Sermon Title: Psalm 95: A psalm for every morning
Passage: Psalm 95:1-11
Big Idea: Make every effort to worship the Lord in Christ with joyful obedience, lest He be disgusted with us.
1. Come before the LORD our Maker with shouts of joy
2. Don’t come before the LORD with hard hearts
3. Make every effort to worship the LORD Jesus
I don’t often go to other Churches because I come here most Sundays of the year, because this is a great Church!
And also, because I’m the minister here.
But every now and then, I would visit other Churches on special occasions.
I remember that one time, I was sitting where you are, in the congregation, and I heard a strange noise on my row.
It was a noise I hadn’t heard for a long time.
It couldn’t be…..could it?
Yes, it was the noise of someone snoring.
Now, the sermon was great and engaging but the man next to me didn’t hear it.
Now, to be fair, I don’t know why the man was so tired.
He could’ve had a long night; after all, he was a young father.
Or maybe, he was too comfortable in his chair.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t keep his eyes opened; he slept right through the sermon.
He wasn’t the first man to fall asleep during a sermon, of course.
The Bible mentioned that a young man by the name of Eutychus was listening to Paul’s sermon when he fell asleep.
It’s a great story; you should read it!
But he wasn’t sitting on a chair; he was sitting next to the window.
He fell to the floor and died.
Paul went downstairs, picked him up, revived him back to life and kept on preaching through the night.
Even death in the congregation didn’t stop Paul from preaching!
Sleeping in a sermon was deadly for Eutychus but Paul saved him.
In today’s passage, we’ll see that sleeping in sermons and not listening to God’s word in general is still a dangerous thing to do today.
In fact, we’ll see that it’s even more dangerous than falling through the window.
If you have your Bible there, please open up to Psalm 95 beginning from verse 1.
We’ll see three things:
1. Come before the LORD our M Do I delight to come before God in worship?
2. Not wanting God to be disgusted, how am I listening to God’s word with joyful obedience?
3. How can I joyfully help others to obey God joyfully also?
Before we look into it, let’s pray, ‘Father, you have said in your word, “Today, if you hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts”. By your Spirit, soften our hearts now as we hear your voice. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.’
1. Come before the LORD our Maker with shouts of joy
The psalmist invites us to come before the Lord with shouts of joy.
There are three calls to come before the Lord, in verse 1, verse 2 and verse 6.
Look with me at Psalm 95:1-2, “Come, let’s shout joyfully to the LORD,
shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation!
2 (You can almost hear him say, “Come on!” Let’s enter his presence with thanksgiving;
let’s shout triumphantly to him in song.”
Jenny and I don’t go to concert much but we did go to watch Coldplay last year.
It was loud; it wasn’t just the music that was loud.
It was the people.
The audience, close to 100,000 of us, all sang together.
It was incredible.
Churches are often seen as peaceful and serene places, and there’s a time and place for that.
But throughout the Bible, God’s people are commanded to shout out praises to our God. We should be even more eager to shout out praises to our God than all the fans at the Coldplay concert put together.
The psalmist gives us two compelling reasons to praise our God.
Firstly, our God is the Great God because He created everything, from the deepest parts of the ocean to the tallest mountains.
How deep is the deepest part of the ocean?
The deepest known point on Earth is Challenger Deep, at 11 kilometers deep.
God made that!
The tallest mountain of course is Mount Everest, standing at 8.8 kilometers tall.
God made that too
God created all of these marvelous wonders of our world with his own hands.
Secondly, our God is the Great God because He created us.
Here, we hear the third call to worship God.
Look with me at verse 6-7, “Come, let’s worship and bow down; let’s kneel before the LORD our Maker. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his care.”
We should bow down and show God our greatest respect, recognising him as our superior.
We kneel before him is a sign of obedience to our Master.
But God is more than our Master; he’s also our Maker.
In the original context of the psalm, this people were the Israelites.
He made them, with their collective personality, their collective features.
What united them together as a people was that he was their God and they were the people of his pasture.
They belonged to God and God told them that His name was the LORD, Yahweh.
He was the God of Israel and Israel was God’s people.
There’s a belonging to one another, not of equals, but of a promise to identify with one another.
The psalmist use the imagery of a shepherd.
God is like a Shepherd, looking after his people.
We see this imagery throughout the Bible. For example, we see it in Psalm 23:1, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want”
In time, the Bible applies the same language to Jesus
Jesus is our Good Shepherd, as described in John 10.
Jesus knows those who trust him intimately; he calls them his very own.
From now on, those who are God’s own are not identified merely by race, but by their relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd.
The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.
The Good Shepherd knows his sheep and his sheep know him.
Their sheep are the ones who trusted what Jesus had done for them, that Jesus died for them on the cross.
Like the rest of humanity, they were made by God.
But unlike the rest of humanity, they are now remade by God, renewed by God, because they have put their trust in the Lord Jesus.
They are born again and so have even more reason to worship and bow down before the Lord.
Christians, brothers and sisters, that’s what we’re called to do:
Come, let us worship and bow down, let us sing joyfully, let us sing like we’re shouting, because we’re singing to Jesus, our Maker.
Don’t hold back!
Our Church musicians spend a lot of time and effort rehearsing and practicing because we want to get it right.
We don’t stand here to perform for you to listen.
We want to help you to sing with all your might to God.
In fact, we want you to sing louder than us, because it’s a joy to hear the whole Church sing for joy to Jesus!
Our God is the Maker of all the universe; Jesus is the Good Shepherd who came and gave his life for his sheep.
And so, don’t hold back!
Sing in Chinese, in English, sing in unison, in melody and sing in tune, at least as in tune as we can.
But even if you’re not sure, just sing loudly with shouts of joy!
Whatever you do, sing with great joy to the Lord; don’t hold back.
2. Don’t come before the LORD with hard hearts
From the last part of verse 7 onwards, the tone of the psalm shifts from joyful shouts to serious reflection.
“Today, if you hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah in the wilderness where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen what I did.”
Shouting before the Lord is great and is the right thing to do, but true worship goes beyond that.
True worship involves obeying God’s voice.
Just like a sheep that hears and follows its shepherd, those who belong to God follow Jesus and listen to his voice.
In Exodus chapter 17 of the Old Testament, the Bible recorded an incident in a place called Meribah.
God’s people, the Israelites, were wandering through the wilderness and found themselves in a place with no water.
They complained to Moses, the leader God had sent to rescue them. “Give us water to drink!”
Moses asked God for guidance.
God told him to strike the rock with his staff, and water came out.
Why was it wrong?
It was because they were testing God.
They were questioning whether God was really with them or not.
They didn’t believe that God was with them as they followed Moses into the wilderness.
Their question wasn’t innocent - it was grumbling, a complaint against God and the one God had sent.
God heard their grumbling and he took it seriously.
A Christian worker once organized a breakfast catch up with his colleagues at work.
However, he was very disappointed with what happened.
He said, “It got to the point where I wished I could leave even though I had organised it. The whole conversation was grumbling about work”.
Grumbling is not harmless; it’s sinful.
God’s people shouldn’t participate in grumbling.
Grumbling doesn’t honour God.
In fact, grumbling was the Israelites’ sin; they grumbled against Moses, God’s chosen leader, and so in turn grumbled against God himself.
God punished people, his own people, for grumbling, including putting them to death.
While we are encouraged to shout joyfully, true worship also demands obedience.
The Israelites' story at Meribah serves as a cautionary tale.
Despite witnessing God’s miracles, many times, over many years, their hearts were hardened by grumbling and disbelief.
Grumbling has no place in a Christian’s life; the Christian shouldn’t grumble at work, or at Church, among families or among friends.
Grumbling reveals a lack of trust in God’s goodness and promises.
Grumbling reveals a heart that asks, “Is God really with us? Can God be trusted?”It is a sin that dishonours God, doubts his goodness and it disconnects us from one another.
We must not allow ourselves to fall into this trap.
Does that mean that we should just accept everything as it is and not want to improve?
Of course not!
But instead of grumbling, let us approach God with humility and faith, seeking His provision without doubting His presence.
Listen to how God views those who hear his word but still live in disobedience, in verses 10 to 11, “For forty years I was disgusted with that generation; I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray; they do not know my ways.” So I swore in my anger, “They will not enter my rest.”
God was disgusted with those who doubt and disobey Him.
How bad do you have to be for God to find you disgusting?
This bad: You hear his word but don’t obey; you’ve seen his work of power and still grumble.
These are the ones whose hearts have gone astray.
Their punishment is that they shall never enter God’s rest.
The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament refers to this part of Psalm 95.
After quoting from verse 7 onwards, the writer of Hebrews says this is how Christians are to understand these words:
Look with me at Hebrews 3:12-14, “Watch out, brothers and sisters, so that there won’t be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13 But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception. 14 For we have become participants in Christ if we hold firmly until the end the reality that we had at the start.”
The Israelites were saved from Egypt, the land of slavery, but despite hearing God’s words and seeing all that he’s done, they hardened their hearts and grumbled instead.
The Bible reminds us in Hebrews that knowing about Jesus is not enough if our hearts refuse to obey His voice.
You can come to Church every Sunday, sing at the top of your voice, but if you hear his voice and don’t obey, you will not enter God’s eternal rest.
For to truly worship God we must hear his voice and determine to obey him joyfully.
That’s why so much of what we do here on Sundays at St Paul’s Kogarah is to help one another understand and obey God’s word.
I spend time reading the Bible and preparing the Bible talk, to make sure I can explain it as truthfully and clearly as possible.
This sermon gets translated, and we put the translation up as subtitles, print them out on sermon scripts, and turns them into mp3 audio files.
We prepare companion booklets for you to write notes in.
Some of you bring your own sermon booklet to fill out.
We ask each other what we’ve learnt, here on stage, over morning tea and in our Growth groups.
Why do we spend so much time and resources to prepare for God’s word to be heard on Sunday?
It’s because we don’t want God to be disgusted with us.
God’s disgusted at those who hear his word but have hardened their hearts against obeying God.
Don’t be disgusting to God; hear God’s word and obey.
Every time you hear God’s word read, he’s speaking to you. ]
You didn’t come here to listen to me; you’re here to listen to God, to be in God’s presence, to obey his voice.
I’m here to help you understand and obey God’s word.
That’s what we’re all here to do.
We all want one another to hear God’s word and to obey him.
3. Make every effort to worship the LORD Jesus
What does it mean to worship God?
Yes, it will sound like like loud worship, but it’s more than shouts of joy.
It will look like serious study of God’s word in KOGKids, KOG Growth groups and Church services, but it’s more than serious study.
To worship God includes singing songs and Bible studies and the heart to joyfully obey God.
True worship is a commitment to follow Jesus Christ with perseverance and joy.
It requires strength and determination, especially in times of trial when obedience seems most challenging.
It will take every effort.
When my son Ezekiel was still in pre-school, we would drive him there before I go off to work.
One morning, he was still in bed when we were about to go.
“Ezekiel, time to get up!”
Ezekiel, with his face still on the pillow, said, “Every part of my body wants to stay in bed, except for my heart.”
Where does he come up with stuff like that?
Anyway, Ezekiel’s heart and his parents won that day, and we eventually drove him to school.
That’s what it can feel like some time when we follow Jesus.
Every fibre of our being, every facet of our lives, every voice that we hear, might fight against our obedience to God.
But we must listen, not to our hearts, but to God’s voice.
It will take a lot of determination but that’s what true worship looks like.
Don’t harden your heart against God.
When you hear God’s word, repent and obey.
The first readers of the Letter to the Hebrews were finding it very hard to live as Christians as they faced persecutions for the sake of Jesus.
It would’ve been easy just to let the heart hardened.
But the writer of Hebrews encourages the readers to hang on.
Look with me at Hebrews 4:1-2, “Therefore, since the promise to enter his rest remains, let us beware that none of you be found to have fallen short. 2 For we also have received the good news just as they did. But the message they heard did not benefit them, since they were not united with those who heard it in faith.”
Just like the rebellious Israelites from long ago, Christians who have hardened their hearts to disobey God are disgusting to God, and they won’t enter God’s eternal rest.
Does that mean that we enter God’s rest by our hard work?
No! By our own hard work, we could never enter God’s eternal rest.
Jesus, however, through His perfect obedience, opened the way for us to enter God’s rest.
And so, we make every effort to follow Jesus.
Our efforts are not about earning salvation, but about trusting in His completed work on the cross.
Yes, Jesus has completed the work on the cross, but His work is of no good to you if you don’t hear it in faith, if you don’t trust in Jesus.
For Jesus didn’t save anyone who refuses to trust him and remains in disobedience.
Jesus didn’t save those who actively disobey him by contradicting God’s word or by grumbling against God’s work,
Nor has he saved anyone who passively refuse to make an effort to live for him.
Rather those who have been saved by Jesus will show themselves as Jesus’ own when they trust and obey him.
That’s how Jesus’ own worship Jesus; it’s making every effort to follow Jesus.
It’s hard work, but worshipping Jesus in joyful obedience is what we owe God and our ministries, our services at Church, are what we owe to God’s people.
For many years, Anglicans have said this Psalm, Psalm 95, every morning as part of our devotion to God.
It’s called Morning Prayer and it’s like a mini service.
The Anglican tradition used to read Psalm 95 all the time because it reminds us to come to God with shouts of joy as well as to prepare ourselves to listen to and obey his voice today, not hardening our hearts.
Last week, a house in the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria collapsed after it got hit with a landslide.
Witnesses said it only took a few seconds, and the house was all gone.
One person was injured, but thankfully no one died.
Jesus said that those who heard his word but don’t obey are like people who built their houses on the sand.
The rains came, the rivers rose, the winds blew, and the house fell with a crash.
Those who heard his word, but refuse to obey will end up like the house.
Some of them won’t know the danger they’re in until it’s too late.
Friends, you have just heard God’s word.
Some of us will obey, but others of us are not quite as willing to obey.
If you heard God’s word, and you’re not sure what it means to obey, then please come to one of our Christianity Explored Classes that Range is organising.
Don’t hear God’s word and just walk away.
The cost is far too great, and you have no idea when it’s going to be too late.
Why is it dangerous to fall asleep in sermons?
That’s because you are missing out on hearing and obeying God’s word.
You might be physically here for the service, but God’s word hasn’t entered your heart.
Of course this doesn’t just apply to sleep.
You might be thinking about something else, you might think you don’t listen because you know all about the Bible already.
All these are signs of a hardened heart.
And hardened hearts are dangerous because God finds hardened hearts disgusting.
God finds hardened hearts so disgusting that he won’t let them come into his eternal rest.
And so, if you have a hardened heart, if you refuse to listen, if you are someone who just keeps grumbling, repent and turn back to God.
Instead, even if every fibre of your body is against it, listen to God’s voice, obey him, your Maker and your Shepherd, your Master and your Lord.
Make every effort to worship the Lord in Christ with joyful obedience, lest He be disgusted with us.
One of the best way for us to help one another make every effort to worship the Lord is through Growth groups.
In Growth Groups, we meet up to read the Bible, to pray, and to help one another obey Jesus.
If you’re not in one yet, speak with one of the Growth group leaders who came up earlier.
If you want to find out more about how you can serve God thorugh the different ministries we have at Church, please see Jenny and the Giftedness team and they will help you think about what it means to serve at Church.
Here are three questions for you to think about this week:
1. Do I delight to come before God in worship?
2. Not wanting God to be disgusted, how am I listening to God’s word with joyful obedience?
3. How can I joyfully help others to obey God joyfully also?
Make every effort to worship the Lord in Christ with joyful obedience, lest He be disgusted with us.
Let’s pray, “Father, you are our great God, King above all the gods. You are the Maker of all things, from the deepest depths to the highest heights. Father, forgive us for hardening our hearts against you. Forgive us for now hearing and obeying your voice. By your Spirit, give us the strength to make every effort to follow Jesus. Please preserve us to persevere until the day of Jesus. Let us live a life of joyful obedience, shouting praises with all of our might, as we follow Jesus, in whose name we pray, Amen.”