in God. I can't believe you are this way. I can't believe that you would think of me in this way. And that I can praise you. And it wasn't from a heart of worship. You were just singing in a crowd. Because the psalmist calls us to make a joyful noise. That's not about the sound. It's about where the heart is at in your praise, in your worship. And I can think of different styles of music. I like listening to various different types of music. And one of them is blues. A good blues guitarist. I just appreciate them a lot because I'm not that good of a guitar player. But they always play in something like a minor pentatonic scale. You might not know what that is, but you can hear it. It sounds kind of sad. And they always have this raspy. Even if it's a beautiful voice, it's a sad voice. And you just hear the agony of this person, of what they're sad, what they've lost, what they don't have anymore how they wish things could be. And in that song, it might be a loud noise, it might be singing, that's beautiful. But can you really say they're delighting in something and that's the overflow? Or is it they're mourning. It's the overflow of mourning. And have you ever had the joy of hearing a small child, unprompted, just happy, singing a nice little song to themselves or humming to themselves off in the corner, just without a care in the world? It's not this depressing noise. You see this almost vibrant, just spark coming out of them. They're just overflowing with excitement about something. They're just happy. The same way in our praise of God, it's not a duty where we walk into the pews and we have to go through order. No, we get to delight in our Lord and praise how great he is. God is something that is actually enjoyable for the believer. And that just boggles my mind that our Lord, who is holy when we are not, has created us in a way that we can actually delight in Him. So when we worship him, when we praise him, it's more than just a song or a style. It's an attitude of the heart that's overflowing in our delight and are magnifying how great our God is. And it's much more than a song. It's our whole being resonating with what we see in God. And the psalmist clarifies this. He says four, and he gives several descriptions. I see seven things here, and seven is the number of completion. So I think there's a very clear that God is great. The word great is used twice, but when you look through the next few verses into verse five, you see seven descriptions of how God is great, how we can delight in Him. The first one is, he is the source of salvation. He's the rock of salvation, the rock of our deliverance. And for the psalmist, they can think back to where God took them out of Egypt, out of slavery, and undeservingly brought them into a kingdom and a promised land and delivered the enemies into their hand and provided for them time and time again. God was their deliverer. But for us, how sweet is our perspective. God has entered history, become a man, died on a cross for our sin, to where we could have a relationship with God and have fullness of life from his resurrection that we do not deserve. But we can delight in how great our God is, who is our deliverer and the rock of our salvation. And that's just the first thing the psalmist points out. The second one is that he's the fullness of our joy. It talks about entering into his presence. And literally just let us meet his face. And in Psalm 16:11, we see that in his presence, his fullness of joy. The closer we are to God's presence, the closer we are to Him. If we're a child of his, the more joy we have. And God is great for that. The third thing is he is a great God. He is Yahweh, the Lord. He is the divine being who created all things. He's all knowing. He's all powerful. There's none like Him. And that's an understatement of how great he is. And the psalm goes on in the end of verse three to say, he's a great king above all gods. There's no spiritual force, no other religion that can threaten the authority of God. There's no power that is greater than Him. He's the King of it all. So we can delight if he is our God. Cause he is great and above all. And then it goes on to talk about his creation. In his hands are the depths of the earth. So the fifth thing is he's great. Cause he holds everything. He's got the whole world in his hands. He sustains every millisecond of our life. Every atom in the universe. God sustains. He holds it. I cannot wrap my mind around how great that is. But I can delight in knowing that he is great. But he doesn't just hold it. The next verse says he owns it. The heights of the mountains are his and the sea is his. I got the pleasure in one week's time this past week to go from the seashore seeing a beautiful sunrise and how magnificent seeing the ocean is at that time of day. To within a week being on the Blue Ridge Parkway, watching a sunset in the mountains. And how magnificent is the God who holds that and who owns it. Almost like an understatement at this point. The seventh part of his greatness that we see here is that he made it all. He made it in his hands, formed the dry land. Our God is great, and we can delight in him because of how great he is. Everything that is good about this world is his, and he made it. And we can delight in him and worship him for it. But it's silly of us when we push God to the side and look at these lesser things that point to his greatness. So they declare his greatness and worship. That we all have phones we all might have screensavers on them. Maybe you have a TV that at certain times of day it just starts putting up pictures randomly. And there might be some beautiful pictures on there. You see the Great Grand Canyon or the Patagonia national park in South America, these great mountains. But how silly would it be to say, wow, that is a beautiful thing. And you start taking the TV off the wall and looking at it, turning it off, inspecting the electronic component. No, go to the mountains, go to the Grand Canyon, and you will see the greatness that that picture is just a reflection of. It does not compare in the same way. The greatness we see in the world around us is an echo and reflection of the greatness of our God, whose glory it declares. So do we have anything to worship in our Lord? Yes, we have so much. He is so great. So when we have times of worship together, we can tune our hearts to reflecting on how great God is. And the natural overflow of a heart that is resonating with the greatness of our God is one. Delighting in worship and I know we Baptists, we get a bad rap. I grew up a Baptist my whole life, and my favorite way to worship is like this, where I just stand like this and I sing along to a song. And to a certain point you can delight in the Lord that way. But if all we do is stand and go through this orderly motion moaning along to the lyrics and there's no delight, do we really see how great our God is? Do we really know what we're singing about if it doesn't move us to overflow with joy? And I'm not saying you have to hop around and throw your hands up in the air, but in your heart are you delighting in your Lord and it might lead you to do that, I don't know. But worshiping God means you're delighting in his greatness. And our God is great. If my dog can delight in me when I get home, I think we can delight in our God, who is far, far greater. And this psalmist is just in part one and the next part of the psalm, it repeats the structure. Oh, come. And we see the second point. Let us worship by delighting in his goodness. In our Lord's goodness. It says, oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. Something interesting is a strict word for worship is not even here, though our translation has it. It's really just three repeated ideas of bowing down, bending the knee, and kneeling. And I think rightly they put the word worship there, because that idea carries the magnitude of worship. But repeat it in the center of the psalm, five verses before it, five verses after it. Right in the middle is to bow down, to bend the knee and to kneel. Showing the heart of worship is redirecting to acknowledging who God is. In our worship of God, our pride, our hearts have to slow down and redirect and bend the knee to God. Worship is redirecting our attention, our focus to tune in to who God is. Because in of ourselves we run from Him. In of ourselves, we want nothing to do with Him. Right now there's many of us who couldn't care about God, but to worship him, we have to let ourselves die and kneel down before him and acknowledge him for who he is. And that's not bending the knee to a tyrant. It's not bending the knee to a taskmaster. It's bending the knee to a good loving Father who cares for us. It just astounds me that in God's grace He allows us to turn out of our sin and to have right relationship when we bend our will to Him. And I see this first saying, I have a 2 year old. I know what it's like to see the battle of the wills. And I had the joy the past two days to be with my parents. And poor shepherd did not understand what his granny was like. I know, I mean, I tried to push the buttons with my mom my whole childhood and I finally gave up. There was no winning there. But he, in his two year old brilliance thinks that he can just push the buttons and get away with whatever he's wanting. And granny said no, no, no. And I tell you what, she never even gave him an inch of ground in what he was trying to disobey her about. And I was like, wow, I'm glad those days are behind me because she's scared. I mean, the fear of the Lord was in me a little bit watching my mom just kind of put him back in place. But we're just as foolish. Sometimes we just push the buttons of God. We try to say, well, yes Lord, you call us to this, but are you really good? I'm gonna do things my way. You really don't care that much about this part of my, oh, I don't really need to take this that serious, seriously. And we just let our pride puff us up and we go the way we want. But for worship, we must bend the knee of our will to acknowledge our God and His goodness and see him for who he is. And the psalm explains it. It says, for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Up to this point, this psalm has been saying, a great God, the great King. It's all these kind of this guy that we can kind of look at in a petri dish. But now it becomes relational. It's not just a God or the God, it's our God. We're not just parts of the creation. We're his people in his pasture. That our God, though we in our hardness, push him away like a shepherd caring for stubborn sheep, claims us, cares for us, loves us. Then Jesus goes on to talk about who he is, the good shepherd and the sheep hear his voice. How good is our God? I know in my own life I don't deserve God to treat me that way. None of us do. But when we understand that we are his, if we're a believer in Christ and we're in his pasture and he is our God and we are his people that he cares for, my heart just overflows with delight and thanksgiving and joy for how good my God is. So in worship, for true worship to occur for us as a church to worship our God, we must not just delight in the greatness of him, but the goodness of who he is, because he gives us so much we do not deserve. And lastly, we see in the last few verses this structure repeats. There's a call, some reasons of what we're being called to, and an explanation. But it looks very different and quite frankly, it feels kind of depressing when you read it, it's like all this uplifting calls to praise, and then it just turns straight to a stern warning. And notice that the perspective of the psalm shifts to where now it's God talking. That's time to perk my ears up and listen. And instead of saying, oh, come, he says today, a call to the present moment for us to reflect on right now. Not just this idea over here, but right now in our life. The psalm says, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart as at Meribah, as on the day of Massa in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. This is a verse that will cut to any heart. And yes, there's some confusing words there, Meribah, Massa, but I'll point to what that's referencing. But the beginning today, do not harden your hearts. When I read that a week or two ago, it woke me up like, lord, I need you. Don't like purify my heart, don't let me harden myself to you. It's a wake up call to who God is and how easily we slip, how easily our hearts build up these charades to where outwardly everything staying the same, but inwardly we grow cold to delighting in our God. And this psalm says, today, if you hear his voice, if the Spirit of God is speaking to you, and to use the analogy of the radio, if the radio waves are coming and your radio isn't picking it up, the problem isn't with the Spirit. The problem is with their heart being hardened. Don't harden your heart, don't harden your heart to the greatness of her God and the goodness of her God. And he references how God's people did this at Meribah and at Massa. And you can go to Exodus 17 or numbers 20 and it's referenced throughout. God has just rescued these people out of slavery. Sometimes we wish God would show up as physically as he did for these people and take them out of slavery, cross the Red Sea and guess what? They're free now. God has taken care of them. And guess what the people do? They start complaining and saying, God, why did you even do this? We don't care about you. Why did you even do this? Is Nathan's paraphrase, by the way. And God asked Moses, well, if they're in the desert and they're worried, give them some water. And even Moses is hard on himself because of the frustration, doesn't fully obey God. And God says, because of that, Moses, you will not enter the promised land that I'm taking you to. And that ended up happening for the people too. As they continued to resist what God was speaking to them. Resist and ignore the works God was doing. They missed out on the rest of God today. Let that not be you. Because God is speaking through his word. He has done great works for us and we can find rest in him. The very thing we were made for and the very thing we long for, we can find in Christ. But if you harden your heart to that, listen to what our Lord said about these people. For 40 years I loathed that generation and said, they are a people who go astray in their heart and they have not known my ways. Therefore I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. That is the scariest thing I could ever read in Scripture. That the God of the universe loathes and is full of wrath towards a person. And that can very easily be you or I. If we harden ourselves to the greatness and the goodness of our God. So today I want to call you to acknowledging God's gifts here. Let us worship by delighting in God's gifts, not hardening ourselves to them. We see the gift of God's voice here, the gift of God's work here, and the gift of God's rest here. Do not harden yourself to any of those things. We can delight in the voice of God because He speaks to us in His Word. The God who with his voice spoke the world into existence speaks to you and I and can speak new life into us through His Word. Do we delight in that? Do we go to it? Or do we harden ourselves and push it to the side and want nothing to do with it unless it's forced upon us? It's a slippery slope from there. If you don't read His Word, you won't know about his works. You won't be able to observe his works. If you do not know his voice or see his work in your life, you will not have the rest that he provides. So let's delight in his gifts. Let us worship our Lord. He is the great God who made everything he owns you and I. He's a good God who sent His Son the greatest work. To live a perfect life for you and I. To die for all the sin and all the shame we may feel and have when we read a passage like this. Because we know and we resonate with the fact that we're unworthy. But our God, in His great love died for us so we could have life in Christ's name, be viewed in the eyes of God as perfect, even though we don't deserve it. And to live eternally in his joy in his presence. And we can worship him and enjoy him forever. That is the greatest news ever, guys. There's no greater story ever told, no greater hope apart from what Christ does for those who trust in Him. Do you delight in that work? Do you know that work where the heart of stone is taken out and a heart of flesh is put in? And what was once a hard, callous resistance and annoyance of God becomes a desiring and a joy and a delight and a God? Have you tasted and seen how good our Lord is? As if. So delight in Him. Let it overflow into all of your life. It's not just when you sing a song. It's when you love the person that is impossible to love. If your delight in your Lord's stronger than your delight in what people think about you, you'll be able to love the person that is Impossible. But that's worship. When you read God's word, a command that is hard and difficult. And in your own Harding, you would want nothing to do with it. If your delight in God's greatness and goodness is so great, his commands will not become burdensome to you. And in your love of him, you will obey and you will find the essential core to a flourishing, vibrant life. It might be hard. There will be challenges, there will be struggles. But there can be a joy, a greater possession that no one or anything can take from you. And that's your joy in God. And that's why we, as God's people, come into this building as the church. And worship our God week after week, as our hearts wander. But we can retune, readjust each week, our hearts to the greatness of God, the goodness of God and the gifts of God extended to us. And in that we find rest. We find rest. So today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart, but worship the Lord, your God. Delight in him and live your life glorifying Him. That's where true life is found. And it cannot happen on your own. You must trust in Christ as your Lord. You must see what he has done for you that you could never earn. And allow him to transform your life through the power of the Spirit. Answer that call today, every one of us, and give your heart to him. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I praise you, God. You are a great God. Thank you for your power, Lord, that is at work in your people. And how faithful you are to us, how good you are to us when you speak to us, when you work in our lives, when you sustain us through every challenge we go through, Lord, help us not to harden ourselves to the delight to be had in acknowledging you in that, Lord. I pray for those here that have only coldness and no warmth towards you, God, I pray that your spirit will cut through and draw them to a life of joy in you. If there's any believer here who's been just following week after week, week after week, week after week. And outwardly going through the motions. But inwardly they've slipped into being hardened, Lord. Ignite in them the fire of your joy, Lord, and help them to see in your greatness and your goodness, Lord, where they can truly worship you from the heart, in Jesus name I pray. Amen.
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  Speaker A: Clifford Baptist Church invites you to join us for worship every Sunday morning at 11aM for more information about our church, please call our church office at 434-94605. 55.