Now please, we'll turn to the psalm for tonight, Psalm 113. Psalm 113. Please follow in your Bibles and I'll read the entire psalm, which is not a big psalm, but I believe packed with much that is helpful to us and exalting to God. Psalm 113. Let's hear God's holy word. Praise the Lord. Praise, O servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. from the rising of the sun to its going down. The name, the Lord's name, is to be praised. The Lord is high above all nations, his glory above the heavens. Who is like the Lord our God who dwells on high, who humbles himself to behold the things that are in the heavens and in the earth? He raises the poor out of the dust and lifts the needy out of the ash heap, that he may seat him with princes, with the princes of his people. He grants the barren woman a home like a joyful mother of children. Praise the Lord. Last line is, hallelujah. Praise the Lord. May praise be ascribed to God. Now, please take your Bibles now and turn to Psalm 113. Psalm 113. Now, C. H. Spurgeon said in private conversation, He didn't plaster it all over social media so that people would think well of him, but he said this in private conversation with a man named William Williams, who later, after Spurgeon's death, published it in a book. And this is what Spurgeon said. He said, I think I can say that seldom many minutes elapse without my heart speaking to God in either prayer or praise." So not a lot of time goes by before I talk to God in prayer or praise. Augustine said, man's chief work is the praise of God. Obviously, that's what Spurgeon understood, and that's what he lived. Man's chief work is the praise of God. And that's what the psalmist is saying. And he addresses us and says, praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord. And I wonder if you and I see that. Do we see what Augustine said? Our chief work is the praise of God. Think of all the things that are important to you and that you give yourselves to and ask yourself, do I see my life this way? That it is to be to the praise of God. 1 Peter 2 verse 9 says, but you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people. Now, here's the purpose, that you may proclaim the praise of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light." What's God's purpose? Why did he save you? Well, so that you might proclaim his praises. That's your purpose. That's your chief work as a child of God. Well, how do you praise God? Well, you praise him in all kinds of different ways. You go through the day with a thankful heart. That praises God. As you make your way through the course of a day, you're thankful for manifold manifestations of His goodness. You express your gratefulness to God. You're driving along and you see something or you remember a mercy or you contemplate some kindness of God and you thank Him for it. Maybe you even start singing, but maybe it's a prayer, but somehow You are thanking God for his mercies and you praise him in that way. Your soul is lifted up as you sing these hymns tonight or the hymns of the morning and you find yourself caught up in this and you are singing genuinely and from the heart. You're praising God. You testify to somebody about the goodness of God and his provision. Somebody asks you how you've coped. during these days of crisis and concern, and you express to them, you tell them how God has worked and how he's provided, and you say, well, I'm so thankful for that. You praise God. Somebody comes to you and says, well, this thing you've been going through, this particular affliction that has come your way, they say, well, no, that's been tough, hasn't it? And you say, well, yes, but God is good. Well, you're praising God. You praise God in all kinds of different ways. You think highly of Him. You think of your life and your circumstances and God's dealings with someone like you. And you think very highly of God, and you want others to think highly of Him. You praise Him. And so in all kinds of ways, we praise Him. And the psalmist says, yes, indeed, you should praise God. That's the burden of the psalm, you see. So we begin with this. There's a call to praise, a call to praise. Praise the Lord. Praise, O servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. From the rising of the sun to its going down, the Lord's name is to be praised. What do we learn here? Well, we learn first, praise the Lord. Your focus is to be on him, not on yourself. Your focus is to be on the exaltation of God, not on the praises of men. Somebody has said that we live in what he calls the culture of Narcissus. Well, you know what narcissism is probably. You might know about Narcissus, who was the son of the river god, who was Well, he was supposed to be a character who was remarkably good-looking. And there was a nymph named Echo who was passionately in love with Narcissus. But Narcissus was not in love with her. Narcissus was in love with someone else. Narcissus had caught a glimpse of himself in a river. He had looked down and seen just what a magnificent creature he was, and he fell instantly and completely in love with himself. And so you had two people who were just in tremendous trouble because Echo was in love with him and she could never have him. And he was in love with himself, but whenever he reached out to touch that beautiful face in the river, it disappeared. And so they were both desolate. And so Narcissus is a fitting symbol for the day and age in which we live and the culture in which we inhabit. One writer says, the predominant religion of our Western society is the worship of self. And our society is locked into the same prison of fruitless frustration as narcissists. And I would agree with that except to say perhaps that it's probably true then of every generation. Now, when you're converted, then everything changes. When you're converted, then the whole orientation of your life has changed. When you become a Christian, then your focus now is on God and not on self. Now your heart cry is the praise of God. And so when you read this, this resonates with you. Now, when you're not a Christian, you say, well, I got better things to do than that. But when you're a Christian, well, that resonates, and that stirs you, and you say, yes, indeed, that ought to be my chief occupation. And so here in verse 1, three times, we are called to praise God. The word is hallelujah. Praise the Lord. Hallelujah. And the word halal means to be bright and to shine and to be splendid and to boast. And it carries notions of enthusiasm and exuberance and radiance and jubilation and celebration. This is something that wells up within you. You want to praise God. It is something that is stirring. It is something that excites you. It is something that moves you. You want to praise God. And the praise is focused on God. The natural man tends to exalt himself or other people, but the Christian exalts God. That's the natural response of the believing soul. And praise then is focused on the person of God, the name of God. And by the name, he means the character and the essence of who God is. You want to set God up on a pedestal. And you want everybody to look at him and be amazed at him because you look at him and are amazed by him yourself. And you know that everybody ought to be in that same condition of being intoxicated by God. And he is infinitely worthy of your praise. Now, Matthew Henry makes note of the fact that we are here urged to praise God. And he says, well now, why do we need to be urged to praise God? You'd think that we would not need to be urged to praise God. You'd think that we wouldn't need to be told, you need to praise God. Because after all, we are the people who are blood-bought children of God. We are those who have been to Calvary. We are those who have gazed upon the crucified Christ. We believe in the risen one. We know that he's seated at the right hand of the majesty in heaven. So why should someone have to tell us to praise God when we've been bought with a price, when we've been made aware that we have a heavenly and eternal destiny with God by virtue of the sacrificial work of Christ? You'd think, well, these people will never need to be told to praise God, but the sad reality is that we do. Why is that? Well, we tend to be self-absorbed. Even as believers, we have remaining and indwelling sins, so we tend to be self-absorbed. That's one of the sins that remains in us. We're kind of self-centered. And then we tend to not recognize that all good in our lives comes to us from Him. We tend to think that we've achieved these. We tend to think that we've earned that. We've worked hard for this. But in our heart of hearts, we know, and when we read our Bibles, we're confirmed in this, that every good and perfect gift comes to us from God. So we remember that now. And then also, we tend to see, or rather, we tend not to see that God is just worthy of praise in himself. Not even thinking now about what he's done for us. but thinking about just who he is. God is infinitely worthy of praise just because of who he is. And to the extent that we don't praise him and that praise doesn't well up within us, just because of who God is betrays something of the shallowness of our knowledge of God. You don't know how beautiful the sunset is until you look at it, and that's why you might never speak the worth of that sunset, because you drive...or you have a You have a goal, you have a place to get to, and so you never turn your eye to look at the sunset and you get to where you're going. So you never are conscious of it, and so you never see the wonder of it, and so you never speak the worth of it. And sometimes that's the way it is with God. If we don't speak his worth, if we don't exalt his name, it's because we're not taken up with him. We're not familiar enough with him. We're not intoxicated enough with him. We're distracted by other things, lesser things, and we're more absorbed in the gifts than the giver. So we want to pray that God will help us to be more aware of him, more familiar with him, have a deeper knowledge of him as he's revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures. And when we know him better, we will love him more. And as we love him more, we will praise him more faithfully. That's what we learn here then. Praise the Lord. That's the first injunction. That's what's impressed upon us. Praise the Lord. Well, we also see this. Praise the Lord, everyone. Oh, you servants of the Lord, praise the Lord. You see, you've been chosen to praise the Lord. You've been chosen not just to rescue you from hell and to save you from sin, but you've been chosen to speak the praises of God. So, everyone who's a servant of God should praise Him. Well, you say, Well, that fellow over there, he's got greater privileges in the service of the king than I do. And she has greater gifts that have been granted to her than I have. And they have bigger houses, and they have fewer problems, and they have more friends, and they have what I want, and I have all the stuff that they don't want. So really, I think I'm exempt from praising God maybe the way they would, because frankly, He hasn't been as good to me as He's been to them. Christians can think like that. But if we think like that, then we are looking at our lives with faithless eyes and selfish hearts. Because the fact of the matter is that all the blessings that other people experience, that should move us to praise. If God's been good to other people, if he's showered blessing upon blessing upon them, we should thank God for that. We should praise Him for His mercy to others. And then think of the blessings that He's showered upon you. Perhaps you look at that and you say, well, those blessings are fairly meager. You know, if I compare my blessings to their blessings, these are pretty paltry. But then you remember that you deserve not the least of His blessings. And then you remember that you really deserve hell. And then you remember that there was a rich man and there was Lazarus. And the rich man died and went to hell, and he begged Lazarus for a drop of water. And that was you. I mean, you and I are that man. And our destiny, without grace, without Christ, without salvation, that's where we are. We are in that man's place, and we're begging for a drop of water. And that would be justice. So do I deserve great blessing? No. You know what? I don't even deserve the least of his blessings. I deserve, if we're talking about just desserts now, then I deserve hell. And now I come to my blessings and I look at it in a different way. And I thank God for the least of his blessings. And then you look at verse 2, it says, blessed be the name of the Lord. This word blessed is different than the word praise in verse 1. This has the idea of kneeling and this is the real bending of the knee that's required in this world, where God says, bend the knee and bow before me and acknowledge your sin in my presence. and acknowledge that your just desserts are awful, but I bless you and I shower mercy upon you. That's the kind of bending of the knee that God requires, where we then lift up our soul in thanksgiving and praise to him, because we know we don't deserve anything. We humble ourselves before him, and we thank him for all the manifold blessings that he has showered upon us. all the saints of God. Every one of his children praises him. And humbly, we acknowledge that we deserve nothing, because we say this from our knees. And we're astonished that we should receive anything. And we're amazed that we receive so much. Because the fact of the matter is that God's blessings never are paltry. They're never meager. God is an extravagant God, and He has been extravagant in His dealings with us. So yes, praise the Lord, everyone, every one of His people, every one of His children, every one of His servants. But then, praise the Lord always. Praise the Lord always. Verse two, blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. From the rising of the sun to its going down, the name of the Lord is to be praised. From this time forward. Perhaps we've neglected to praise God before, really. Well, let's begin now. You say to yourself, well, right now. And maybe I've been negligent about this before. that I want to live in such a way as is to the praise of God. And I want to stop being a spoiled brat, and I want to acknowledge that I ought to be thankful for God's mercies to me, because they're abundant and they're gracious. And I want to be a God-worshiping, God-praising servant who acknowledges the daily benefits that the Lord loads upon me. From this time forward, whatever I've done in the past, Lord, let me make a promise to you from this time forward and then forevermore, I always want to praise God. May there never come a day when I stop praising Him. May no day ever dawn wherein the circumstances of it bring to an end the praise that emanates from my soul. No trial will come, and no deprivation will be experienced, and no blessing that God and His wisdom removes from me, no cloud that darkens my horizon will lead to me speaking ill of my Lord. No, forever I'll praise Him. Now, it's easy to say this. This kind of thing preaches. It's more difficult to live it. Is it easy? Will I ever be really tempted to think hard thoughts about God? Well, of course. And we're sinful, and life is hard. But look, this is our determination. and our conviction that we know that there will never come a day wherein we do not have reason to praise God. So from this time forward and forever, let me praise God. And the darkest day, the Lord is with me. The darkest day, he strengthens me. The darkest day, I know it's for my good and for his glory. So even on that day, I praise him. Praise him forevermore. I read an interesting description of eternity, really a description of forevermore. A writer by the name of Hendrik Willem van Loom, he says, high in the north in a land called Scythijd, there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high. And once every thousand years, a little bird comes to this mountain and sharpens its beak. And when the mountain has thus been worn away, a single day of eternity will have passed. eternity and forever. And the fact of the matter is that in eternity, you will never run out of reasons to praise God. For all his personal grandeur and glory, and for all his gracious acts towards you, you will never come to the point in eternity where you have no more reason to praise Him. So how right the psalmist is to say, from this time forth and forever, we praise Him. Praise the Lord always from this time forward and forever and from everywhere. From everywhere, from the rising of the sun to the setting of it. Now this may be Praise Him the whole day, you know, from when the sun rises to when the sun sets. So the whole day you should be praising the Lord and conscious of your need to praise Him. But it may also be from the east to the west, and probably both. But let's think about the latter for a minute, and the fact that then everybody should praise the Lord everywhere. So what we have here, then, is an exhortation that we should praise the Lord. If you go over to Psalm 117, and there you have an exhortation to all the peoples of the world. Psalm 117, verse 1, praise the Lord, all you Gentiles. Lord Him, all you peoples. Now, the people of God and Israel, oh, they should praise God, but we can't limit it to that. God is too big. And so, no, all the Gentiles, that's everybody else, and all the nations of the world, they should all praise God. And so, does this happen? Well, we know well that it doesn't, but we pray that it might. Let all the nations praise God." And they don't. So let's go and tell them about Christ so that they might be saved, so that they might be moved to praise God, because all the nations ought to praise God. John Piper writes somewhere that missions exist because praise does not. There's wisdom in that. Everybody should praise God. God deserves to be praised. He ought to be praised. be praised, but it doesn't happen. So people need to be saved so that they might praise Him because He deserves to be praised. So we need to go and we need to give them the gospel and pray that God might use it to save them so that they might know Christ, so that they might praise God because that's what they should do, because He deserves it. That's the great motive of missions, you see. It's not just the saving of people, although, well, that's a genuine and a righteous motivation. The great motivation is the fact that God deserves to be praised and our work is to praise God so they need to be saved so that they might fulfill the purpose for which they exist, which is to praise God. You see, we have a much bigger concern than people who want to rid the world of racism. We have a much grander goal than that. We have a massive goal, a God-given concern and agenda. We want a human race that lives in harmony, not just a human race that lives in harmony. That's not an end in itself. We want, because God tells us this is what we should want, we want a human race that lives in harmony before God, as the blood-bought children of God, as part of the new human race. God's new society. That's what we're after. That's what we work towards. That's what we're praying about. That's why we give money. I mean, that's how important these offerings are, because we're giving money to that. Because we're concerned to see one day what Revelation 7 talks about men and women from every tongue and tribe and nation and kindred, and they're all gathered as one around the throne, the blood-bought children of the living God. That's what we're working towards. That's what matters. So there's a call to praise, isn't there? Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, everyone, always and everywhere. Now, secondly, the second major section is reasons to praise. There's a call to praise, and then there are reasons to praise. There are a multitude of reasons to praise, but the psalm tells us about two, and so that's what we'll focus on. The first reason is because he's so high. He prays God because he's so high. So really, these two have to do with who he is and what he does. And the first is who he is. He prays God because he's so high. Verse four, the Lord is high above all nations, his glory above the heavens. Who is like the Lord our God who dwells on high, who humbles himself to behold the things that are in the heavens and on the earth? He prays God because he's so high. He's above the nations. You see, our notion of height and majesty and supremacy is informed and shaped by what we see in this world. So when we think of majesty, probably we think of the royal family in England and all the pomp and the ceremony, and the gowns, and the clothing, and the crowns. And you may not think much of all that stuff. I sympathize, but this is what passes for majesty amongst people. And all the hoopla, and all the pomp and ceremony. And the Bible says that you put all of them together, all the august people of this world, and God is over them all. And God raises them up and God brings them down. And God whistles and they come running. And God speaks of Cyrus, who was one of the great leaders of his day, and God says, oh, he's my servant. So God's above them all. He's above the heavens. He's so high, he's not only above the nations, but he's above the heavens. Now, this is how big the heavens are. This is how big the universe is. I got this from a section on the website for Harvard University. They're talking about the galaxies. Now, listen to this. This is the universe in which we live. We live in a little part of it, but the universe in which we live. Galaxies extend as far as we can detect with no sign of diminishing. There's no evidence that the universe has an edge or an end. The part of the universe we can observe from Earth is filled, more or less uniformly, with galaxies extending in every direction as far as we can see. More than 10 billion light years, or about 6 billion trillion miles. We know that the galaxies must extend much further than we can see, but we do not know whether the universe is infinite or not. When astronomers sometimes refer carelessly to galaxies near the edge of the universe, They're referring only to the edge of the observable universe. The universe is unbelievably massive. But God has to look down to see the universe. You see, the Lord is high above all the nations, is glory above the heavens. Who is like God? Verse 6, he humbles himself to behold the things that are in the heavens. He has to humble himself to see the universe. He has to, as it were, get down on his knees to see the universe. That's how big the Lord is. Verse 5 says that there's no one higher than God. God in this universe doesn't have a second in command. There's God and then there's no one else. He is high above all things. And that's why He is to be praised, because He is inconceivably more grand and glorious. And so we must respond with praise, with awe at the majestic God. So praise Him because He's so high. And then praise Him because He bends so low. He bends so low. Now you'd think that a God that great wouldn't notice us. Listen to Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking said, he knows better now, but he said this while he was still alive. He said, we are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of 100,000 million galaxies. So it's difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence. You may not know this, but Stephen Hawking's wife actually believed in God. She said, actually in one biography of Hawking, it says that his wife Jane, Jane attributed her ability to cope for so many years with their unusual and often difficult life, a life with no hope of a long or a happy future, to her faith in God. Without that, she said, I would I wouldn't have been able to live in this situation, would have been able to marry Stephen even in the first place, because I wouldn't have had the optimism to carry me through. She believed in God. I don't know if she was a Christian. I just know that she says she believed in a God even though he says he didn't. And he says, well, such a massive universe, how could this God notice us? And to a point, you say, well, I get that. But the glorious thing that the Bible tells us is that, well, He did. He did notice us. And not only did He notice us, but He loved us. And He sent His Son to die for us. God took an interest in us. Now imagine if I came down from the pulpit, and I got down on my knees down there, and I whipped out of my pocket a magnifying glass, and I started to look at an ant. He's making his way along. And I'm looking, I'm looking. And all of you are thinking, why is he interrupting something so important as this to look at something so insignificant as that? And you'd say, OK, Jotham, Levi, help him up because he needs help. Get him up. Get him back into the pulpit to carry on with the important stuff of life. You see, the kind of condescension that's involved in that kind of thing gives you only the barest hint of the kind of condescension that's involved with God noticing us. But not only does He notice us, but He loves us and He sends His Son to die for us. So yes, He's so high, but He bends so low. And see then how low He bends. See how low God comes. In verse 7, notice verse 7, it says, he raises the poor out of the dust and lifts the needy out of the ash heap. Now, ash heap, that's a word that we don't use in polite company. The old King James says, the dung hill. Somebody paraphrases it in this way. It's the man who lives on heaps of garbage and manure. So, you live in a nice home, and you go to church, and you have nice holidays, and you wear whatever happens to be in fashion at that particular time. And God says in his eyes, you live on a manure pile. And if he's going to have dealings with you, he has to come down to that. to help you. That's how low God bent. And we read in Ephesians 2 that these people, these people who were in such desperate state, this one lives on an ash heap, this one has a life that causes her grief. What has God done? Well, look at Ephesians 2, 4 to 6. I'll just read it to you. But God, who was rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you've been saved, and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That's what Christ has done for you. He's raised you up off the ash heap, off the dung hill. He's brought you from a circumstance where there's only grief for you, and he's given you life in Christ. He's made you sit in the heavenly places in Christ. That's what the Lord's done for you. He's gone that low. He's lifted you that high. I'll tell you where I've come from. I used to live in Heathfield in South Africa. And I lived in a nice house. And across the road from me was the Browns. Actually, I guess we were all Brown, but their name was Brown. And a friend of mine was Terrence. And it was a terrible house. And I remember eating a wretched piece of bread in their kitchen and my feet going right through the floor. It was a terrible place. He was my best friend. And then just up the road and around the corner with someone else and they lived in a zinc house, but not everybody could fit in the zinc house. And so some of the family lived in the hollowed out part of a car, which was sitting in front of their zinc house. So that's where I used to live. And so there was poverty all around me, but there was wickedness inside me. I talked recently to a friend who knew me before I was converted. And he said to me, he says, I remember what you were like. He says, I remember you were an angry man. You were an angry young man. He said you were hard emotionally. And he's right. It's full of hatred. Just, oh my, you have no idea. Full of hatred. but now I sit in the heavenlies with Christ. He's bent down, lifted me up. Bent down so low, has lifted me up so high. He's done that for you. He's done it for all of us who are in Jesus. Sinclair Ferguson was asked in an interview, he said, how do you understand yourself? He says, oh, he says, I'm a servant, and I'm a son. Verse 1, we're servants of the Lord. In a lot of verses, we've been raised to sit with princes. There's one prince in this kingdom, and we're joint heirs with him. So yes, that's who we are. We're servants, and we're sons and daughters. The Lord has bent so low to bring us up so high. They used to sing this psalm, as far as we know. They used to sing this psalm at Passover. And so probably before the Lord instituted the Lord's Supper, they would sing Psalm 113 and 114 at the beginning of that meal. So probably he sang that. And at the end, they would sing the other psalms in this section. And so this psalm was probably sung by the Lord Jesus while he was doing just this. Come, and he's condescended, and he's bent down, and he's come into this world and humbled himself to die for sinners like you and I so that we might be just lifted up. seated with him in the heavenly realms, eternity with him in the glory. Astonishing. And so then, these are reasons to praise God because he's so high and because he bent so low. And we praise him. we whose sins brought us so low. Now we praise him because his love has lifted us so high. God help us then to live for his honor, to praise him day by day on the good days and the bad days because he's worthy. Let's pray. Oh, our God and Father, we're so grateful to you for your mercies to us. How sinful we are. We recognize where we've come from. We recognize the pit from which we have been dug. And we praise you that this God who is so great took notice of us and visited us and rescued us and has lifted us up to be with him. For this, we praise you for who you are and for what you've done. We praise you and ask for help to live for your praise in Jesus' name. Amen.