The sermon you are about to hear was recorded at Grace Baptist Church, Cape Coral, Florida. For additional sermons and more information, visit our website at truegraceofgod.org. C.S. Lewis is best known today for his books in the Chronicles of Narnia. Some of those have been made into motion pictures that many of you probably have seen. If you've not seen, you've probably at least heard of them, so I would be surprised if most of us here had never heard of the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. Or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I think there's another one, maybe Prince Caspian or something that's due to release soon. And if you don't know about it, just listen to the young people and they will tell you about these movies. Because Lewis was a brilliant storyteller and he used stories to communicate truths from scripture and Christian worldviews. Lewis was more than a storyteller, however. He was also a very considerable Christian apologist. That is, he defended the Christian faith against those that would seek to reject it. One of his books called Miracles is a very persuasive argument against naturalism, showing that the world in which we live screams out supernatural, screams out that there is a creator. But Lewis didn't become a Christian easily. or quickly. He was 29 years old before he finally became a follower of Jesus Christ. And one of the things that was a real barrier for him, one of the things that was the hardest for him to overcome is when he read the Bible, especially the book of Psalms, he kept seeing this call to worship God and to praise God. And he was put off by that. He writes in a book entitled Reflection on the Psalms about his thinking prior to being a Christian. He said that all of this constant call for praising God struck him like a being who craves our worship as if he were a vain woman who wants compliments. So that's what God seemed like to him, and he was repulsed by that picture. When you stop and think about it, he had a point, right? What do we make? of all of the teachings in the Bible, all of the calls in the Bible to worship God, to focus on God, to make much of God, to honor God, to praise God. I mean, should we just kind of ignore those statements or should we somehow try to downplay them and not make too big a deal out of them because it seems like just an egomaniac's plea to be noticed? Or should we try to take them seriously and to follow the actual instructions and commandments that are included in them? Well, of course, you know the answer in this church, right? I mean, we believe the Bible. We're pretty committed to the Bible. We're determined that whatever the Bible teaches, we want to believe wherever it leads us, we want to go. So we are duty bound, we're pre committed to try to understand and make sense of these repeated calls that God gives us in scripture to worship him, to praise him, to honor him, to acknowledge him as God. Well, as I mentioned earlier before we entered into our time of worship, today is day five of our 40 days of praise. We began it on February 29th, leap day, and it ends April 8th. Forty days between last Wednesday and Sunday, April the 8th, that 40-day period, we are asking as a church for everyone to enter into a season of focused praise, celebrating God's grace. And if you can do this at eight o'clock every evening, we're asking folks to specifically set aside time wherever you are, with whoever you're with, and just praise God for the thing that we've allocated that day to take note of. There's a calendar in the back. If you don't have one, it's a little rolled up scroll. Take it. It will guide you through how we as a congregation are working through, walking through these next several weeks together to praise God. Well, in order to do that, to help us along that pathway to praise God rightly, appropriately, we're setting aside the study of Exodus just temporarily for a few weeks and going to focus upon some of those themes. And this morning specifically, I want us to focus on a call to praise God that's found in Psalm 117, Psalm 117. It is the shortest chapter in the Bible. It's found almost directly in the middle of your Bible, so if you open up your Bible directly in the middle, you would come very close to Psalm 117. If you're using one of the Bibles provided for you, it's on page 511. Spurgeon says of this psalm that though it is little in its letter, it is exceedingly large in its spirit. We don't know anything about the context out of which it was written. Evidently, it was used in conjunction with other psalms to begin other psalms or to conclude other psalms. But in the two brief verses that we find in it, we have a wonderful call to praise God. So follow along as I read this brief psalm for our text and our study this morning, Psalm 117. The psalmist writes. Praise the Lord, all nations, extol him, all peoples, for great is his steadfast love toward us and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord. Praising God is both the duty and the delight of all who know him. If you know God, it's your responsibility to praise God, as we will see, even if you don't know God. It's your responsibility to praise him. But if you know God, your praise will arise out of a sense of delight and wonder in God. And that also in the wisdom of God is our duty. We have the responsibility. We have the privilege of praising this incredible being who has saved us through his son, the Lord Jesus. I want to look at this psalm with you this morning by focusing on three lessons that it teaches us about our responsibility to live lives that continuously praise the Lord. The psalm helps us first to understand our duty in praising God. And then it also helps us to recognize the nature of the praise that we are to offer to the Lord. And then there are two amazing reasons given to us in the last verse, verse two. for praising the Lord. So let's look at these lessons as they are found in our text. The first is this, the duty of praise. Everyone is obligated to praise the Lord. The psalm begins, praise the Lord, and it ends, praise the Lord. There's a call to praise that introduces and concludes this particular psalm. And that's fitting because all of our lives from beginning to end are to be lives of praise. But notice specifically what is said here about the one whom we are called to praise. He is the Lord. And if you look in your English Bibles, the word Lord, the name is written in all capital letters. And that's a signal to us that in the language that the Old Testament was originally written in, in the Hebrew language, that is the name of God, Yahweh. It is the covenant name of God. This is the name by which he revealed himself to Moses. This is the name that he used to underscore the promises that he made to his people in the Old Testament to be their God and to assure them that they would always be his people. This is the name which, if we were to translate it literally, means I am that I am. It's a name that tells us God is self-existent, eternal. Unending, he doesn't need anything. He is the source of all things. The call to praise this great God extends to all people. You see, it's universal. He says all nations, nations. This is a word that was used by the Jews to describe anybody who wasn't a Jew. This is sometimes translated, and maybe in the Bible you're using, it might say Gentiles. If you weren't a Jew in the Jewish mind, then you were a Gentile. It didn't matter who you were. You were a pagan. And so when this particular word is used, the call is extended out to all the people in the world, all pagans. This would have included the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Philistines. People who historically were the enemies of the Jews that they were radically opposed to. But here in the word of God, they are included in the call to praise God, all nations and then all peoples. A little different word is used there to indicate all collections or gatherings of people, whoever, wherever they might be found. Both of these phrases. Praise the Lord, all nations, all peoples. Both of those phrases are used to describe the universality of this call and the inclusiveness of it. Nobody escapes the duty to praise God. If you're breathing, God calls you to praise Him. If you're born in this country or another country, if you live where the gospel is well known or the gospel has never been known, you are obligated by virtue of the fact that you've been created by God. to praise Him. He calls you to praise Him. God chose the Old Testament Jews to be His covenanted people. He gave them His law. He gave them His promises. He gave them incredible provisions for their maintenance so that they would be sustained over thousands of years. But when God chose Abraham to create the Jewish people, It was never his intention that his grace and mercy should be limited only to Jews. It was never his intention to restrict his saving purposes to one nation. Listen to Genesis 26.4 as it reiterates what God said repeatedly to Abraham about the universal scope of his saving purposes. He writes this in Genesis 26, for he says to Abraham, Moses writes it down for us. I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands. And in your offspring, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. He says to Abraham in your offspring, through your offspring, all the nations of the world will be blessed. Well, who is his offspring? Who is he talking about here? Well, the Apostle Paul gives us the answer to that. He very clearly writes in Galatians 316, citing this specific reference. Now, the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. And Paul goes on to say it does not say and to his offspring's plural. As if there were many, but referring to one and to your offspring singular And Paul says, who is Christ? Jesus Christ came from Abraham, he is the offspring of whom God made mention, referred to in his promise to Abraham, that through his offspring, all the nations of the world would be blessed. God's always intended for his. Good news of salvation to extend beyond the borders of any single nation. To understand more of how this works, read what Paul says when he cites Psalm 17-1 in Romans chapter 15. Let me read to you Romans chapter 15, beginning in verse 8. Paul says, For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised. That's the Jews. to show God's truthfulness in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs. He's going to have an offspring that will be the Messiah, that will be the savior of the world. That's the promise given to Abraham. Paul says Jesus was born a Jew to fulfill that promise. But then in verse nine of Romans 15, he says, and he was born in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. as it is written, and he starts citing Old Testament passages, Psalm 18, Deuteronomy 32. He says, therefore, this is written in the Old Testament, I will praise you among the Gentiles and sing your name. And again, it is said, rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people. And then in verse 11, he quotes Psalm 117, verse 1, our text this morning. And he says, and again, he says, praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let the peoples extol him. Paul, citing Psalm 117, says that in Christ, the command is being obeyed, the promise is being kept. Gentiles are coming to Christ, coming to know God through Jesus Christ. This was always God's intention. It was always his saving purpose. There is only one God. And the only way people will ever know this one God is through Jesus Christ, whether Jew, Gentile, American, Slavic, German, whatever. The only way you will come to know this one God is through his son, Jesus Christ. That's the way God has designed it. He calls upon all the people of the earth to praise him, which necessarily then means that he calls upon all the people of the earth to come to know him through his son, Jesus Christ. The saving work that Christ accomplished in his life and death and resurrection has been designed by God to be declared promiscuously to the whole world so that all the nations might enter into his praise. through faith in Christ. This is why when Jesus came into the world, he was recognized by the disciples, by those who came to know him as, as John puts it in 1 John 4, 14, the Savior of the world. It's why John writes what he does in 1 John 2, that Jesus is the propitiation for our sins, that is the one who takes our sins away and absorbs God's wrath against our sins. But then he adds, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. For all the peoples of the world, all the groups, all the nations of the world, God has always had a worldwide perspective. For the saving work of his son. It's why we read in Revelation chapter five, the glimpses that are given to us into heaven of the 24 elders, they're representing all of God's people throughout all of history, constantly singing the worthiness of Jesus, the Lamb of God who has been slain. And they sing this to him, for you were slain and by your blood, you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. God calls all the peoples to praise him because he sent Jesus into the world to shed his blood for people from all of the people groups and nations of the world. Brothers and sisters, this is why sometimes we describe our efforts at evangelism to persuade people to trust Jesus Christ. Sometimes we just in shorthand describe it as recruiting for the choir. We're recruiting people to sing the praises of God. How will they do that? Through faith in Christ. How will they come to know God? By bowing before Jesus Christ and being reconciled on the basis of his life, his death, his resurrection to the God who sent him into the world to seek and to save people who are lost. When someone comes to faith in Christ, another choir member is added. Another voice is added to the praise that will redound throughout eternity to sing God's greatness. If you've never offered up praise to God, it's because you have never trusted Jesus Christ as Lord. And if you're not trusting Christ as Lord, you need to understand that God commands you, that God created you, calls you, it's your duty to praise him, to praise him. And you can't praise him outside of Christ. And so what you need more than anything else is to turn from the way you've been living and to offer yourself wholeheartedly to Christ to receive from him forgiveness of sins and new life to be reconciled to God so that you can comply with what your creator before whom one day you will stand to give an account. Commands you to give to him. The duty to praise God. is universal. And because that is true, it's vitally important that we also then understand, secondly, what this song teaches us about the nature of praise. Everybody's obligated to praise God. What exactly does that mean? The duty to praise God is universal. The nature of praising God is delight. It springs from delight. It's the expression, the inevitable expression of delight. There are two words that are used in our text in verse one that underscore this. The first is praise the Lord and the second one is extol him. The word praise the Lord is the word, the Hebrew word. It just comes over into our English vocabulary. It's been transliterated. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. That's exactly what that means. It's the first and last phrase of this whole psalm. The word simply means to boast. To rave about something you can praise things beyond the Lord, but when Hallelu is added to Yah, then it is praise Yahweh, celebrate Yahweh. Declare the greatness of Yahweh. But then the psalm adds, extol him, that's a different word. Which means to commend something, to recognize and describe it as the very best, and to do so especially with great expression. So if you're doing it verbally, to do it with a loud voice would be to extol. Now, we all know what it means to praise because we all do it in one way or another. Nobody lives without praise. Everybody gets excited about something and declares their excitement, whether it's over experiences, possessions, relationships, people, accomplishments. We all find it easy to talk about something in very positive ways. Just listen. That movie was incredible. The cinematography was breathtaking. The actors portrayed the characters at such multifaceted levels that it just drew you in. The plot was intriguing. People talk about movies they like in ways that praise the movies. Our sports teams, our plays and sporting events. Did you see that? Can you believe how he did that? I don't know how humanly possible it was he was able to do it. It was incredible. He flew over that guy. Guy came in to tackle him and he was grabbing midair and the ball carriers in the end zone. Did you see that? It's amazing. Relationships. You've got to meet my fiance. She's everything I've ever dreamed of. She's beautiful. She's godly. She's smart. She's funny. Just get someone freshly engaged to talk about their fiance and you'll get what the Bible means about praise. All of these and others could be cited as examples of what the Bible calls us to give to God. We praise someone, we celebrate something, we commend someone or boast about something when we find joy in it. The root or the source of praise that I want to think with you about this morning is vitally important for us to understand. If we're going to not fall into the trap that C.S. Lewis fell into that kept him from becoming a Christian for so many years, then we need to understand how praise originates and what praise constitutes, what its beginning points are and what it actually consummates and completes, because praise arises from delight. If we fail to see this, then like C.S. Lewis in his early years, we can look at all the commands to praise God and think, man, he's just an egomaniac. He's like the guys we all know, right, who just turn the conversation back to themselves, no matter what the subject is, who just want to be talked about, want to be acknowledged by others because of some kind of imbalanced egocentricity. Well, that's not God. And it's not God because of the nature of praise. The root of praise is delight. We praise what we enjoy. You cannot praise that which you do not delight in. If you do, it's inauthentic. If you praise something you really don't delight in, you know what that is? That's flattery. You're a sycophant. And sometimes people surround themselves with those, yes, people, yes, man, who always, oh, what you did is, oh, that's great. I get everything you've done. And it's just vain flattery. That's not what God calls for. He's not telling us just to express things with our lips, just to let words flow out of our mouths without meaning. No, the praise that God calls for springs from our affections. You don't offer it to him. You don't praise him unless it flows out of a heart that is delighted in him. A heart that has come to see something, come to taste something, come to experience realities in God that you can't help but express. Praise is rooted in delight. And the praise of God flows from the light in God. We can't help but praise that which we enjoy. You want to get a picture of this, just get around some new parents and ask them about their baby. Oh, he's wonderful. He smiled the other day. It was incredible. They'll take 10 minutes to describe a two second smile. Right. Why? Because their hearts are overwhelmed with the light in this new baby. Praise arises from the light. That's simply the nature of praise. When C.S. Lewis came to understand this, it caused him to see the biblical commands to praise God, to worship God in a completely different light. Listen to what he wrote about it. It's insightful and it's what we must come to see and understand as well. He writes this, the most obvious fact about praise, whether of God or anything, strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise, he writes. lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite gang, praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I have not noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced and capacious minds praised most while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. All praise. All enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. You see what this means. If that's true, that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise, all praise is rooted in The light, what that means is the call to praise God. Is inherently a call to delight in God. God's not commanding us to just verbally say words. To go through motions, to flatter, God is calling us to express that which is in our hearts, and so the call to praise him includes a call. To be delighted in him. To enjoy him, to find in him something worth exclaiming, something worth extolling, something worth celebrating. The shorter catechism in its very first question captures this reality, this truth very well. The question is asked, what is the chief end of man? You remember the answer? To glorify God and enjoy him forever. It's one end, however, not two. It's not two things. It's one thing. Glorify God and enjoy him forever. It's two sides of one coin. Piper rightly, John Piper rightly takes this and he says to glorify God by enjoying him forever, because it's when we enjoy God that we will glorify him. It's when we delight in God, we will praise Him. We can't help but praise Him when we come to taste and see that He's good. We come to experience the riches of His grace in our lives. The reason we don't praise God quite honestly is because we don't enjoy Him. It's an indictment, but it's a reality. And the scripture is set before us this morning to help us evaluate our lives in the light of the command to see the call to praise God and understand the nature of that praise and to recognize if we are not fulfilling the responsibility, it's not because God's not praiseworthy. And it's not because we're just having an off day. It's because we're not enjoying God. Something's captured our affections more than God. Maybe it's the ballgame yesterday. Maybe it's the opportunity this week, whatever that thing is that just naturally, spontaneously flows out of you to extol, to proclaim. Glorifying God and enjoying him are not two things. But one thing again, listen to C.S. Lewis. Lewis says, I had not noticed either that either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it. Listen, it's like this. Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that's magnificent? The psalmists, in telling everyone to praise God, are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely valuable God, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help but doing about everything else we value. And then he writes this. This is a brilliant sentence. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. It is it's appointed consummation. Praise not only expresses our enjoyment, it completes and consummates our enjoyment. So you can't really praise God without enjoying God. And when you enjoy God, you can't help but praise him. The connection between praise and delight reveals something about us. Our praise of God is a barometer of our delight in God. Do you see this? Where praise of God is lacking, the problem isn't the music or the lights. The problem is that there's no enjoyment of God. It's a heart problem. If we want to make God's praise glorious, what do we do? We don't manufacture things to manipulate a mood. If we want to make God's praise glorious, brothers and sisters, we have got to go deep. We got to go hard after this privilege, this responsibility to know God. to do what the Bible commands and offers us to taste and see that he's good, to become overwhelmed at his grace, at his mercy. Where you find people like that, you can be sure you will witness praise. It'll happen without any manipulation, without any kind of emotional efforts to try to trick people. It will arise spontaneously from hearts that are inflamed with love for God. Wherever evangelistic impulse is weak. It's because we're not enjoying God as we all because we're not commending him, we don't find him worthy of commendation. If praise of God is anemic, it's because the light in God is inadequate. The connection between our affections toward God and praise of God is what caused Jonathan Edwards, the greatest mind the American nation has ever produced in the 18th century, in the midst of the Great Awakening, as he was a pastor in New England, to, in his book Religious Affections, write about his understanding of his duty as a pastor. Listen to what he says. I should think myself in the way of my duty. This is my responsibility to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can. It sounds almost scary, doesn't it? Edwards? I mean, don't you have some suspicions about preachers like that? What would you think about somebody who stood up and said, I'm here this morning and my job is to cause your emotions to go as high as possible. I mean, I think I would hear 200 guardrails going up. I'm not going to be manipulated by this guy. But this is John Edwards. He said, I would think myself in the way of duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided. This is what keeps us from having to put guardrails up, provided they are affected with nothing but the truth. Truth. Not lights. Not mood music. Not emotional stories, but truth. To see it, to understand it, to recognize this, this is real. God really did this. God really is this way. The Bible teaches us this. To see that, to lay hold of that, is to have your emotions soar. Sometimes young preachers will Tell me, because they've been raised in emotionally manipulative environments. They'll talk about services or conferences they've been to. And I remember one in particular says, man, it was great. There was no emotions whatsoever. As if he's saying something good. It's not biblical if there's no emotions. See, emotional ism is deadly. That's where emotions at any cost in any way are the focus. And you just try to manipulate and do whatever you got to do to get people jacked up emotionally. That's deadly. But the raising of our affections as high as possible, according to the truth, that's biblical. We ought to be praising God with everything we are, all that we have, because we see something, we delight in the reality of God. Well, this leads to the third thing I want to show you from this text. And the duty of praise is universal. The nature of praise is that it's an expression of delight. Thirdly, I want you to see in the second verse the reason for praise. Why? Praise God. Because God is infinitely delightful and therefore infinitely praise worthy. There are two reasons given to us in this second verse for praising God. For great is His steadfast love toward us. And the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. The first reason is God's covenant love. Great is his steadfast love for us, his merciful kindness toward us. Some of you will be familiar with the Hebrew word that this phrase merciful kindness or loving kindness translate. It's the word hesed or hesed if you want it to be more technical. And sometimes we just use it in English to describe the nature of God's covenanted commitment, his love for his covenant people, the words used over 250 times in the Old Testament, over 100 times in the Book of Psalms. It is the exclusive kind of love that he has for the people whom he has chosen, Abraham and his offspring, those who, like Abraham, are trusting in him. It's the unique kind of relationship, the unique special saving kind of love that God has with His people. And here, the psalmist says, praise the Lord because of that love. If you know this love, then you ought to respond in praising God. Your life ought to overflow with a sense of wonder and joy, extolling Him, declaring His greatness, commending Him to others, because you have come to know God. His covenant love. It's his determination to bless his people. It's his provisions of our salvation and our welfare for this world and the world to come. This is the love that is put on display. When God sent his son into the world. This is what the Bible means when it says God so loved the world. That he gave his only begotten son. This is the love that John speaks of in first John 14 here in his love, not that we've loved God, but that he loved us. And sent his son to be the propitiation, the atonement, the sin bearer. For our sins. It's the love that we see in Calvary, the love that led Jesus to the cross, the love that kept him from calling angels to rescue him, the love that subjected himself willingly, subjecting himself to creatures. in order to bring about the saving purposes of God, where God's love and mercy and grace would be magnified to rebels like you and me. It's His covenant love. If you want to know the measure and character of God's love for us, then, brothers and sisters, all you have to do is stop and meditate on, reflect on what was going on at the cross. What did God do on the cross? He gave up his son to ransom us, to purchase us on the cross, the son of his love, father, son, spirit, one God from all of eternity in a perfect loving relationship. The father sends his son, the son volunteers to go to rescue people like us. It ought to blow us away. I mean, it ought to just just make us stay up at night in wonder. We've been loved like this. Listen to Paul in Romans chapter five, he says, while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Brothers and sisters, we've been loved with an infinite love. The Bible tells us that in love he predestined us, that is, Before the world was ever created, God loved us. If you're in Christ, you're trusting Christ, you need to stop and think about this periodically. Before God spoke the world into existence, he loved you. He determined to have you. He determined before creation to send his son into the world to rescue you, to ransom you, to do everything necessary in order to bring you into a right relationship with him. He determined to give up his son to live the life you can't live, to die the death you deserve to die, and then to raise him from the dead, conquering sin and death and hell and this world in order that you might be his child forever. That is the kind of love that the psalmist says we are to extol. We're to praise God for this because he is a God of covenant love. But he goes on and he says we're to praise him for his. Unending faithfulness, his faithfulness that looks upon creatures of his love. And determines to have them for himself, and he doesn't reject us. I mean, he looks at us in our brokenness. He looks at us in our failures. And rather than holding us at arm's length, He comes and He embraces us in our brokenness and failures. He absorbs our brokenness and our failures. And He completely remedies those failures and our brokenness by what He's accomplished. And He does it without violating His character at all. He's faithful. He does what he says he will do. He's trustworthy. He's consistent and loyal to himself and to his word. Think about the faithfulness of God and what this means. Has God promised it? That he will do it. Has God promised to complete the work that he's begun in you on the day of Christ Jesus? He has. Then, brothers and sisters, take heart, you're going to be saved. You're going to make it to heaven. Why? Because you're so strong? No, because God promises, having begun it, he's going to complete it. Has he promised never to leave you or forsake you? He has. Well, then, can you ever be alone? You sometimes might feel alone, but when those moments come, your feelings need to be trumped by your faith in the promises of the faithful God. Knowing. He said it. He will do it. Has he promised never to turn away any who come to him? Absolutely, he has. Then why do you hesitate coming to him? What is it? Well, I failed again. My sins so great. I got to get better. I got to clean up my act. All who come to him, he will in no wise cast away. Come to him in your brokenness, come to him in your sinfulness, come to him in your failures and acknowledge what you are before him, but come to him because he promises whoever comes to me, I'll never cast away. He's faithful. Has he promised to give rest to those who are weary and weighed down with heavy burdens? He has, hasn't he? Then why are you here this morning weighed down by heavy burdens? Why do we live like that? Why do we let things captivate our minds and our imaginations and repress us and hold us back and keep us from venturing out into a life of faith? Our God is faithful and he's promised if we come to him that he will give us rest. Some of you here at the breaking point and you wonder if you're ever going to have rest. Jesus promises to give rest. Come to him. He's faithful. Has he promised to cleanse and forgive all who confess their sins to him? Yes, he has. Then why are you here this morning trying to manage your sin? Why are you sitting here this morning thinking, I hope nobody finds out about this, I hope I can somehow rework my life, reorganize things so that this sin is not as big a problem as it's been. Why are you sitting there thinking I can't come to Christ because I'm too sinful? Your God is faithful. He's faith. If you confess your sins, he's faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness, come to him, confess your sins to him. Some of you hold back and you refuse to name Christ as your savior. You refuse to declare yourself a disciple of the Lord Jesus. If you strip it away, the reason is because you doubt his faithfulness. You doubt what the Bible assures you of. Time after time after time. And the scripture says, praise the Lord, because his faithfulness endures forever. Has he promised to work all things together for the good of those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose? He has. Therefore, brothers and sisters. We don't have to fret and worry over those things beyond our control. We don't have to look at tragedy. Evil. Brokenness. Difficulties that just leave a wake of shattered dreams and think. There's no purpose, no use in this life is over, you don't have to believe that you don't have to live that way. Even in the failures of your own making. This promise is true. You love the Lord, you're called according to his purpose. He promises this is going to work out for your good because he's going to do it. To know God in this way, to live by faith in the faithfulness of God is to enter into a life that sets you free to praise the Lord no matter what your circumstances are, because you're not dependent upon things being just right before your spirit can soar. You're not subject to changing circumstances to bring you down in the pits and have to struggle and live there because your affections, your emotions are hitched to the covenant-making, covenant-keeping, faithful God. This is what the psalmist calls to our attention. This is how he calls us to live. of a Christian should be a life of praise, praise that is regularly offered up to God, which means that it is a life that should also be grounded in joy. A life that is delighting in God and spontaneously overflowing in praise to God. A life that is growing more and more in the awareness of all that God's done for us in Christ and absorbing that and having that affect us emotionally and intellectually and volitionally so that we become a walking, breathing billboard. To the faithfulness and the loving kindness of our God. How do we get there? How do we grow in this? Again, it's not by external manipulation, not by trying to pump up things outside of ourselves, but rather it comes by knowing Jesus Christ. And finding in Christ everything that the Bible reveals to us about God. Finding in Christ that we have a strong savior. A lover. Of our soul. The greatest treasure. That a. Frail, limited human being could ever embrace. If we sincerely enter into a life of praise, it will be because we sincerely go deeper into a life of joy. joy in knowing Christ, and as we know him and know his love, we will enjoy him. And as we will, as we enjoy him, we will inevitably praise him. And as we praise him, we will inevitably commend him and make his praise known to the ends of the world. Brothers and sisters, we ought to be able to we ought to be celebrating God's grace all the time. We shouldn't have 40 days of praise. We should have a lifetime of praise. Our lives should be characterized by praise. I know there's some of you here this morning and you can't enter into this, you can't praise the Lord because you don't know the Lord. And what a tragedy that is to not know the God who made you. to not be reconciled to Him, to not be able to go to bed tonight, pillow your head when nobody else is knowing what's going on inside of your mind, and to be able to breathe deeply and to know love and acceptance from your Creator. It's available to you. God sent His Son to rescue people like you. And the promise of the Bible is for you, that if you turn from your sin, confess your sin to God, trust Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. then you will be reconciled to God and you will know new life in Christ and you will be set free to live a life of praise. Our desire for you, the reason that we are here this morning in large part as a church, the reason we exist in large part is to declare the praises of God to people like you who don't yet know God. We want you to know Him. And we want to help you in any way that we can. We're not going to manipulate you. We don't believe that that's God honoring is not good for you, it doesn't work. We want you to taste and see that God is good. We want you to come to Christ. To experience forgiveness of your sins, to experience new life in him. We'd be delighted to spend time with you, pray with you, read scripture with you, help you in any way to address these eternal truths from God's word as they speak to your life right now. Let's pray. Our Father, we bow to you, we acknowledge that you are God and good and you deserve to be praised. We ought to sing praises to you wholeheartedly. We ought to offer up our lives to you without reservation because of what you've done for us in Christ and Lord, we admit that our lack of praise is an indictment on the smallness of our joy in You. God, please, please work in us so that we might see You as You are by faith. enter in to the joy that our Lord has secured for us by his life death resurrection. Please help us, even as we close out the service this morning, please help us to extol you for your faithfulness, to praise you for your covenant love. And call others who are strangers to your grace today, call them to turn from sin and trust the Lord Jesus. We pray in his name.