The Essence of True Worship: Lessons from Psalm 145

Hello and welcome to the Middletown Baptist Church podcast, where we are proclaiming the truth to the world.

My name is Pastor Josh, and I want to thank you for listening to this podcast.

I hope that this podcast can be a blessing to you and strengthen you in the word of God.

Now come along, let's look into the Bible and see what God has for us here today.

The reason why I wanted to focus on that is because sometimes in our life as Christians, as believers, as the family of God, we're tempted to feel as if we don't have a reason to worship.

Or maybe we intellectually know that we have a reason to worship, but sometimes we just don't feel like worshiping.

And I wanted to for the rest of the summer until we hit our fall time.

And when we get into our book study that's coming up next, I wanted just to pick out a few psalms because I felt like, where should we go when we study worship?

And the Lord kept drawing me back to the psalms.

And I have been going through a couple psalms recently, but one psalm that I have been going through a lot recently is Psalm 145.

And so we're going to start looking at Psalm 145.

But as you're turning to Psalm 145 and you can.

You have a Bible that has a bookmark.

You can make a bookmark there.

I want us to go to another passage in the New Testament that speaks to worship, because sometimes we.

We lose sight of why we worship.

We lose sight of how we should worship, and really, we lose sight of the focus in our worship.

And, and so many times I, I've even heard people saying this in, in a good context, trying to be beneficial.

Hey, any type of worship is good worship, but that's not what the Bible says.

The Bible says that there is a proper way to worship the Lord.

There's a proper method to worshiping God.

And I was thinking about, you know, where would we go when we talk about worship?

Well, I think that we should look at profiles in Scripture of individuals who were known for their worship.

And if you could think of anybody who was a worshipful individual, you could think of a lot of people.

But I went to the person that the Bible says is a man after God's own heart, and that's David.

Now, was David perfect?

Certainly not.

We know that, but we also do know that David was a man of worship.

The Bible indicates that David was a man of worship.

But in the New Testament, in John chapter four, some of you know the story of Jesus ministering to the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman.

And just to give you some context, he's talking to her about the living water.

And she's basically saying, well, you know what?

You guys don't worship, right?

And Jesus is talking to her about worship.

And they get to verse number 23.

Well, actually in verse number 22, he says, you, you, you don't know what you're worshiping is basically what he says.

He says, you worship, you know, not what we know.

What we worship for salvation is of the Jews.

And Jesus says, you know, we, we know we're worshiping.

There's a lot of people in this world that don't even know what they're worshiping.

They don't even know what this is all about.

They're just in religion or, or they're just in some kind of tradition or, or they're in some kind of routine and they feel like this is going to be enough.

But then Jesus says in verse 23, but the hour cometh, and now is when the true worshipers.

And I don't know about you, but I want to be categorized by, by being a true worshiper.

And it says, the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

And, and there's some individuals that we, we see in this world today that definitely are willing to worship God in spirit, but maybe not in truth, right?

It's just all about emotions, it's all about feelings, but maybe it's not grounded in truth.

And then there are some people that say, you know, I'm all about truth, but God's power doesn't stir me at all.

And what we're seeing here is that the perfect way, the biblical way to worship God is number one, based in the truth, but manifested through how God is working in our life with joy, with excitement, says, worship the Spirit in truth, and for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

So the Bible calls us to worship a certain way, to worship in spirit and in truth.

A lot of the New Testament speaks of true worship being based in love, right?

We know that if we are to worship God, we are to love him.

And Jesus says, if you are my disciples.

John chapter 8, verse 31, he says, if you want to be my disciples, continue in my word.

Other passages of scripture, like John 14, 15 and many others.

Jesus says, if you love me, you will obey me, you will keep my commandments.

And so tied together with worship is always going to be not just an outward action, but an inward action, meaning this.

This we're thinking, we're believing, we're trusting in a truth that is going to manifest itself in what we would call worship.

So we can worship God a lot of different ways.

Even the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 10:31, whether, therefore, you eat or drink or whatsoever you do, do, all to the glory of God, meaning we can worship God outside of the worship service.

Certainly singing is an act of worship.

We know that through the book of Colossians.

Colossians 3:16 says that we lift up our praises to.

To God.

And so that's one amazing way to worship God.

It's one of the major things that we see, obviously, in the book of Psalms, is the idea of praising God through song.

But we know that we can praise God in.

In all places we.

We know that we praise God and honor God and worship God through the way that we obey him, through the way that we serve him, by the way that we reject the things of this world.

And so I wanted you to think about that in context when we come to these Psalms, because I want you to understand what we're talking about.

We're not just talking about outward displays that we have within the church, even though those are completely fine.

And we actually embrace people worshiping within the church.

But we all know maybe you've even been guilty of this at some point of worshiping externally, but inside of our hearts not being where we need to be.

It's similar to when our children obey us, maybe on the exterior, but on the inside they're in rebellion.

And that's not true obedience.

True obedience will be completely obeying with the heart and with the action.

It's the same thing with worship.

Worshiping God with a worshipful heart with worshipful actions.

Today in our society, people see worship as a fabricated or at least some sort of production like music, lights, activity, and certainly at some degree that can be worshiped.

But what I want you to see here this evening is that worship is not just in a box that we define in our culture today.

Worship is a worship of worship of heart, worship of action, worship of thought, worship of obedience.

And so we come to Psalm 145, and we're going to go through as much as we can here this evening.

I don't anticipate finishing the whole psalm tonight, but I would like to do is.

I'd like to just go through this and call this a profile of worship and look at the heart of the man who was A man after God's own heart and see what it was like for him to worship and see how we as believers could come alongside like David and worship God with all our heart.

The Bible says in Romans chapter 12 that we present our bodies, a living sacrifice wholly acceptable unto God, which is our reasonable service.

And so God wants us.

He wants all of us.

He doesn't just want our Sunday mornings, He doesn't just want our song time, he doesn't just want a Wednesday night here and there.

He wants our lives.

And so we're going to look at what David has to say here, and he has so many reasons to praise God and think about how much of a contradiction it really is, is that if a Christian says, well, God is good, but I really don't have a reason to praise him today.

God has been super faithful to me, but I, I can't worship him today.

Do you see the contradiction in what we're saying and how we're acting?

Because if we say that God is good, we have a reason to praise.

Even if our lives are going in a very difficult direction.

If we are believers, we can always go back to God has saved us from our sins.

He's extended everlasting life to us.

And I have a reason to worship today.

And so let's look at David's reasons for worship.

And really, Psalm 145 specifically deals with God's greatness, his majesty, his power.

And in verse number one, he says in Psalm 145, I will extol thee.

Now, I had to double check what that word extol means because it's not a word that we use frequently in our language.

But extol means to lift up, to, to be excited in our praise, fervently praise.

It's not just saying, hey, you know what?

I'm going to praise him when I can.

No, it means I'm going to lift God up as high as I possibly can.

He says, I will extol thee.

It means this.

He's going to exalt God and honor him and promote the name of God in every way that he possibly can.

To the glory of God.

Everything good in my life is to the glory of God.

Every good thing that I have ever had in my life is to the glory of God.

Every success that I have, every accomplishment that I have, every good thing that people notice about me is to the glory of God.

Why?

It's because he's given it to me.

The Bible says in the book of James that every good gift comes from God.

That's James 1:17, that every good gift comes from God.

And so in my life, if I take credit for anything, I am misappropriating where that worship needs to go.

I misappropriating praise.

If someone comes and praises me for my talent, say, well, praise God.

It's only by God's grace that I'm able to do this.

It's only by God's grace that I can have this business.

It's only by God's grace that I'm able to have this talent.

It's only by God's grace that I was able to teach this person.

The Bible clearly teaches that everything, everything in our mouths, everything in our lives, everything must be lifting up Christ and lifting up the Lord in every way.

So he says, here, I will extol thee, my God.

It speaks here to his personal relationship with God.

True worship will never come unless we understand that we have a personal relationship with God.

He doesn't say our God or their God because the God of Israel, David, recognizes here that he is his God, my God.

And I think it's important for us to understand as Christians that we have a personal relationship with God, an intimate relationship with God.

And if we don't recognize that personal relationship with God, everything that we do will be what we would see is somewhat superficial because we think of God as someone else's God.

I remember sitting in a Christian environment and hearing testimonies like we heard tonight.

And just by way of honesty, I would hear other people getting excited about God and I would have a hard time doing it.

I would say, well, how can they say that?

Or how can they have that much joy?

I don't understand.

It doesn't make sense to me.

And you know, what was missing from my life, what was missing from my life was that personal walk with God.

And I think if we're tempted in our lives to drift away from seeing that personal walk with God, we'll miss the reason to praise Him.

We can, we can talk over and over and over again about the love and the personality of God when it comes to our.

Our lives.

And I'm going to say to you, one of the best passages of scripture that I've ever read that gives me comfort and peace is Hebrews, chapter four, when he says that we can come boldly with confidence before the throne of grace.

It's an exciting thing.

It's an exciting thing to know that God doesn't have to have us jump through hoops and, and do all these outstanding, extraordinary things.

No, we can come to him as children in obedience, and he will answer us.

He will help us and meet us in time of need.

So he says, I will praise you or I will extol thee, my God personally.

This is a personal address.

But then he goes a little bit further.

He says, oh, King, now you got to remember who is writing this.

David King.

David.

Right.

The temptation would be for David is that I answer to no man.

No one else is the king.

I am the king.

But we see even a man that holds great authority here on this earth has an opportunity to say, you know what?

No, I am not the top.

God is the top.

He is my king.

He is my Lord.

He is my master.

And so here we see in worship a surrendered heart, a completely surrendered heart to the guidance and the will of God.

Now, again, was David perfect?

No.

None of us will be perfect.

But what we must do in our worship is say, you know what?

If I'm going to worship you, Lord, I'm going to first recognize that I have that personal relationship with you.

But secondarily, I. I am going to come to you and submit to you and allow you to guide my life and be my king, to give me the marching orders.

So many times we.

We create our own marching orders.

We try to move forward with our plans, and then we expect God to bless it, or maybe even sometimes demand God to bless what we're doing.

All right, God, I'm going to do this.

This is the path that I think I'm going to take.

And hopefully you'll bless me because I'm your child.

But the truth of the matter is, is that before we make any move, we must go to him and see if God wants this for our life.

If he does, he give us peace.

And oftentimes, if we go to him and we're patient, we're going to see that God has different plans than we have.

And so I'm going to say here this evening that, number one, we need to praise God.

We need to praise him because of that personal relationship with him.

We need to praise him because he is our guide.

And then he says here, and I will bless thy name forever and ever.

So what this means is this.

This is not a one time thing.

Worship is not just one time a year when we have our annual revival.

Even though we want to have revival in our church.

Revival is not an event that a church puts on.

Revival is something that happens in the heart and something that needs to happen over and over and over again in our lives.

What do we see here at the end of verse one, he says, I will do this.

I will bless thy name forever and ever.

Sometimes we're tempted to look at a period in our life that was a high point for our spirituality, a high point for our relationship with God, and look at that as the time that we just keep looking back to as well.

I'm not as close as I was back then, and I don't know if I ever will be that close.

No.

The Bible says that we have to constantly come back in repentance.

We have to constantly come back in humility.

We have to constantly come back and say, lord, I'm going to bless you over and over and over again.

And so David recognizes that God is his king.

David recognizes that God is a personal savior to him and he recognizes the need for consistent praise upon his lips.

And I think that's important to note.

And, and he goes on to say in verse number two, he says, every day will I bless thee.

I think a point to note here would be our worship must be a daily thing.

We should not save our worship for Sunday mornings.

That's corporate worship.

And so many times I think that we, we liken corporate worship to the worship that we're supposed to have in our life every single day were to live a life of worship.

Sunday morning is just when we come together and do it together as a family.

But Monday morning, Friday night, Wednesday afternoon, we are called to worship God in every aspect of our life.

So we don't save worship for, you know, once a week.

We're worshiping God every day, since every day will I bless thee and I will praise thy name forever and ever.

A lot of times with Hebrew literature there is repetition and that's what David's doing.

He's repeating things.

They show emphasis of the consistency of a life of worship.

And so he says, I'm going to bless God daily.

I'm going to lift him up daily.

Verse 3, he says, Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised.

He speaks of God's greatness and this idea of greatness.

He says it's the unsearchable greatness.

God is bigger than us.

There are going to be things that God does in our life that we cannot understand.

Why?

Because he's bigger than us.

There's going to be elements of God in his nature that we will not be able to understand.

Why?

Because he's bigger than us.

Say, I don't understand what you mean by that.

Well, let's talk about the Trinity right now.

Okay.

How many of you can formulate how the Trinity works.

None of us can.

Why?

Because it's bigger than us.

He's greater than us.

His thoughts are above our thoughts.

His ways are above our ways.

That doesn't mean that we give up and say, lord, I can't understand you.

So I walk away.

No, we say, lord, I trust in what you say.

I understand what I can and, and everything else.

I trust in faith that you are who you say you are.

That's what David's saying there.

He's God, you are great.

All the more reason to praise.

We have to praise God for his infinite nature.

Praise God for his eternality.

Praise God for his all powerful nature, his all knowing nature.

There's so many reasons to praise God.

And he says it's because of your greatness.

And he says, and his greatness is unsearchable.

It's okay to recognize that God is beyond us, that he's bigger than us.

We could sit here for hours every single day and we still would not be able to mine the depths of God's greatness.

We would never be able to catch everything.

And so that's the beauty of being in a relationship with God, is that every day is a new day.

Every day is new blessings, every day is new mercies.

And so he says, this is what it means to understand the greatness of God.

David is just gonna pile praise upon go declaring his greatness, declaring his power.

He says, you are worthy.

That's really what worship's all about.

Worth ship, meaning this God has worth, ultimate worth and giving him praise.

No one else deserves our worship.

And really we get the understanding that David.

Not only did David say that we should praise him, but that he would almost be dishonorable.

To withhold praise from God, like to give God half hearted praise would be wrong, right?

Oh, I'm going to check my box today.

I'm going to check.

I'm going to do my devotions.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with doing devotions.

Actually you should do devotions.

But so often we can check boxes and just say, well, I read my paragraph today, I prayed my prayer and now I just go back to living the life that I want to live.

No, our lifestyle should be a lifestyle of worship.

You know, I used to think, well, you know, I went to Sunday church, I'm good now, I can just relax.

But that's not what the Bible says.

The Bible says that our whole life should be reaching and trying to understand God in a more personal way and worship him through that.

Then we get to Verse four, which I find is so interesting.

David basically gives the call to not only worship God, but then show other people what it means to worship God and to know Him.

He says in verse 4, One generation shall praise thy works.

12 Another.

I think this is often one of the things that we forget about.

We, we might worship God on Sunday morning, but are we willing to explain and demonstrate to the next generation what it means to love God and to worship God and to praise him and give him thanks?

That's why testimony time is so important.

People are, the children need to hear that God is working in the lives of, of their parents and the lives of their friends and the life of their church members.

I, I love the church that I was growing up in, but there was a lot of like, you know, I don't even know if that person loves God.

I mean, they're sitting in their pew, they go home, folks, the children and the teenagers and the young adults are looking at the next generation saying, is it going to be worth it for me to worship?

If all these people are miserable and at each other's throats and angry all the time and not thankful for God, why would I want what they have?

I'm going to go search for that kind of stu somewhere else.

And we see people leaving churches because there, there, there isn't this opportunity for people to see that God is still at work.

He says one generation shall praise thy works to another and shall declare thy mighty acts.

We should never hold back from sharing with everybody, young or old, what God is doing.

God is still a God of salvation.

God is still a God of miracles.

We want our children to know that this isn't just a fairy tale.

This isn't just a story that we tell them so that they are good kids.

We're telling them this because it's real to us.

The question would be, is that is the church in America today, is the modern church really believe that God is the God of the Bible?

If we believe that God is the God of the Bible, we believe he can still do miracles.

And I was really challenged by this recently because I was tempted to say, you know what, I don't know if this is actually could happen.

And it was a situation that looked beyond the, what we would call the likelihood of something happening with a person, like they're too far gone, they're too much into sin.

But then I was really challenged by the fact that, you know what the same God that we said this morning, part of the Red Sea, the same God that did all these miraculous Things.

Is the same God working in this world today?

Who are we to say that that person's too far gone?

Who are we to say that that person can't be healed?

We so often lack in faith because we look at the world and we look at the Lord from our human perspective.

But what we see is that we're worshiping the God of the universe.

We're worshiping the Creator.

We're worshiping the One who is eternal.

He had no beginning.

He has no end.

And so what he says here is, he says, proclaim that to the next generation.

We need to be authentically proclaiming it.

If I tell my kids, you know, you need to be good, because God's going to strike you down if you're not good.

That's not a good thing for me to teach them because that's not what.

That's not how God acts.

I'm teaching them a God that I have created to try to put them in a place of fear.

But if I show my children that God is real to me, that.

That we're going to pray to him, we're going to worship him, we're going to sacrifice for Him.

Our young people see when there's real authenticity.

They see if someone's real about what they say.

You know what?

I think it's harder to trick a teenager with someone who's a hypocrite than an adult.

I think sometimes you can trick adults more than you can trick teens.

They can see right through it sometimes, and young people see right through authenticity or disingenuous people.

So what I see here, what David is saying, he says the worship is, yes, ultimately, God is the center of our worship.

And by the way, our world today has removed God as the center of worship and put themselves in the center of worship.

Okay, I'm going to speak to an aspect of modern worship that I just need to caution you on.

Okay?

If modern worship, specifically music, is focused on the person who is singing the song, it's not worship.

Okay?

There's certainly some songs that talk about how God's worked in my life.

There's songs about, hey, you know, there's a lot of songs that talk about just, hey, my actions in my life.

And how maybe this is a beautiful picture.

But if a song is not praising God, it is not worship.

Because in, by definition, if a song is not worshiping God, it's not a worship song.

And what's happened is, is that we've taken a section of songs, whether they be modern or contemporary or whatever, and we Put the focus of the song on the person who is singing, and it's no longer worship.

It's actually worshiping self and not God.

We look at churches today.

If the focus is.

I. I just.

I don't know if you guys saw this, but there was like, a.

A pastor who, again, I don't know what he was about to preach, but he came in, like, on a zip line and, like, it was like this whole ordeal.

There was like fireworks coming in.

He came in in a smoke machine.

He came in, like, if the focus of the service is a person, if the person is the star of the show, it's no longer worship anymore.

What is worship?

It's man worship.

It's idol worship.

So I want to tell you here this evening is that Jesus must be the centerpiece.

Jesus must be the main focus in our worship.

And that's what, that's what the psalmist is saying.

The next generation must see Jesus being the focus.

Not, not, not a.

A program, not, not, not a person outside of Jesus, not a list of rules, but the focus must be Jesus.

And if we worship Jesus that way, it's not to say that everyone will stay in the church, that everyone will get saved.

But biblical principles mean this, that there's a lot more likelihood for a person to come to Christ when the generation above them teaches them the truth.

We see this in Second Timothy, chapter two, verse two.

Paul tells Timothy, what I've taught you, teach others so that they will teach others, so that they will teach others.

And so that line will go on and on.

That's true worship.

That's generational worship.

That's why we want to do more things together.

That's why we come together and we give testimonies on Sunday nights.

That's.

That's why we want to have more of those worship nights.

Pastor Carlos.

Right.

We want to come together and just have time together.

I was reading a book recently, and the way that this guy framed it was church should not just be a place that we congregate once a week.

It should be a place where we do life together, do worship together.

And so that's what he's saying here.

He says one generation will praise thy works to another and shall declare thy mighty acts.

And so David looks for God's people to encourage others to praise.

And so, yes, worship is about lifting up God and God alone, but our proper worship to God will affect others around us.

It will affect others around us.

And that's what he's saying here.

He says an older generation can inspire A younger generation to praise God.

How?

By remembering those mighty acts of God from the past.

But for the other side of things, a young generation might.

Might stir the older generation.

And so it's not just a one way thing.

I mean, but what we can see here is, he says, the older generation needs to pass that down and needs to work together in worshiping God in a unified way.

One of the things that I appreciate about Middletown Baptist Church and many other churches for that matter, we are not the only church that has this uniqueness.

But I like the fact that Middletown Baptist Church is not one dimensional.

It's not just one age group.

It's not focused on just one age group.

It's not focused on just one group of people from one culture.

It's.

It's for everyone to come to Christ.

That's the beauty of this.

I. I want older people in the church.

I want younger people in the church.

I want middle aged people in the church.

I want people that speak different languages.

Why?

Because that's a snapshot of where we live now.

If we lived in a place where there was one demographic, that's the way it's going to look.

But we live in a diverse place, and so we don't actively try to be more diverse.

All we do is preach the gospel.

I got to tell you, really, some of you were here yesterday for this at the peach festival tent, but it was just a testimony of our church, and I'm so thankful for it.

So there's this lady comes up and we.

Ms. Mary Lou was there.

And so this lady, we were trying to like give her a track.

And she goes, no English, no English.

And so obviously the assumption might be that she was going to speak Spanish.

So Mary Louise was on the ready, but she was like, no, no, no Spanish.

I'm from Europe.

I'm from Europe.

And so Ms. Mary Lou said something in French.

I don't know how she knew it, but she knew us a little bit of French.

And she said, do you speak French?

And the lady goes, oh yeah, French.

Well, well, then Stephane was there.

So Stephane spoke a little French to her.

Got her.

We got her all the information, was able to talk to her.

And I was just like, that is an amazing thing.

Just to see the body of Christ there.

It was a little.

It was a little microcosm of the bigger picture of the church, Right?

There's different people.

And it just so happened that Stefan was there and there was a little French spoken.

She took the track and she took it with her.

And ultimately I Just was sitting there, sitting back, just watching that, and I was just like, wow, that's amazing to see.

And, and I'm not saying that every church is called to do that, but what we see here in this case is that the Bible says that there, there is an opportunity for us to reach more people in authenticity.

And so he says that we can reach different generations.

I, I've heard of some churches that say, we don't want this group, right, because they're going to change us.

We don't want the younger people.

We want it to be our identity here.

And I understand that because we want to keep things a certain way, and sometimes different generations confuse us.

Right?

I know I'm getting older when I look at people that I used to, like, understand.

Like, I used to understand teenagers.

I came right out of college and I started teaching senior, senior kids when I came out of college.

So I was like 22, 23, and they were like 18.

I, I went to school with some of them.

So, like, I'm like, I get it.

I know what you guys are like.

And each year I would just start losing more and more of the relevance.

And now I look back at teenagers and I'm like, man, I do not get it.

And that just shows that I'm getting old.

But that means, it doesn't mean that that next generation has nothing to bring to the table.

But I know churches that will say, no, we don't want any older people.

We want to bring everything in young.

We only want to cater to young people.

That's also a problem too, because we're missing the dynamic there.

And that's what David's saying is we need to pass it on.

We don't need to be afraid of the next generation or an older generation or a different culture.

We just tell them about what Jesus Christ has done for us.

That's the power of the gospel.

So let's go to verse number five.

He says, I will speak of the glorious honor of thy majesty.

So he says, this is what I'm going to tell the next generation.

This is what I'm going to tell people in my life.

The glory and the honor of God's majesty and of thy wondrous works.

Where you could say that is, is in our, our language today.

I want to tell people about who God is and what he has done and what he continues to do.

Really, folks, the message of the gospel is just who God is and what he has done.

God?

Who is God?

Well, God's not just, again, talking about people at the Peach Festival.

God came up and he goes, well, you know, I. I know about the man.

Man up there.

And, you know, everyone basically is worshiping him if they're genuine.

I'm like, well, that's not entirely true.

But, you know, we.

And.

And it was.

So he had a wrong view of who God is in his character.

God's not just a man sitting up in the clouds.

God is a spirit, and we must worship him.

A spirit.

In truth, God is beyond our comprehension.

But.

But we first must have to have people understand what it means to understand who God is in his character and his attributes and his deity.

But then we need to tell them, because there's a lot of people that are willing to believe that God exists.

And there's even people that are unsaved that are willing to worship the power of God whether they know it or not.

Look, well, I believe there's a God.

There has to be a God up there.

But I hope that all of you understand that just recognizing that there is a higher being up there that is powerful does not mean that we're saved.

Because Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

And so if there isn't a recognition of Jesus's deity, if there isn't a recognition of what Jesus Christ did on the cross, that person might be religious, that person might be honest with what they see around them and say, well, there must be something bigger than me.

But that does not mean that they're saved.

And we have a lot of people in this world today that will recognize that there is a God, but they will not recognize that Jesus is God and that Jesus will save them from their sins.

So we have to tell them the complete story of God's wondrous work.

And the complete story of God's wondrous work is that Jesus Christ is the.

Is God in the flesh.

John, chapter one.

And dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.

And so we have to teach the whole scope of Scripture.

Verse six, he says, and men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts.

That word terrible doesn't necessarily mean terrible as in bad, just means full of power, awesome.

And I will declare thy greatness.

And so this idea that he brings about in this case is he said, there's going to be people talking about your work.

And what I will do is point them to you.

I. I will sing.

I will praise you for your greatness.

He says, they shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness and shall sing of thy righteousness.

The Lord is gracious and full of compassion.

Now what is he going to do?

He's going to get into this idea of, of recalling the character of God, recalling how God has been good to him.

And he says here the Lord is gracious.

He recognizes the grace of God.

He recognizes that everything that he has is given to him by God.

And I think that we have to recognize that as well when we're worshiping God, when we recognize the power of his grace, the love that is found in his grace, we're able to worship him, go back to his grace.

And then what does he say more?

He says.

He says he's full of compassion, to meditate upon his compassion.

So.

So how can we worship him properly?

Meditate upon his grace, Meditate upon his compassion.

Slow to anger.

He's.

He's patient with us.

That's one aspect we should be thankful for, is God's patience with us.

God has every right to strike us down in our first mistake.

But he's slow to anger.

He's patience says more here and of great mercy.

So just as God is great in his graciousness, he's great in his merciful nature.

Mercy is withholding something that we deserve.

So just as much as God extends things to us that we don't deserve, he withholds from us things that we do deserve.

And so he recounts these aspects of God in His worship.

And that is why my personal preference, and actually I would venture to say my conviction in worship music would be music that is densely rich in doctrine.

Why?

Because it reminds us why we're singing what we're singing.

There's a time and a place for simple songs to recount choruses and sing about the goodness of God.

But what I will say is that when we worship in a shallow way, we believe in a shallow way.

And I think we need to get deeper in what we sing about.

We need to get deeper in what we read.

There's nothing to shy away from when it comes to doctrine.

Okay?

Doctrine's not a scary thing.

You don't have to be a PhD level theologian to understand theology and doctrine in the word of God.

Because the deeper you get with understanding the greatness of God, the deeper you get with your trust.

Right?

The deeper you understand him, the deeper you say, you know what?

No, he isn't going to forget about me.

He is with me through this.

No, God is good.

And so what does he say here?

He says we need to recount these things as we're praising God, praise Him for specific things in greatness, in His Mercy in his forgiveness, in his patience, in his compassion, in his mercy, in his goodness.

Verse 9.

The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all of his works.

This speaks to the love of God.

I mean, we could sit here all night and recount these things, but that's what David's doing.

David is just recounting God's goodness and his love and his patience and his grace.

And that's what we should be praising him for.

We have every reason to praise.

Verse 10.

All thy work shall praise thee, O Lord, and thy saints shall bless thee.

And so he kind of concludes the thought with, you know what?

I'm going to remember what you have done for me.

And as I remember what you have done for me, I'm going to rest in what you've done for me.

And then I'm going to trust in what you will do for me because of your faithfulness.

And so David is echoing this description of God and his faithfulness and his love and his grace.

He says, the Lord is good, the Lord is patient, the Lord is kind, the Lord is full of tender mercies.

And so David sees God's care in his life.

David sees God's presence, and he says, you know what?

We have all the reason to praise.

And so we're going to go down just a few more verses here this evening.

Verse 10.

He.

He recognizes that all thy works shall praise him, O Lord, Thy saints shall bless thee.

What he's saying here is that all creation points to God, as brother Dan mentioned.

You know, being in a place of beauty helps us understand the power of God.

I remember just.

Just seeing certain places when, when I haven't traveled the world, but sometimes I have traveled just seeing uniqueness and difference.

How you can go to one place out west in the Rockies and see huge mountains, and then go down to Florida and see the swamps and see all these different.

The complete, different places, but God's handiwork and his creativity across the whole world.

And so what is he saying here?

He says, creation is going to praise God, the.

The creation itself and the people.

And yet what he goes on to say is this even more so.

Verse 11.

They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom and talk of thy power to make known the sons of men, his mighty acts, the glorious majesty of his kingdom.

Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.

So he speaks of the eternality of God's kingdom.

And this is not just going to be a limited time.

And so we would say one reason to praise God is that one Reason why we should continuously praise God is because God is eternal.

His kingdom is eternal.

And we, his believers also have eternal life with Him.

His.

His dominion, his power, his majesty will be forever.

And.

And I know that so many times we're tempted to think, well, this world has gotten so bad, maybe God has taken his hand off of this world.

Yes, to a sense, God does give people over to the reprobate minds.

Yes, they're so.

So God does give people what they want in their sin.

But at the same time, God is not left.

God is not taking a break.

He's still on his throne.

He's still in control.

There's still thousands of people getting saved.

There's still people seeing the mighty hand of God.

And so there's all.

There's reason to praise.

There's reason to praise.

Now when worship becomes a display of notice me, we've lost the focus.

It's always so.

So what I would say is, because some people say, what's the proper way to worship?

The proper way to worship, if you could summarize it, is God first following His Word?

So God's not going to ask us to do anything outside of his word when it comes to his worship.

I'll give you guys a very stripped down, clean version of what I mean by this.

Some of you know where I might go where this.

There.

There were people in a place called Corinth.

Okay, Corinth was a very evil city with many of the things that they did with the Goddess Diana.

But when they got the church there, there were Christians.

What happened was, is they said, well, you know what?

We're going to try to merge some of the things that the pagans are doing and bring that into the church.

And I don't need to list to you what they were doing.

But what I will say is for people back at that time frame in Corinth and outside of Corinth, for.

For someone to be evil and sinful, they would say, they're being like a Corinthian.

So the Corinthians were the worst of the worst when it came to that.

So they brought a lot of that evil pagan stuff into their churches, thinking that, well, this is our way to worship.

We're going to worship God the way that we think is best, the way that our culture thinks is best.

But there's a lot to be said in First Corinthians about the wrong way to worship.

And they were worshiping the wrong way because they were worshiping in sin.

They were worshiping in the flesh, even Though it made complete sense to them to worship that way in that culture, it was still wrong worship.

And so there's things that we might do today that would make complete sense in our culture to do, but it isn't what God has called us to do because it's feeding the flesh.

So again, I'm not saying that there's one specific church as one specific type of worship because that's the easy way.

The easy way to look at anything in the spiritual realm is to make a list.

Well, these types of churches are evil.

These types of churches are not good.

These type of churches are right.

What I'm saying is that we have to look deeper at the motivation.

Yes, but we also have to look at the method and we have to look at the message.

Those three things we need to really think about when we're coming down in the area of worship, really every aspect of our life.

So, so we need to look at motivation when we're worshiping is my motivation.

People noticing me is my motivation.

Someone noticing how great of a singer I am or how much know I've lifted my hands or how much I've fallen to the ground or how many times I've come forward.

If our motivation is someone else noticing my worship, it's the wrong motivation.

In worship, the correct motivation is lifting up Christ, exalting him.

Right?

What we saw in verse one, extolling him, lifting up Christ.

Okay, so then secondly, the method is my method.

Biblical is my method.

Righteous is my method.

Holy is my method.

Not filled in the flesh is my method appropriate to the setting that I'm in, then that's proper worship.

And then we see lastly, the message is the message that God loves everybody is the message that, hey, he embraces your sins, so worship.

No, our message should be always pointing back to the truth where we started John 4:24.

We must worship him in spirit and in truth.

And so there's this idea that as Christians, we need to worship him with our spirit.

I, I, I'm completely fine with us verbally and physically worshiping God because by the way, it says that we should worship him with our complete bodies.

Bible says in First Corinthians that our body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.

So what we do with our bodies does matter.

But at the same time, we need to liken that to the truth of God because if we get any of those out of whack, we'll miss the point.

And so what I, what I want to emphasize as we close here tonight is that proper worship is Based with the right motivation, it's based with the right methodology, and it's based with the right message.

And when we do that, hey, then we have freedom in our worship.

But we have to be very cautious about the way that we worship, because all worship is not good worship.

We know that through the Bible, he says there's the true worshipers.

And so again, there's stylistic choices within worship.

But what we have to see is like, what about this?

That makes me uncomfortable.

Is this a preferential issue or is this an issue of the word of God?

And so, yeah, I mean, the church that I grew up in is very similar to Middletown Baptist.

But there's certain things at my church in Providence that would be different than this church here.

But at the same time, doesn't make one church better than the other or worse than the other.

Just means that there's differences.

But if the worship's proper worship, it's okay.

And so what we're seeing here is David is saying, hey, there is a.

There's something deeper in our worship.

But, but I would say to you that at.

Just as there was thousands of years ago, right, with the prophets of baal, what did the prophets of BAAL do?

Remember the way they worship themselves?

Some of you know the story with Elijah when they, when, when.

When they were trying to call down fire from baal, it didn't work.

They're jumping around.

They're cutting each theirselves.

They were calling out to baal, BAAL wasn't listening.

Right.

And.

And so it doesn't necessarily mean that all worship is good worship, because we could be worshiping the wrong things.

We could be worshiping the wrong way.

There could be the wrong message there.

So we're going to come back next week and we're going to conclude Psalm 145 because he speaks more about some of the ways that we can worship God.

But I think it's important to.

As we get into the study, it's not going to be a long study.

We're probably just going to go up through probably like early September.

But what we're going to do is just take probably the next month or so to go through some of the psalms that speak specifically to aspects of worship that can help us live a life of worship.

Now, there's a lot more that we could talk about with this.

But what I would say is this.

If you want to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, he very clearly gives us the job description of a disciple.

He says, to be my disciple, you must obey my word.

He says, continue.

In my word.

There's a lot of people that say, well, you know, I. I am a disciple, folks.

I don't believe that you are by default a disciple if you believe in Jesus Christ.

The Bible says that there's a secondary step of commitment to him.

And many of us will say, you know, I'm pretty content with just coming in on a Sunday morning and singing the songs, listening to the preaching and going home.

And that's like, frankly, that's better than nothing.

But what I would say is that God's ultimate plan in for the church in Matthew chapter 28 is to make disciples.

He doesn't say, have church members.

He doesn't say have followers.

When it comes to following the pastor.

Fill out buildings.

No, he says, make disciples.

So our job as a church is to be a disciple factory.

Now, ultimately, it's through the power of God.

We're just the machinery to do it.

God is working through us to make disciples.

How do we make disciples?

We teach them how to worship, we teach them how to obey, we teach them how to study, we teach them how to serve, we teach them how to make disciples.

And that's really the goal.

That's got to be the goal.

And so what that means is that all of us must be ready and willing to take that mantle of being a disciple.

Why?

Because you cannot make disciples unless you are a disciple.

I can't say, hey, new member of the church, we want you to be a great disciple.

But no one in the church or disciples, they're not going to see anything as an example.

So again, how do we pass it on to the next generation or just the next generation of Christians?

We pass it along by example and by declaring so, by being a disciple.

So I would take a challenge.

I'm going to take a challenge for myself and I'm going to challenge you with this.

Are you willing and ready to say, okay, Lord, I want to know what for me, what does it mean to be a disciple?

What do I need to get rid of in my life?

What do I need to add to my life to be a disciple, to worship Him?

One of those things might be, I need to get into proper worship.

I need to worship him properly.

That's a great step.

Because you cannot be a disciple without worshiping him.

It would be.

It would be impossible.

So I encourage you to do that, encourage you to think about that.

And if you want to get ahead, read the rest of Psalm 145, come back next week.

And as we talk about it, make this Something that in your own life that you're understanding more and more what it means to worship God and man.

There's so many great Psalms.

I wish I could go through all of them.

But if, if we were to go through all the Psalms, some of, you know, there's 150 of them and there's some long ones, too.

Psalm 119 is pretty long, right?

So we won't go through the whole book, but we.

I do want to point out a few of them to you, but if you would like to take it on as your own personal study, that would be a great study to go through all the psalms and just go through and break them down and see, because not all of them are written by David.

A lot of them are through the.

The lens of David, but some of them are written through the lenses of other people.

And so you can get a lot of, you know, intake with that, and I think it'll help you out greatly.

Well, we're going to go ahead and close in a word of prayer.

Lord, I thank you for this time that you've given us.

Thank you for this opportunity to come together to study your word here this evening.

We thank you for our reasons to worship.

Lord, we.

We could sit here and give you reason after reason why we worship you, Lord, but help us to rest in those, live in those, and to be thankful for your goodness and for your grace and for your patience and for your compassion for.

For all of these things that were listed here this evening and many others.

Lord, thank you for the testimonies this evening.

Lord, you are a great God.

You are doing an amazing work in the life of people, not only here, but around the world.

Lord, we recognize that.

We're ready for it.

Lord, I pray that you can move us to a place of change in our life if need be.

Lord, help us to be willing to worship you properly or with the right hearts, with the right actions, with the right spirit, or help us to worship you in spirit and in truth.

Lord, I thank you for even testimony in my life of many folks that have impacted me for the cause of the gospel.

And Lord, I pray that we can all recount those that impacted us and think about the implication of that as we impact others around us.

Lord, help us to affect as many people for the cause of the gospel in the time that you've given us.

We ask all these things in Jesus name.

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you again for listening to the Middletown Baptist Church podcast.

I hope that this sermon has been a blessing for you.

You would like to find out more information about our church or this sermon, you can find us at middletownbaptistchurch.org or find us on Facebook or YouTube.

You can also email me directly at Josh Massaro@middletownbaptistchurch.com if you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and follow along for future podcast and updates.

Thank you so much.

God Bless.

Have a wonderful day.