you turn to Psalm 100 in your Bibles. As we recently celebrated national holiday that we call Thanksgiving, I thought it'd be appropriate to be reminded by our text here that Thanksgiving is something that we should practice daily. It's something that should fill our hearts as we recognize all that God has done for us, but especially we practice Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving is a religious event that we celebrate here when we gather together to worship our good and our faithful God. Let's read the text before us this morning. Psalm 100, beginning in verse one. The psalmist says, shout joyfully to the Lord all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before him with joyful singing. Know that the Lord himself is God. It is he who has made us and not we ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him. Bless his name. For the Lord is good. His loving kindness is everlasting. And his faithfulness. To all generations. Let's pray together. Father, we come before you thanking you for your word. We ask you that you would keep us from wandering away from your commandment. We treasure your word in our hearts that we might not sin against you. Blessed are you, O Lord, teach us your statutes, give us insight and understanding, and may your word and your spirit work a change in us here this morning to give us grateful hearts, joyful hearts, hearts full of thanksgiving as we recognize who you are and what you have done for us. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. When we gather together for worship on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings, and we set aside this day as a Sabbath day, a day of rest from our worldly employments, and we come together in order to worship God, giving thanks is the very basic reason that we gather together each week as a church. The Sabbath, as we understand it, is a day of thanksgiving. It's a day wherein we come and we feast upon the Word of God and the sacraments that God has given to us. And we do so for the nourishment and the building up of our souls unto godliness. And as we do this, and we're praising God, and we're giving Him thanks for His goodness towards us, that is all motivated by a spirit of gratitude, a great thanksgiving for what God has provided. In fact, this Hebrew word here, as you see this subscription here in Psalm 100, a psalm for thanksgiving. It's the only psalm that has that title to it. And while the title may or may not be inspired, it's unique that this psalm is the one psalm that has this title, a psalm for Thanksgiving. And that word Todah, Thanksgiving in the Hebrew, comes from the verb yada. And in the simple form, it means to throw or to cast. And so a common form of this verb means to acknowledge or confess or to praise. And so todah is the acknowledgment, or rather, in another sense, it's the confession. It's the confession of God's people, and as we talk about confession, even the Hebrew word here can mean a confession of our sins against God, or a confession of God's goodness towards us. Another meaning of the word is a Thanksgiving offering. You see this oftentimes in the Old Testament, which was an optional sacrifice that the people of God could bring to the temple in order to express thanks to God. And what Psalm 100 is, is a typical psalm for use when giving such an offering. This is what the psalm was used for in the Old Testament. They would bring their thanksgiving offering and then they would sing this psalm together and praise God. They would praise Him for His righteousness in contrast to a confession of the people's sin. It would be a confession of God's goodness, a confession of His mercy and His love. And so as we think about worshiping God as the gathered church, We think about this as the redeemed of God coming together into God's special presence and we give him thanks. We give him praise. We acknowledge and confess the good things that he has done for us. And so we enter his courts. When the church gathers together corporately, we know God is specially present with us. We are offering, in the same sense, a thanksgiving offering, entering his courts with grateful hearts, in reverence and in awe of him, and ascribing to him the glory that is due to his name. In worship, you understand, God speaks to us through his word in sacraments. And then we respond to God with prayers and praise and thanksgiving and confession of sin. And then we hear from God again. If you notice our liturgy, the whole liturgy is designed, God speaks, we respond. God speaks, we respond. And we're trying to do the responses appropriate to what God has said to us. But the heartbeat of worship, is the overwhelming gratitude that we feel in our hearts due to, or in a response to, all that God has done for us in Christ. It's everything that we have received from him. And we see these things presented to us in word and sacrament, and thus, as we go through the worship service, the gratitude should be growing. It should be getting exponentially bigger and bigger, and it should be a rising tide in our hearts so that as we hear the benediction and we leave, we leave more full of gratitude than when we came in the door, more secure in our salvation, happier about what God has done for us through his son Jesus. And so what Psalm 100 does is it demonstrates that worship is something, first of all, we're called to do it. Secondly, we're to be motivated to do it by a heart of gratitude. And this gratitude flows from the recognition of who God is and what God has done for us. Thanksgiving is something that we as Christians ought to be very good at. We should be very practiced at it. And yet the reality is we often neglect it. And when we turn Much like the Israelites who grumbled in the desert about the food that God provided for them, we start whining about the normal things. Even in our worship services, there's a tendency to do this. Well, it's just the same old bread. Every week after week, we hear the same things and go through the same motions. And yet, we're to be a people of thanksgiving. We're to be someone different. We neglect the necessity of cultivating a grateful attitude when we fail to truly reflect and meditate upon God and his goodness towards us. That's why we don't have thankful hearts. We don't take the time to stop and really reflect on what God has given to us, what he has done for us. And this has a negative effect on our worship. Our worship has to be motivated by gratitude. And when we don't have gratitude in our hearts, all we're doing is going through the motions. And we're not actually worshiping in spirit and in truth. So this very popular very familiar Psalm here, really exhorts us to foster that attitude of thanksgiving. Because it's that attitude of thanksgiving that carries us into our worship, that brings us through our worship, that sustains in us a right heart so that we do worship God in a way that's pleasing to Him. God's not pleased when we come to worship Him in such a way that our hearts are hardened or bitter or unthankful for what He's done. So notice, first of all, the first three verses. The first three verses here in the psalm give us a general call to worship, and this is very important for grasping the thought of the psalmist and what God has for us here in the text. Shout joyfully to the Lord all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before him with joyful singing. Know that the Lord himself is God. It is he who made us and not we ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Now we'll take this point by point. First of all, in verse one, shout joyfully to the Lord all the earth. Now, a joyful shout in the time that the psalm was written was something akin to the chant of the crowds as the king came before them, and they would cry out with joy when he presented himself and say, long live the king. This is the joyful shout that we see here. It's the cry of the church where we say often, praise the Lord, or glory be to God. This idea of a joyful shout ascribing glory to God our Savior. And we see that that shout is motivated by joyfulness. It's not just going through the motions. We can kind of do that in our own lives. We'll praise the Lord for that, or glory be to God for this, without the joy that ought to be accompanying that statement. And when we do things like that, nobody's fooled by it, but especially God's not fooled by it. There has to be something that motivates that beyond just, I want to sound like a Christian. the object of the joyful shout is being ascribed to the Lord. shout joyfully to the Lord. And further, the hyphal verb here in the Hebrew is in the imperative, which is something important to notice. This is not optional for us as the people of God. This is a command down to the basic roots of Hebrew grammar. It's a command, it's an imperative that says cultivate joy in the Lord and then express that joy with a shout. In fact, the Puritan Richard Hooker put it this way, concerning the blessings of God, whether they tend unto this life or the life to come, there is great cause why we should delight more in giving thanks than in making requests. Now often we think about this, and I'll get back to Hooker's quote here, but most of our prayers are just filled with requests. But listen to what he says. In as much as the one has pensiveness and fear, the request, the other always has joy attached. The one belongs to those who seek. The request belongs to those who are seeking something. The Thanksgiving, he says, the other to those who have found happiness. Those who pray do so, but yet so. Those who give thanks declare, I have reaped. And so when we ask things of God, we're waiting. There is a pensiveness, as he puts it. There is a fear. There is a sense of even urgency, wondering about how God's going to answer the prayer when we give thanks. It's motivated by the reality we have received. We have been given. It's a different type of prayer. It's a different type of praise. And it brings us into a different, I think, emotional standpoint as we come together to worship. When we come together to worship, we do so in the knowledge that we have received Christ, Him crucified, risen and reigning, and all the benefits of eternal life. That's what's motivating our worship. It's not that we're hoping these things will happen. It's that we have been given these things as a firm and sure inheritance. Now the interesting part of this verse is that the imperative is directed at all the earth. He's talking to everyone. All the earth here is called to recognize God, to recognize His goodness, and to joyfully ascribe glory to His name. All mankind, he's saying, has a duty to worship. Every single person, whether they know Christ or not, has a duty to worship God. And this is what's summarized in the first and greatest commandment, to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's a law that belongs to everyone. Everyone ought to be praising and glorifying God. Everyone ought to be loving God. And that love naturally works itself out in worship. It is the heart that loves God that worships God. When we're not cultivating love for God, we're not worshiping God. We can go through the motions, but that doesn't mean anything. God's looking at our hearts. And so as we think about this, the failure to worship, the failure to vocally ascribe glory to God demonstrates a heart that does not love God. Now, we know this just by human nature. Now, some people can't vocalize their praise to God due to handicaps or age or whatever it may be. But those who can are called to shout joyfully to the Lord. And those who don't do it demonstrate that they don't love God, rather they hate them. If you're in any kind of an event, say it's a sporting event or whatever it may be, and there's that moment when your team, I don't know, hits the home run or throws the last pitch or throws the football. I don't watch football, so I don't know what you guys do with football. They chase each other around with balls. Whatever it may be, there's that moment when the team succeeds and the crowd goes crazy, right? They can't help but cheer loudly and shout joyfully for that victory. Why? Because they love the game, and they love their team, and they love that their team's winning. And in much the same way for Christians. As we look at God and we see the victory and the conquering of Christ and we see the love of God poured out on his people and the salvation that he gives to us in Jesus Christ. If there isn't something in you that desires to shout joyfully as a reaction to that, it's because you don't know God and you don't know the glory of his salvation. These are imperatives that are given to us. Notice verse two, serve the Lord with gladness. And this is still in a general call to worship here. Our service to God is the service of a living sacrifice of our lives to seek first his glory, his kingdom, and his will above our glory, our kingdoms, and our wills. And again, this is motivated by the thankfulness, the gratitude that we have that God has given us eternal life in his son, Jesus. And so as we think about this, it's a service rendered in gladness, the same idea of joyfulness, gladness, thanksgiving. All these words are kind of acting as similes here in a sense. We serve God with glad and joyful worship, and thus our worship is to be the outward or outworkings, you should say, the outworkings of a delight that is formed in the acknowledgement of all that God is and all that God has done for us. The goodness of God is what makes us glad. The redemption of God is what drives our worship. It's not coming together in a sense. I have this this kind of picture in my mind of the medieval monks who lived under the burden and terror of the law and the condemnation of the law and they would come together with their Gregorian chants and it was just this almost miserable gathering of people as they just basically reflected on their sinfulness in the hopes that they could do enough works to make it to heaven and get out of purgatory one day. And the Christian church is not like that at all. It is a joyful gathering of thanksgiving, of gratitude, of happiness, because we recognize, as we hear the word preached, as we take the sacraments, we're recognizing the work has been done. It's been completed. Christ has conquered on our behalf. Heaven belongs to us. And God has promised to cause us to persevere in this life, in the present evil age, even to the very last day when Christ returns. The second part of verse two. Come before him with joyful singing. We're still in the imperative here. This is one of the questions, I laugh about this more often than you know. Why do we sing at church? You don't do it anywhere else. I mean, you do it in your car, and you have it cranked way up. But that's good singing, right? Because my voice is getting muffled out by the radio, and so it sounds like I'm singing really well. Why do we gather together as a church, and everybody is commanded to sing and shout joyfully to the Lord, to sing with all that they are? It's so strange. And it's such a concept in scripture that you almost can't have church without this element of worship that is singing. It doesn't happen. It's an element that has to take place in our worship. It's tied into the very theology of what Christianity is. And there are so many verses in the Bible that command Christians to sing. And it never says, if you're good at singing, sing. If you've got a nice voice, sing. And it never even gives the exception for guys like me who have a horrible voice. It just says to us all, you need to sing to God. It's incredible, but notice how we're to do it. We're to do it joyfully. Not with that kind of hesitant, here we go again, not with the dread of somebody might hear me, but almost like David as he's bringing the ark into the city and he's dancing before the ark and singing and dancing around and he's embarrassing himself in the eyes of his wife. Remember that? That's the way we're supposed to worship God. Look at Psalm 95 just a few pages back. Oh, come. Let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods, in whose hands are the depths of the earth, the peaks of the mountains are His also, the sea is His, for it was He who made it, and His hands formed the dry land. So where does this joy come from? Another Puritan, George Swinnock, said, a Thanksgiving day has a double precedence of a fast day. On a fast day, he writes, we eye God's anger. On a Thanksgiving day, we look to God's favor. In the former, we specially mind our own corruptions. In the latter, God's compassions. He says, therefore a fast day calls for sorrow, a thanksgiving day for joy. And listen to this. But the Lord's day, the Christian Sabbath, is the highest thanksgiving day. So what does that tell us about worship? The tendency to come in and to focus so much on self and the law and our failure to keep the law really throws the purpose of the Sabbath away. The day's not about me and you. The day's about God and reflecting upon his mercies and then responding to him in the recognition of those great mercies. And the law is appropriate because the law reminds us of how great the gift is, but we don't dwell there, we don't live there. We live in the glorious gospel and we worship God out of the joy that the gospel provides. Notice this also, you have this come before him here. Well, who comes before the Lord? We've seen this in the text of Revelation on Sunday nights often. The only people who may come before the Lord and stand before him are those justified. We gather to worship on the Lord's day, the day, the highest day of thanksgiving, and we come into God's presence where his work and his power is extolled and glorified, and we do so as those who stand before the Lord, justified in Jesus Christ, covered in his perfect righteousness. And so our joyful worship really flows out of the reflection that we take time and reflect upon God, who he is, God and what he has done for us, and the great salvation that we have in Jesus Christ. So what this tells us in the call to worship here in these first three verses, take time, take time before you come before God to worship him and reflect upon the gospel. Reflect upon who God is. Reflect upon what he has done for you. I know Sunday mornings are busy, and it's kind of like, if you have kids, you're just lucky to get here. And sometimes we're running around, we're saying hi, we're doing all these things. I would urge you to take time before worship to really meditate upon the gospel. lest your worship be nothing but a hypocritical going through the motions. We need to come before God with these heart attitudes. You observe something here in the psalm. Thus far, he has given us three commands. Shout joyfully to the Lord, serve the Lord with gladness, and come before the Lord with joyful singing. And then there's a final exhortation here. Notice it in verse three. Know. Know that the Lord himself is God. It is He who made us and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Shout, serve, sing, and know. Not necessarily in that order, right? As I just said about this time of reflection and meditation, the Hebrew psalmist here is telling us everything is rooted in this knowing. We shout joyfully, we serve with gladness, we joyfully sing to God in knowledge. in knowledge. One of the dangers of the contemporary idea of worship is that it's just all emotion. If we can play the right songs with the right chord changes and the right rhythms, we can stir the emotions of the people. And we can manufacture a joy. We can manufacture a gratitude or a thanksgiving that really has nothing to do with spiritual things at all. The psalmist is telling us there are things that we have to know. Gladness and joy arise from knowledge, not the other way. Emotions do not drive our worship. Knowledge drives the heart, and the heart then drives the will, which then melts out in worship. But knowledge is really the basis. So there's three things we know here. Know that the Lord himself is God. I am God, and there is no other, he tells us. He is God, there are no other gods, and every other god, every other idol, is just that. It's an idol that you've replaced God with, and it needs to be destroyed. Anything that brings you joy, that brings you satisfaction, anything that you cling your heart to, that you would replace with God. That's an idol. There is only one God. Know that the Lord himself is God. This is another statement here. There's a lot of ways you could take this. This is monotheism. There's only one God is what all that means. One God, one God only, and as Christians, we're monotheistic. We believe in one God. And this one God has revealed himself in nature, the Bible, and Jesus Christ. Right, kids in catechism? This is how God reveals himself to us and in that revelation. We find that God is one God Existing in three persons the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit and so in knowledge We worship him as the triune God the all-powerful mighty triune God Derek Kidner says to know is to have firm ground underfoot and And this is the prerequisites of praise, and this knowledge belongs to us as a gift from God. In other words, God gives the knowledge of himself, we receive that knowledge, it becomes firm foundation for us, and all of our worship proceeds out of that knowledge. Secondly, We know it is He who made us and not we ourselves. If you ever take time to read through the Psalms, you're going to find a theme reoccurring almost in every Psalm, it seems like. The acknowledgment of God as the sole creator of all things. And this is very important, I think, in our day, that we recognize that God is creator, that he made every person, that he created everything that exists, that he didn't need the help of anything or anyone. And it's important because the knowledge of the creator God is being diminished Well, the church begins to slowly adopt the evolutionary worldviews that have dominated what we call the scientific realm over the years. And in doing so, the church is slowly but surely rejecting its creator, pushing off its creator. And we, as the people of God, are called to stand firm in God's Word and reject the ever-changing opinions of men whenever they come up against the firm foundation that is the Word of God. Now, finally, we are to know that we are His people. We are His people. This is where the doubt of self and the doubt of Satan and the doubt of the world is cast against us, where Satan would have us believe that, yeah, you don't really belong to God. Look at your life. You're sinning every day. We tell ourselves sometimes when we put ourselves under a covenant of works, how could God love a sinner like me? And then the world chimes in and says, how could you believe there is even a God to have? How could you believe in these fairy tales and follies? We're to know we are his people. We're to know that we're the sheep of his pasture. He's the only God. He's the creator of all things, but he is also the sustainer of all things, especially his people. He sustains us and he keeps us. One preacher said, if anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and all perfection, He must tell you to make a rule to yourself, to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you. He says, for it is certain that whatever seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing. And that's rooted in knowing that you are a child of God. and that everything that God allows in your life, he allows it for your best good and his greatest glory. And thus, when you know this, when you know I belong to God, I can say, thank you, God, for everything, for every bad moment, for every difficult moment, for every trial and sorrow, because I know you love me, and you love me in ways that I can't even fathom. And that you're doing the best for me through even the trials. I always think of Cyprian the Martyr in Carthage and he was martyred in 258 and upon his sentence of death being read to him by the tribunal. He said I heartily thank almighty God and I praise him. I praise him that you have been pleased to set me free from this body of death. So on the moment that he's going to get torn apart, he's thanking God because what's the good in this death? He's going to be set free from his body of death. And he's going to go straight into the arms of his loving father. That's in his greatest trial. He could thank God and turn it into a blessing. We're always thankful. That's a general call to worship. joyful shouts, serving with gladness, joyful singing, and knowing God and knowing what He has done for us. Now, notice secondly this theme of thanksgiving. Verse four, enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. Now, the phenomenal reality, of corporate worship, one that should, it should scare you a little bit, is that God has promised to be present with us when the church gathers. That's why we worship in reverence and awe, because God's here in a way that he's not here at other times. God's omnipresent, but when his church gathers, whether it's our church or the church down the road that's a true church, God shows up in a special way. And that's a bit terrifying when we really consider what it means. That when we come here, we are entering into his courts. We are entering into his gates. And we now, as those justified in Christ, have access to the throne of grace. We have access to the Father God. And quite frankly, If you're not worshiping God in his church, in this life, if you've said, I don't need to go to church, that's no big deal to me, you're not going to do it in heaven. If you've refused the invitation to the feast, the Thanksgiving feast here, the feast is not open to you in heaven. This is a microcosm of what's going on in heaven the gathered redeemed of God are meeting with God in these places of worship all over the world today and tomorrow and however the time zones work, but wherever we're at If we refuse the invitation to come and meet with God, to enter his courts, to enter his gates, it demonstrates that our hearts are not fixed on godly things and on the eternal life in Jesus Christ. Think about it this way. If you're the person you look up to the most, whether it's a family member or a president, a historian, let's say this. Let's say somehow the apostle Paul jumped into our day. He just showed up in a time machine. And I sent out the email and said, guys, Paul the apostle will be here Sunday to preach. Who's going to miss that service? Right? Yet, God's here every week. God's here every week and so often our hearts are so turned to idolatry that we refuse the invitation of God to meet with him specially. Now, This is why we enter his courts. We enter his courts in order to give thanks. Thanksgiving fills our hearts, the expression of gratitude. Here you have the opportunity to thank God for all that he has done, all that he has provided for you. And it's this act of offering that worship publicly that's in view here in the psalm. Recall the four commands that we saw earlier, shout, sing, serve, and know. Underlying all of that action is an attitude of thankfulness that flows out in public acts of worship. we publicly come together and confess our thanks to him. Anybody can kind of say, yeah, I'm a Christian and I believe in God, but when you're in the assembly, you're called to account. You're going to be worshiping God publicly and everybody's going to be hearing that. You can't kind of hide and hope one day, well, I was a secret Christian, God. I was kind of hiding out in the closet. Here, here in the church, now you've been marked You've been marked by the world, you've been marked by the people here in the church. Now you can't get away from it. Now you're either a witness for Christ or you apostatize and walk away. And so when we enter his courts with praise, when we come into his courts with thanksgiving, these songs of praise, these songs of adoration, these songs of thanksgiving are all directed at God in the public proclamation of his glory. And I like what Isaac Watts said. He said, let those refuse to sing who never knew our God, but favorites of the heavenly king must speak his praise abroad. In other words, Watts is saying, if you cannot come together and sing praise to God, it's demonstrating something about your heart. We are called, and there's something in us, burning in us, that desires to glorify and praise God for who He is and what He's done. Give thanks to Him, he says, bless His name. Again, we're still in the imperative, commands that we have to do. And you recognize, giving thanks and blessing His name is the most natural thing that the one born of God can do. We don't have to be schooled in this, really. Every fiber of our being, as those who are made in the image of God, we were created in order to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That is the chief end of man. And just because sin came in and dampened the design, when God comes and regenerates us, He breaks apart that hold of sin, and we are set free once again to pursue that for which we were made. to worship God. True worship, I think, is necessarily filled with thanksgiving because we can't help it. We can't help but be thankful for what God has done. We must shout joyfully, we must serve with our whole lives, we must sing, and we must know, and we must know more and more and more as we grow in the Christian faith. Verse five, why do we give thanks? There's three reasons here. The Lord's goodness, the Lord's loving kindness, and the Lord's faithfulness. First notice this in verse five, for the Lord is good. Every, as James tells us, every good thing given, and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow." Now, this is one of these all-encompassing statements. Every good thing given and every perfect gift comes to you from God. You didn't earn it. You didn't make it. You didn't just struggle real hard and get it. All of it, every good thing you know, every good thing you have, every good thing you've ever experienced in your life, all of it came as a gift from the good God. Start from the very beginning to the very end. All of it. Now this is where humility has to jump in here because sometimes we tend to forget this and we start murmuring about the manna. And the reason that we do this is because we forget what we deserve. If God was just just and not good and merciful, all of us being conceived in sin justly should have been immediately thrown into eternal hell. Everything that we get good after that comes by virtue of the mercy and grace of God and not doing what justice required. So every good thing certainly came as a gift from God. Another Puritan, Richard Sibbes, said, whatever our condition be, let us never limit God. God's people should never be better. The times were never worse. Where we be bad, God is good. Times are bad, God is good, and he can alter it all. When there is no hope of escaping, no likely issue, God can make it good. And God does make it good for all those who love him and who are called according to his purposes. God is good. and only he is good, and therefore every good thing comes from God, and therefore our response is thanksgiving. It's gratitude in the recognition that we would have, you would have nothing good in your life had God not given it to you. Secondly, his loving kindness is everlasting. His love for us never fails. And loving kindness speaks of His love moving out in action. His loving kindness is everlasting. It'll never cease. We just saw this in Romans where Paul says, but in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. Through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. His acts of kindness towards us will never fail. They'll never cease because we're found in Christ. God acts Love towards his people. He acts in regard to his love for his people and Therefore everything God does for you is a good thing It's a good thing. Even your worst trial is a good thing from God You notice here the difference between God and people, and this is where we have to be really sure that we don't take our conception of love that we receive from people and transfer it to God. God's love is everlasting, therefore it means it's unchangeable, because God is unchangeable. Just as the hymn goes, my love is oft times low, My joy still ebbs and flows, but peace within remains the same. Why? No change, Jehovah knows. Because God doesn't change. He goes on, I change, He changes not. The Christ can never die. His love not mine the resting place, His truth not mine the tie. Finally, last thing here, not only is his loving kindness everlasting, so is his faithfulness. We sang about this this morning. God always keeps his word. God always keeps his promises. God always does exactly as he says he will do, and he never fails to do it. Therefore, as you sit here this morning, know that God is faithful. know that everything I've told you here from his word is true as it is tested against his word because his word can never change because God never changes and because God never changes we know he is faithful to do exactly as he said he will do Spurgeon said no fickle being is he speaking of God promising and forgetting. He has entered into covenant with his people and he will never revoke it, nor alter the thing that has gone out from his lips. He says, as our fathers found him faithful, so will our sons, and so will their seed forever. A changeable God, he writes, would be a terror to the righteous. They would have no sure anchorage, and amid a changing world, they would be driven to and fro in perpetual fear of shipwreck. But our God changes not, and our God is faithful. And for that God, we are thankful. for that God we have joy and gratitude, we shout, we serve with gladness, we sing for joy because we know God. We know Him as He has revealed Himself to us, and we're thankful for who He is and what He has done, and that drives us to praise. And you see in the end here, the privilege we have, the immense privilege we have to enter His gates, to come into His courts, to be in His presence, and may we not neglect the call to heartfelt worship. May we not neglect it to be informed by a mind that is fixed upon the truths of God and that flows out then as we gather and give him praise.