Amen. Let's take our Bibles up and turn to Psalm 96, which is our sermon text today. Psalm 96. It's a Psalm written by King David a thousand years before Christ came. We'll talk a little bit more about that in the introduction to the sermon, but Psalm 96. Beginning in verse one, we'll read the whole psalm. This is God's word. Again, please give careful attention, therefore, to its reading. Psalm 96, beginning in verse one. Oh, sing to the Lord, a new song. Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord and bless His name. Tell of His salvation from day to day. Declare His glory among the nations. His marvelous works among all the peoples. For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols. But the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him. Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. Bring an offering and come into His courts. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. Tremble before Him all the earth. Say among the nations, the Lord reigns. Yes, the world is established. It shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity. Let the heavens be glad and let the earth rejoice. Let the sea roar and all that fills it. Let the field exult and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord. For he comes, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness. Thus ends the reading of God's word. May he add his blessing to it. Please be seated. Let me pray and ask God to bless our time in his word. Heavenly Father, this is your word. We do pray that the same spirit that inspired scripture would illuminate today, that you would indeed give us eyes to see and ears to hear, hearts to receive, hands to apply, feet to walk out what it is we're learning here today. And we commit ourselves to you and commit this time to you in Jesus' name. Amen. Author John Dixon. tells the story of being in a coffee shop with one of his friends. And he was talking about how his church was getting the gospel out in their community, how they were making the word known around the community. And he was really excited about what was happening in his church and through his church. And sometimes when we get excited, our tone, our level can rise a little bit. You've heard those conversations in coffee shops where people get a little noisy and you can overhear every single word that they're saying. And a lady overheard the conversation and she got up from her table and she walked over and she was steaming, she was angry. And she said this to John Dixon, she said, so you want to convert the world, huh? She said, how dare you? And she stormed out of the coffee shop. Pastor Dixon, admitted that he was a little taken back. He was reeling for a moment and he was thinking about this question, should we really be doing this sort of thing? Should we really be thinking about converting the neighborhoods for Christ? Is it really our place to go out and tell people about Jesus? Because it seems to be offensive to some. We live in a day where there are many young people that are growing up that say, I believe that Jesus is the only way to be made right with God, but I think it's wrong to put my beliefs on other people. Think about that. How could those two ideas exist in the same brain, in the same mind? But that's where some people, some young people, find themselves. today, we live in a really confusing, complex culture. Here's what I want us to walk away with today. Here's the takeaway for this sermon, this sentence. The Lord our God is great and is greatly to be praised and worshipped by all creatures, all creatures, great and small, without exception. By all creatures, great and small, period, without exception. The context of this psalm, you know, a lot of the psalms don't have a, they don't tell us when they were written or why they were written. They're just kind of in the Bible. But this psalm, we understand when it was written because the very words that are written here are written in 1 Chronicles 16, and they have to do with when King David brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. He had tried to do that before, and the Ark got shaky, and one of his men stuck his hand out to balance the Ark, and God struck him dead for touching the Ark. And David got mad at God. David was upset at that time. And so he said, we're going to park the ark over here for a while at Obed Edom's house. And David got himself together. He regrouped, regathered himself and said, OK, it's time to take the ark to Jerusalem. And so he took the ark of the covenant, the place where God promised to dwell. Right. His presence was in that box. God promised to be there. And then they took the ark to Jerusalem, which was the city that God said, I'll put my name upon that city. And so you have God's presence in God's place. That's what David's celebrating 1,000 years before Christ came, God's presence in God's place, a triumphal entry of sorts. Derek Kidner says that God crowned his victory by planting his throne in the enemy's former citadel. And so in David's mind, you can imagine this is a great victory, a great cause for celebration. And he's painting the picture in this Psalm, Psalm 96, that God is the king, that God is enthroned. He's not just the king of the Israelites, mind you. He is the king of the whole earth, of the created realm. He is the king of all. And I think it's significant for us to point out. I don't know if you've ever looked at a map. at the size of Israel. whether it be 1,000 years before Christ came, 3,000 years ago, when David was writing, or today, but this is a very small geographical location. This is a very small piece of land in the ancient Near East, and yet David is saying that he's not only the God of these people that live in this little area, but he's the God of the whole planet. And he's unapologetic about saying so. He is unnerved to pin these words. So God is the king, not just of this little area in the ancient Near East, but of the whole world. This is a psalm of celebration, a celebratory hymn. This is a psalm of invitation for the nations to come and join God's chosen people in worship and adoration. And finally, it's a prophetic document looking down to the end of time when God will in fact judge the world in righteousness by the man that he has appointed, even his own son. our Lord Jesus Christ. A simple outline for this afternoon, worship and witness. Sometimes I go with praise and proclamation. I heard recently music and mission, however you like it. But it's these two elements that make up this psalm here. And so we're going to start with worship here. Point one, the what of worship. I want us to understand, it's really important for us to know today, that our priority as Christians is to worship the Lord. Like when you think about what it means to be a Christian, at the very top of that list should be worship. I meet a lot of people that are professing Christians that would say they're Christians, but they don't have any kind of context where they can actually worship the Lord in the way that He prescribes. There's no place that they join themselves to. There's no meeting that they're a part of where they actually can worship the Lord the way that God demands that His people worship. And so what we do on the Lord's Day, what we're doing right now in this time, from the call to worship to the benediction, is the most important thing that you can do. This is a foundational thing for us as Christians, as heaven and earth come together, as God promises to meet with the people in a way that he doesn't promise to meet with his people any other day of the week in any other situation. This is unique. This is special. This is incredibly Significant worship, dear friends, is what you were made for. You were made to worship your triune God. What am I here for? What is my life about? It starts with worship. It starts with worship on the Lord's day, every Lord's day, it's recalibration, it's focus, it's foundation. It's what we were created for. It's why we exist. Worship is the most important thing we will ever do, and that's not an exaggeration. Somebody defined worship this way. Worship is the due response, what is owed, of rational creatures, those with the faculty of their minds, to the self-revelation of their creator, and Redeemer. It's the due response. It's the logical response to the revelation of God as Creator and Redeemer. And you see this clearly, the several imperatives that kick off right off the bat Sing to the Lord three times in verses one and two. Bless His name in verse two. These are imperatives. This is what we are called to do as believers. Ascribe glory to Him in verses seven and eight. Worship and tremble before Him in verse nine. And it's just a great thing to remember, this most basic doctrine of Scripture, there is but one true and living God. who is the king over all things, there is but one. In the beginning, God. In the beginning, God created. And that means he deserves all of our allegiance. And that means, listen, he deserves the allegiance of all. Sometimes we get the first part that he deserves all of our allegiance. We get that part, but we don't understand the next implication that he deserves the allegiance of all and the part we have to play in bringing that to him. And so there are many loud voices in our culture calling for worship and allegiance, calling for us to bow down to their beliefs and their opinions and their ideas, and we cannot do it. We talked in the Sunday school hour about all of the different voices out there, all of the different attitudes that are opposed to our beliefs as Christians. And it reminds me, and this is something that constantly comes up into my mind, when Paul the Apostle writes his epistles, at the time of the New Testament being put together, and Paul's writing to various churches, he would say things like, Jesus is Lord. And we say amen, of course. But back of that statement is the cultural statement that was said everywhere, Caesar is Lord. And Caesar would say, Rome would say, as long as you give allegiance to our little G gods, our false gods, you can go worship your Jesus. You give your pinch of incense over here and then you can worship your Jesus. But you have to compromise over here. There are these cultural compromises that you must make and we'll leave you alone. And if you don't compromise in these ways, we will hold it against you. And Paul was saying to the church in those days, don't you do it. Jesus alone is Lord. Caesar is not. Don't you do it. And in our day, the same kind of things are coming up. Different context, different reality, but the same idea. Bow the knee here. Recognize our ideology. Recognize our language. Bow the knee here. And I'm saying to you, don't you do it. Bow the knee to God alone. Bow the knee to Christ alone. Don't bow to the cultural gods. Stand for truth. Stand up and stand strong. There are many little G gods. Verse 5. Notice the contrast and the comparison. Great is the Lord, verse 4, greatly to be praised. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. And he is to be feared above all the little g gods. For all the little g gods, verse five, of the peoples are what? They're worthless idols. They're deficient. They're false. They can never satisfy. They can never fulfill. They can never give what they promise. They can never come through for you in tough times. They can never provide for you what you ultimately need. God alone can. I love what the Psalm says, Psalm 115, not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name, give glory for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness. Why should the nations say, where is their God? I love this verse, Psalm 115, verse three, know it and know it well. Our God is in the heavens and he does all that he pleases. But in contrast, the psalmist goes on to say, their idols, their little g-gods, in other words, are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths but don't speak, eyes but don't see, ears but don't hear, noses but don't smell, hands but don't feel, feet but don't walk, and they do not make a sound in their throat. And further, those who make them become like them, And so do all who trust in them. You become like what you worship. Two things. Everybody worships someone or something. Second thing, you become like what you worship. If you worship the true and the living God, and you focus on Him and bow the knee to Him alone, you will become more like Him, developing in knowledge and righteousness and holiness. you will become more like Jesus, Romans 8, 29. And if you worship and bow the knee to false gods, you will destroy yourself. It's a lot at stake. Coming to church is more than just sitting in a room for an hour and some odd minutes. You're either becoming greater or you're destroying yourself in how you worship and what you worship. And the interesting thing is that we want change now. We want change instantly. But we're really changed by a lifetime of Lord's Day and Sabbath observance. We're really changed by, in really small, almost imperceptible ways, through a lifetime of having our schedule set up the right way. There aren't these huge leaps forward It's just gradual, day by day, week by week, forward movement. That's the design and purpose of God. And worship is at the very center of who we are and what we do. God not only cares that we worship him, but how we worship him. And I think that's really important for us to think about too. Sometimes what passes for worship is really man-centered. It's really focused on the self. I'm still at the center. I want God to serve me. I want God to baptize the way that I've decided to be worshiping him. I want his blessing on what I want to do. But worship is about submission. Worship is about reverence and awe. It's about losing our self-focus in something bigger and grander than ourselves. God cares not only that we worship, but how we worship, that we worship in spirit and in truth, that we worship rightly and uprightly. according to His Word, throwing or casting back to God some high thought formed by His Word. It's our response to Him. And also, it's interesting to point out here, and we've also looked at it in other places, that singing is commanded in Scripture as an element of our worship. I go to a lot of churches, and I visit a lot of churches. I preach in a lot of churches. I sit in the congregation at a lot of churches. Singing is commanded. And sometimes I understand, and somebody pointed this out recently, sometimes people are convicted that we sing only this or that or the other, and I get that. But for the most part, when people don't sing, it's because they just don't want to sing. And I would just throw this out for you if you have a problem with singing in a worship service, that it's about the Lord and not you. It's not about you feeling uncomfortable. It's not about you feeling like, oh, I don't have a good voice. Make a joyful noise, the scriptures declare. But it's about the Lord. When we gather in this place, the focus is to come off of ourselves and to go, as much as we can do it as sinners, is to go on to the Lord and to be focused on him. And so I would encourage you, I would exhort you, sing to the Lord. Make a joyful noise if you don't have a great voice. I don't have a great voice, We still sing. It's not like singing in the shower or singing to your Spotify playlist in the car, where it's just to your choosing or to your liking. It's different. What we're doing here is different. God has ordained singing because he wants us to sing to him. God has ordained singing because it pleases him when his people sing to him. And so we sing out loud to God. We worship passionately. We worship joyfully. We sing new songs. Matthew Henry talks about a new song being a product of new affections clothed with new expressions. In Scripture, new songs were written during new seasons of God's work, when God accomplished victories, when God was doing new things. Each stage of redemptive history brought out new wonders of His grace. And each new song was carrying forward the grand theme of saving grace revealed on the pages of Scripture. And so what motivates us, what moves us for David, the why of worship now, we've talked about the what of worship, the why of worship for David, the new location of the ark, God's presence in God's place. But for us, God coming down to the earth in a person. Just think about how much greater that is. God in a box going into one city. And David's like, yes. This is so amazing. presence in God's place in this box, the Ark of the Covenant, but we've had God in the person of Jesus Christ come down into our world, God tabernacling, Christ tabernacling among us, as John says, and they beheld His glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father, that our Creator entered time and space. That our Creator took on a body. That our Creator came like you. Became like you in every possible way. Sin accepted. That He came and didn't just rent a body. He didn't just borrow a human frame for 30 some years. But although glorified, there's a man sitting on the throne of God right now. The why of worship is because God is infinitely worthy. Because God is great. Notice that in verse four. For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. You know, we throw that word around a lot. How you doing? I'm great. How about you? Yeah, great. Can't complain. Great. It's just a common word for us. But in the Bible, this word is a special word. God is great in the truest sense of that word. God is great in magnitude and extent. He's great in intensity and importance. He's great. He's infinitely excellent in his wisdom and power and dominion. He's great over all things. He contains unimaginable greatness. Only God is great in the truest sense. The gods of the world and the nations are but idols. He's great in His nature and in His essence. He's great in His authority over all things. His name is great. His power is great. His actions and activities Great. His judgments are great. His perfections are great. He's great in holiness and in love. He's great in wrath and in mercy. He's essentially great in himself, perfect, perfect in and by himself. But his greatness is not just seen in the fact that he is. His greatness is not just seen in the fact that he exists. His greatness is not just seen in the fact that he's our creator and we are his creatures. He is infinitely, listen, infinitely worthy for those realities alone. But He's great because He's our Savior. He's great because He has saved us to be His people forevermore. We would owe him allegiance and worship if he never sent Jesus to die for us. We would owe him worship if he was condemning us to hell for all of eternity. But how much more should we focus on him because he has chosen to save us? because he has chosen to redeem us, because he has chosen to forgive us at the great cost of his own dear son. Talked to my kids about this the other day. When God decided to save a people for himself, I asked them this trick question. And theologians talk about it, but I'm convinced of the answer. It's pretty clear to me. When God decided to save a people, how many ways could he have done that? One. There was one way. It was that Jesus Christ would take on our humanity that we just spoke of, that he would take on human flesh and he would be the God-man, God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever. God is great. And He is greatly to be praised now and always. He is greatly to be praised, and that means we could never praise Him too much. We could never go beyond and say, I'm sorry, forgive me, that's too much worship and praise for you. That's more than you deserve. We could never get to that place. But as we go to witness, and this will be a shorter point, but I want to make the point clearly, that sometimes we think if we've just worshiped the Lord, we've done our part. We've done enough. We've gathered in with the congregation on the Lord's Day. We've given ourselves to worship. Worship is amazing. It helps us to realize what we were created to do and be But it also helps us to go beyond. Worship is not the end point, it's the starting point. Worship is the beginning, not the end. Worship recalibrates and refocuses and helps us to be motivated and fueled to go out and then be, listen, witnesses. To be witnesses. And I've said this before, but I want to reiterate again, I said it in the beginning, I said it in the middle, and I say it again here, that worship isn't just for some people, it's for all people. God is due the allegiance of all people. God has made us and all people for something larger than we often think. And so worship can help us and lead us to understand that God has made us and others for global purposes. And he has not just saved us so that we might display his glory among the people in our congregation. That's the starting point. That's where we gather and we worship together and we see that together and we encourage one another. But I want us to think more widely and more broadly. I want us to challenge our own thinking and start thinking about this, who might God be willing to save? I want you to think about the person that is the most annoying person, the most unlikely person, the person that you could never see coming into this place, and I want you to ask yourself the question, why not them? Is the grace of God not big enough? Is the power of God not grand enough? What purpose could there possibly be that those people might not end up in here? Because our worship should lead to our witness, to the people that might bother us, that we wouldn't expect to be, oh, they would never, the person that you say, oh, they would never come to believe, that person. As I've done evangelism talks through the years, I had just kind of an image in my head one time, years ago, that's just stuck with me, and it really just, it's just lodged in my brain. But we all come from various places around. You know, we live, you know, a ways away. We don't live just right around here. We drive in, we hear from God, God meets with us, we worship God, and then we go back to where we live. and we go back to our schools or we go back to our jobs or we go back to our communities and our friends and the things that we do, and if we come in and receive and worship with our mouths here and talk to each other here and then go back there and don't say anything, then I would actually say that's a tragedy. And it's certainly not what God intended. And one of the things that you can point out, and for the sake of time, we don't have the time to really look in depth at it, but I would encourage you to go home tonight and look at this, that the same things that are said about the Lord to the Lord in worship are the same things that we turn around and say to our neighbors outside of the church. The Lord reigns. Our God is great. He will come to judge at the end of the age. The very same things we say to God here, hopefully to one another here in fellowship, are the same things that we say out there to our unbelieving friends in New Orleans, our neighbors, coworkers. We say the same things. We're not called to come up with a new spiel. We're called to rehearse the same things to them as we rehearse here. And to me, that makes it easier. Consider the Psalm. It says that we should do at least three things for the nations. Declare God's glory among the nations, summon the nations to join with us, and then warn the nations about the judgment that is to come. We don't want to make the assumption that worship is the end of our duty. And on a deeper level, we understand that that's not the case. And I love to make this illustration When we find a new restaurant that we like, man, we love to tell other people. When we find a new product that works well for us, we're telling everybody. When our team wins the big game or gets the new free agent that's on the market, the best player that's out there, we want to go talk about it. We evangelize all the time. But do we evangelize about the things that mean the most ultimately? Listen, we evangelize about the things that mean the most to us. Do we evangelize about the things that mean the most to God and should mean the most to us? And again, that's a question for our hearts, for us to ask ourselves and to be honest about before the Lord. And notice that God is the king over all of creation, the implications being All kinds of people should love Him and serve Him. All people, every single person should give their allegiance to Him. And God gives us the privilege as well as the responsibility to tell others. Look in verse 1, the call goes out to number, first of all, all the earth. The call goes out in verse 3 to the nations. The call goes out to all the peoples," verse 3. The call says that he is to be feared above all little g-gods that are worthless idols. And so the church is commanded to, notice, the Old Testament church, the New Testament church, commanded to tell of his salvation, verse 2. To declare his glory and his marvelous works among all of the peoples, verse 3. To tell the nations, verse 10, that the Lord reigns. Not the nation, Israel, the nations, all of them. Again, verse 10, tell the nations the Lord will judge rightly. And so Matthew Henry, again, another Matthew Henry quote, says that these are the instructions given by God about what we preach among the nations. For those that have received the truth, they were to pass it along. It's what they were to say among the heathen or the unbelievers after they'd said it together in the congregation. The sayings remain the same, but the audience changes. And I would also say this. I mentioned it in passing, but I want to say it and I want to encourage us this way. Sometimes we sit shoulder to shoulder and we worship the Lord next to each other, but then when we turn and we have fellowship with one another, We're talking about other things. And those things are fine, by the way, the things that are going on in our community, the things that are going on in our lives at school or work or whatever. But I want to encourage you to speak God's word to one another. I want to encourage you to speak God's gospel truth to each other. When I was putting together an evangelism curriculum years ago, and I was asking some of the young people in our college group that became our Pasadena church plant, One of the young ladies that was a pastor's daughter in the OPC said, Chris, one of the reasons we have a hard time talking to other people outside about the Lord is because we never talk to each other inside the church about the Lord. That's profound. If we can't talk to each other about the Lord, how are we going to go talk to other people about the Lord that are out there? We can talk about the weather, the news, we can talk about different things like that, but speak gospel truth to one another. Encourage one another with gospel realities, God's word. And it may be uncomfortable at first, get over those humps together. And so we go out and we witness, we tell other people, how shall the people, one commentator said, how shall the people of the earth share in worship with Christians if Christians do not in some measure proclaim praises with their lives in their homes, their communities, their work, and further? And so the outflow, the overflow of our worship should be our witness. Worship informs and shapes us through the word. We're shaped and informed by the word. We take it in, and then we give it out. worship leading to witness. No longer focused just on him, but focused on others as we think about him and honor him with our words. So David was excited when he wrote the psalm for good reason. It was a victory shout. God was the victor, the king, the judge. Very exciting. Amazing even. But again, God didn't just come to a city In a box, he came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word becoming flesh. And when he came, he was victorious. Shorter Catechism 26 says this, when Christ executes the office of a king in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all of his and our enemies. Christ is a conquering king. He came to gather a people for himself and to himself from the four corners of the earth, from every tribe and every tongue and every people group to be with him forevermore. And we see the glorious reality in Revelation 4 and Revelation 5. I would give you some extra credit assignments there to read those passages about what's happening because that's your reality. The throne of God at the center, the angels of God, around and the people just falling on their faces before the Lord, worshiping, saying, worthy is the Lord, worthy is the Lamb. The greatest new song that's ever been written has to do with our resurrected and ascended Christ sitting on the throne, ruling and reigning over all things. He has won the ultimate victory, dear friends, as we close over sin, Satan, death, and the grave, and he has been given the name above all names that every knee should bow, and that every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. All authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth, and with that authority, he commands his church to worship. And with that authority, he commands his church to go and make disciples, to witness and to make disciples. There is no ground not covered. There is no person not responsible. And at the end of time, he will have accomplished all his holy will and have gathered all of his chosen race. And we, as brothers and sisters, have that privilege and duty to be a part of the work that he's doing in these last days. I came upon this quote, and we'll close here. But I came upon this quote the other day that I thought was phenomenal. It came from J. Campbell White, who worked with a ministry called Lehman's Missionary Movement over a hundred years ago. But it's still fitting today. And it's still dead on because this is always and forever true. He says this, most men are not satisfied with the permanent output of their lives. Nothing can wholly satisfy the life of Christ within his followers except the adoption of Christ's purpose toward the world he came to redeem. Do you get that? As a Christian, nothing can fully satisfy, nothing will fully fill you up, nothing will fully make you feel like you've had enough except serving in the purpose and plan of God. Fame and pleasure and riches are all but husks and ashes in contrast with the boundless and abiding joy of working with God for the fulfillment of His eternal plans. The men who are to put everything in Christ's undertaking are getting out of life its sweetest and most priceless rewards. When you put in You're all to the kingdom of God. You get back the richest and fullest and most satisfying rewards. Are you aware of that? Do you know that principle to be true in your life? Are you living according to that reality? If you're not, I would encourage you to do that here today. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for your word. Thank you so much for the glory that you've revealed to us of your own nature, of your own purpose, of your own work. Lord, thank you that you've revealed yourself to us. Thank you that you revealed Christ to us. Thank you that you've gathered us into this place to be your worshipers. And we do pray that this church would be those that witnesses boldly passionately, consistently to those that are outside the four walls, and that we would expect to see people come in, not because of our eloquent words, not because we say just the right thing, but because your spirit is at work on them and in them. We love you and praise you in Christ's name. Amen.