Well, we're reading from Psalm 29. Hear the word of God. A Psalm of David. Give unto the Lord, O you mighty ones. Give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory due to his name. Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. The voice of the Lord is over the waters. The God of glory thunders. The Lord is over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. Yes, the Lord splinters the cedars of Lebanon. He makes them also skip like a calf, Lebanon and Syria like a young wild ox. The voice of the Lord divides the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadish. The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forest bare, and in his temple, everyone says, glory. The Lord sat enthroned at the flood, and the Lord sits as king forever. The Lord will give strength to his people. The Lord will bless his people with peace. Father, we thank you for this scripture, and I pray that you would quicken it to our hearts as we We listen to it and we pray it in Jesus' name, amen. A few years ago I entered into a public debate with some Christians on the subject of evolution, and two of them had been vigorously insisting that it's not fair, you cannot inject God and the Bible into science because science by its very definition excludes God. It's dealing with things that you can measure, which you can see in the laboratory, which you can analyze with your senses. And he said that the Bible deals with spiritual and visible reality and science deals with the laws of physics. And yet he claimed to be a Christian. Another person on that same Christian forum said, and I'm quoting him verbatim, science tries to look at the natural world as completely natural. as a perfectly integrated system of laws in which the spiritual concepts of separation, sin, and death simply have no meaning as such. And I responded by quoting from Cornelius Van Til who said, since God created all things by, for, and through Christ, Colossians 1.16, and since he sustains all things, Colossians 1.17, It would be impossible to interpret any fact without a basic falsification unless it be regarded in its relation to God the Creator and to Christ the Redeemer. And then I said, when God is left out of science, it becomes a godless science. Well, this is a passage that I think beautifully, beautifully illustrates what Van Til was saying. For David, it was absolutely impossible to look at any aspect of creation without glorying in God's wisdom, His power, His judgments, His mercies. All of creation was shouting God's existence. And when you begin to live every moment of your life before the face of God, it really does revolutionize your life. If you want a great essay on this subject, it's a very short essay by R.C. Sproul Sr. You can ask me for the source of this, but it was written in 2017, and it was titled, What Does Quorum Deo Mean? And I won't give away the whole essay, but here's how he summarized it. He said the big idea of the Christian life is Coram Deo. Coram Deo captures the essence of the Christian life. Now before I keep reading, let me emphasize this is not an overstatement at all. It is critical that Christians learn to live before the face of God, which is what Coram Deo means. And that's the main theme of this mini-series that we've been going through on experiencing God in every aspect of our lives, living before his presence. Anyway, back to Sproul. He said the big idea of the Christian life is Coram Deo. Coram Deo captures the essence of the Christian life. This phrase literally refers to something that takes place in the presence of or before the face of God. to live Coram Deus, to live one's entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, and to the glory of God. And I say, Amen. In that essay, he went on to emphasize that any version of Christianity that compartmentalizes life, you know, this part is sacred, this part is secular, has a fundamental inconsistency that will eventually destroy even the sacred part of life. God will become less and less central to your life to the point where God's really not that meaningful when you come before him in worship. Everything we do must be seen as under God, as consistent with his sovereignty over all. I'll just quote one more paragraph from his essay. Sproul said, this means that if a person fulfills his or her vocation as a steel maker, attorney, or homemaker quorum deo, then that person is acting every bit as religiously as a soul-winning evangelist who fulfills his vocation. It means that David was as religious when he obeyed God's call to be a shepherd as he was when he was anointed to the special grace of kingship. It means that Jesus was every bit as religious when he worked in his father's carpentry shop as he was in the garden of Gethsemane. And I say amen, amen, and amen. And this psalm teaches us how to worship and serve God in absolutely everything that we do. It's just going to be three main points. Call to worship, motivation for worship, the goal of worship. So let's dig into the text. Call to worship is given in verses 1 through 2. You've heard these verses many times, very familiar. Give unto the Lord, O you mighty ones, give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory due to His name. Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Now what I want to point out is that the context for this call to worship was not the synagogue, it was not in the tabernacle, it was not in any corporate gathering. The context was David was caught in a tremendous thunderstorm, which many commentators believe was accompanied by a tornado. Rather than freaking out, David was awestruck at the enormous power of God, and he felt compelled to call other people to worship God. Well, there wasn't anybody else around, and so he calls upon the angels to worship him. The Hebrew for Almighty Ones, B'nai Elohim, is a title for the angels, one of the titles. This rainstorm was a call to worship. The point is that worship should not be restricted to Sunday. David didn't have to wait until he got to the tabernacle or until he got to one of the local synagogues. He found calls to worship everywhere that he went. When I'm driving down the road, I'm conversing with the Lord about all of the things that are going on, the crazy drivers, the beautiful scenery, you know, the things that the Lord is opening up to me or just praying or interceding on behalf of others. Worship is basically glorifying God in all that we do and relating all that we do to God. And unfortunately, the only call to worship that many Christians ever hear is the one that comes here from the pulpit, and there are times where we don't even respond to that as much as we could. And I believe that the reason is the same. When I joined Faith Presbyterian Church some 47 years ago up in Canada, there were two sweet ladies. I loved these ladies, but they kept complaining almost every Sunday that they just couldn't worship properly because we were meeting in a holiday in conference room. It didn't feel like a church. at all, just not conducive to worship. And even though I didn't say this out loud to them, I thought, oh wow, pity the first Christians who didn't have any churches. They met in the open fields. Pity the early church, you know, that met in the catacombs and worshiped their hearts out or met in caves. Most Christians in Africa and Asia and other parts of the world don't have what we consider to be normal church buildings. and yet they are able to worship. They have what many Westerners consider distractions. I remember when I was growing up in Ethiopia, we would not have any seats. So we'd sit on the ground with our knees crunched up to our chests, and there were a lot of distractions. You know, a chicken would wander in, and somebody would swat it, and it would go off with a squawk, and I would look across the the aisle over here, and I'd see a bug walking up somebody's leg, and I was wondering what was going to happen. And, you know, a little kid would pull on a puppy's tail, and it would yelp. There were all kinds of distractions that were going on in these worship services, and it would be easy to get distracted if your heart was not in tune with God in everything that happened. So, what is it that causes you to worship or that hinders your worship? I think if you can discover that, you'll find the difference between living Coram Deo and being oblivious to God most of the day. David had learned how to tune into God wherever he was. Seeing this thunderstorm caused his heart to well up in worship. And David was prompted to worship by almost everything that he saw. You read through Psalm 104 sometime and you will see that this was true. Seeing a bird's nest made him want to worship because he saw the wisdom and the goodness of God. seeing cows giving birth, and the ocean beating against the shore, and the wild goats up in the mountains, and the conies in the caves, and the sun and the moon, and the lions hunting prey. I mean, all of these things were calls to worship for Him. not just on Sunday, but wherever he was. Now, in verses 1 through 2, David realizes we have a tendency to ignore God's calls, to adore Him, and to worship Him, and to glory in His wisdom. And so he gives a command here. Now, the new King James is not quite the way it should be. Marginal rendering is a little bit closer to the Hebrew, and it's what the way the New American Standard and the NIV translate it. It says, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. We can't give God anything that He doesn't already own. We can't give Him glory and strength as He already has it, but we can certainly ascribe to God the glory and the honor that He deserves. We can recognize it. We can acknowledge that glory in the thunderstorm that He's about to describe is the glory of God Himself. And over and over again, the Israelites failed to ascribe glory to God. They ascribed power sometimes to Baal, like the Canaanites did, and David was saying, Baal is not the lord of the storm, God is. Now, we would never say that Baal is the lord of the storm, or would we? We might have a different name for it. I wouldn't be too sure. What were those Christian scientists doing when they were excluding God from nature and from science? There was something that took the place of God in their scientific worldview, and it became the highest reality in their lives Monday through Friday. If God is not upholding scientific law, then what is? Did you realize that Jacob kept idols for many years? When many Old Testament saints had idols, they did not think of themselves as departing to the one true God at all. They sort of saw those idols and icons as having some kind of inherent intrinsic power, sort of like a lucky rabbit's foot, right? Or some of the icons that you'll find in Roman Catholic churches, some Protestants have them as well. I have known Christians who actually believe they're not going to catch fish if they don't wear their lucky fishing cap. Or who get all excited when they find a four-leaf clover. What is going on there? It's failing to ascribe to the Lord the glory due unto his name. Now there's other people, they're not superstitious at all, at least they think they're not. They're overly mechanistic, and they don't see God's hand in AIDS, in typhoons, in storms, or in gentle rains. They don't see God's hand almost anywhere. Now, I didn't ask the Christian brothers in that science forum what they thought about AIDS and the typhoons, but I suspect if I had asked that, they would say, oh no, God's hand was not in those things. They would probably speak of those things as being fluke or lucking out, you know, if your car escaped having a branch fall on it. They many times act like deists and see God as having set impersonal laws in motion, and only once in a while, through what they call a miracle, interfering in those laws. There is no personalism in nature for them. What a sad thing to be a scientist and to miss out on the glory of God. And it never ceases to amaze me at how close to the truth and yet how far from the truth Carl Sagan was. You guys, some of you probably don't even remember who Carl Sagan was. That's before your time. He had a show, he was a supposed scientist, talked about evolution, but I was always amazed at how he would speak of evolution almost as if it was a person, the wisdom of evolution, you know, the planning of evolution. But are we much different? When we view the flight of a cardinal to our bird feeder, we find a branch that just narrowly missed our roof, or maybe hit our roof. Do we just think, oh man, that was bad luck? Or do we ascribe this to the Lord and seek to learn from Him? Many of the things that David praises God for in nature do cause us to have awe and amazement and fascination as well, but do they draw our hearts out to God? That's the central theme here. Do they draw our hearts out to God? Do they cause us to worship? Or are we merely fascinated with the intricacies of nature? If we can develop an attitude of worship in our day-by-day lives that can make the hymn that we're going to be singing here shortly, How Great Thou Art, a reality for us, a personal testimony, then having that continual attitude of worship, we're going to be a long way to developing a heart that's going to be intently focused on worshiping God on the Sabbath. We're not going to complain about the external so much. We're going to be drawn to worship because we sense God's presence with us. Now this leads to the second main point, and that is the motivation for worship was the fact that God was present. And I want you to notice that God is mentioned in every verse in this psalm. David does not want us to miss out on the fact that God thunders through the storm. God tears apart the oak trees. Okay, God makes the ground rumble as that tornado comes roaring through like a freight train and God leaves a path of destruction in the forest. I wish you could read the poem in the Hebrew for yourself because David makes it almost sound like a thunderstorm when you're reading that Hebrew. My professor at Westminster Seminary was an expert in Hebrew and he would teach us many different facets using different passages, but he taught us onomatopoeia in the In the Hebrew, onomatopoeia is where you have a word that sort of sounds like what it's describing, like fizz, buzz, gurgle, you know, things like that. Those are onomatopoeic words. And the onomatopoeia in this Psalm is absolutely incredible. I can't replicate it perfectly, but let me just give you a few examples. The repeated phrase, the voice of the Lord, sort of sounds like thunder rumbling off in the distance. Okay? But when it's put in conjunction with other words, it gives the feel of the storm coming in, moving overhead, and then dissipating into the east. In verse 3, the storm is brewing out over the Mediterranean. And in the language, you can hear a small, soft rumble of thunder, a little bit of reverb in the Hebrew. In verse 4, as the storm moves inland, there is a much sharper sound of thunder through Onomatopoeia. First phrase shows the crash. It's kind of a crashing sound. The next phrase, the reverb. Just a little bit softer. But in verse 5, you've got the most awesome language and the words that are chosen for the cedars breaking apart, for example. Listen to this onomatopoeia. It's almost like a shredding, a ripping sound as it's describing this tearing apart of the trees. Now, my Hebrew teacher could do a much better job than me reading through the whole psalm, and I still remember him in the front of the class reading this. It sent shivers up my spine. It just is incredible. You'll have to listen to it in Hebrew sometime. It's a beautiful, beautiful psalm in the Hebrew. that then as we go into verses six and nine, you hear the storm pass overhead from the first mountain range of Lebanon to the next mountain range where Sirion and Mount Hermon are located, and then dissipating into the steps of Kadesh in the east. And the reason David uses these words is not only to give the feel for the storm, but also to make it unmistakably clear that God controlled every branch that fell and every wind that blew. We, who live in an age of science, tend to be very skeptical about ascribing too much meaning to rain, and sun, and falling leaves, and bugs, and things like that. Saying God brings it upon the just and the unjust, and the implication in our minds is okay, it's indiscriminate, it's not got any meaning. We tend to view weather past mildew earthquakes like the deist zoo. We say, oh yeah, God controls the weather, but not in a personal way. He just sets these laws of physics in motion so that Southern California is always going to have different weather patterns than Nebraska will. Right? They don't see God's hand being personally there. It's just laws of physics. And once in a while, God might intervere. But there's no cause and effect other than the laws of physics. And I will admit that it's true. God makes desert regions. He makes luxuriant regions. But he doesn't just wind up a clock and let it run. History shows numerous examples of covenantal judgments and covenantal blessings as nations as a whole abandon God's law or begin to embrace God's law. And in both cases, the Bible is quite clear that God is present in the storm and God is present in the drought. We do not just deal with impersonal laws set in motion. In nature, we are witnessing a personal God who is orchestrating every detail with a purpose, with a goal in mind, guaranteeing that all things work together for your personal good. Let's read verses 3 through 9 with this in mind. The voice of the Lord is over the waters. The God of glory thunders. The Lord is over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. Yes, the Lord splinters the cedars of Lebanon. He makes them also skip like a calf. Lebanon and Syria are like a young wild ox. The voice of the Lord divides the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forest bare and in His temple everyone says glory. So at least the angels are not just awestruck by nature, they're awestruck by God, even if the scientists are not. And it's not just during special times like the Exodus or the conquest of Canaan or Jonah in the storm or other judgments that God controls the weather for personal purposes. Gary North coined, at least I think he coined the phrase, cosmic personalism. I love that phrase. Cosmic personalism is a theology where everything in this universe is working together for the good of his church, for the good of his elect. Isn't that what Romans 8 says? It's cosmic personalism. All things work together for the good of those who love him. In Zechariah 2, God says that he controls the winds just as surely as he controls the nations. Revelation 7, verse 1 says that God commands certain angels who control the winds. I find that very interesting, that angels can control winds to keep the wind from blowing for a specified period of time. And just as a side note, I think we need to be much more cognizant of angels being all around us. There's probably a bunch of angels in this room right now. And they're looking on either stunned by the patheticness of some people's worship or glorying in the goodness of other people's worship, that their hearts are on fire for the Lord. But moving on, 1 Samuel 12, 19 through 18, it says that the destructive rain that came at harvest time and actually ruined the harvest came because Israel asked for a king. Now, they might not have known. That's why the destructive weather came, that they'd asked for a king. unless God had revealed it to them, or unless they had done, you know, personal introspection and the Lord had opened their hearts to that. But they should have known just by reading the law of God. Read Deuteronomy 11, read Deuteronomy 28, and you cannot miss the fact that God judges nations, He judges states and families, With all kinds of things that we just think of in the realm of science, He judges or He blesses by controlling those things in our lives. Job repented of his blindness and was awestruck at God's goodness when God revealed his personal hand in his boils and in all of the things that he was seeing around him in nature. Can you see why there is an immediate response of praise from the angels in verse 9? It says, in his temple, everyone says, glory. Angels live quorum Deo. They're always before the face of God. They're always cognizant of God's presence. And in that heavenly temple, all of these angels are saying glory when they see this awesome thunderstorm. We have a hard time doing that. It takes God's personal presence in the storm to elicit such a response. And so what I want to say to you is there is no such thing as chance in God's world. And we do dishonor to God when we think of storms as being arbitrary. If a thunderstorm elicits a glory from the angels, it ought to elicit a glory hallelujah from God's people, too. Or if we sense that it's a judgment, then it ought to elicit a humbling ourselves from Almighty God. This is one of the things I just love about the Puritans. You read very much of the pilgrims and the Puritans, and you will see that they believed in what Gary North talked about as cosmic personalism. They were in tune with God's hand in nature. Now, some modern scientists would say that these pilgrims were superstitious, ascribing way too much meaning to providence. And I would say, no, they were the men of true science and true learning because they saw God's hand in everything. The other kind of science is what the Bible speaks of as science, falsely so-called. I own a book called The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall and David Manuel. And I found it fun reading because it gives a theological interpretation to the early years of the founding of America, from the sending of Columbus to the settling of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and later American history. And these authors show how none of the details were by accident. Now, I don't necessarily agree with every interpretation that they give, but at least they're seeking to see God's hand in history. But back to the pilgrims, one of the things that really impressed me about them was their immediate response to drought and rain. They responded to those things as providences sent by God. They saw God's hand in everything from the Indians who saved their lives to the Indians who were attacking them, from plagues and droughts to unparalleled health and gentle rain. And when you see all of those details brought together by Peter Marshall and David Manuel, you come to love providential history. It makes you worship. Thanksgiving Day was a heartfelt response of the people to God for his mercies to them. Not simply as many textbooks teach Thanksgiving to the Indians. I'm sure they were thankful to the Indians too. But they were especially thankful to God. They saw God's hand as personally present in the affairs of their lives. And because they were able to respond to God's call to worship in nature, It enabled them to respond to God's calls to worship in the pulpit in a much more gutsy and full-hearted way than we tend to respond. By the way, Their worship services were like four hours long, sometimes longer. And yet these people, you read the histories of what went on, these people were just enraptured with love for God, devotion to God, adoration for what God did because they saw God present with them. Now this psalm ends with a two-fold goal for worship. Give God the glory and receive blessing. First part, most important part, is what we give to God in worship. We enthrone him on our praises. We acknowledge him to be the king, to be the sovereign. Verse 9 says, and in his temple everyone cries glory. That's what they see is God's glory. Verse 10 says, the Lord sat enthroned at the flood and the Lord sits as king forever. So they are focused upon worshiping God. He was, is, and will be. King, yesterday, today, and forever. That's the purpose of worship, to ascribe the glory to God. God will share his glory with no other. He's not going to share his glory with a preacher. He's not going to share his glory with a pianist. And when nature calls us to worship on Tuesday, He will not share His glory with chance, with thunder, with hail. Our awe at the power of nature must be translated into an awe at the power and majesty of our great God who loves us and cares for us. In the last few weeks, we've seen some pretty amazing weather, haven't we? In fact, that was commenting to somebody earlier how amazed I was at how one of those tornadoes was coming through, and then it jumped up, went over, and then landed again. I was wondering, I wonder who was in those houses that the tornado just jumped over. I don't know. But Romans 1 says that the moment our attention turns from serving God to serving the creation, we have lost our purpose and we have become idolaters. We might not have physical idols, but he says we're still idolaters. Same is true on Sunday. The moment our attention turns from serving God to the things that attend worship, The moment we come to worship to be served rather than to serve, we're missing out on the blessing of the second half of this point here, okay, verse 11. First goal of worship is critical. If we're to have the blessing of verse 11, we must come to worship with the attitude of verse 10 and the last phrase of verse 9. If you are focused on what you give rather than what you receive, distractions are not quite as important. But having done that, the second goal of worship becomes true. When the worshiper comes to offer sacrificial worship, he finds God pouring refreshing grace into his life. And so it says, the Lord will give strength to his people. The Lord will bless his people with peace. That's a second great reason to come to worship. The Lord will give strength to His people. The Lord will bless His people with shalom. Shalom is the reversal of everything that was lost in the fall. So it is health, it is prosperity, it's blessing, it's inner peace, it's outer peace. The Lord loves to bless His people in all of those ways. And so this psalm starts with a call to worship. It ends with a pronouncement of blessing that comes to those who are worshipers. So why is it that we are often not strengthened in worship. Why is it that we often do not find this supernatural peace? And some churches' worship committees are tasked with trying to figure out how to change the worship so that people could be blessed. And they're changing all of the circumstances, all of the different things like that. That's going down a wrong direction. I think this psalm gives us a hint. If you don't find God present in the storm, it is doubtful you will find Him present in the pew. Okay, if God is not at the center of your life six days a week, it is doubtful he will fill your heart one day a week. Calvin summarized the entire Christian life with the phrase quorum deo, meaning before the face of God, and the Christian life must be lived in the personal presence of God. My conclusion is this. There's no need to blot out reality in order to worship. That's sort of like saying that we need to blot out all the works of God in order to see God working. Right? It's a contradiction. And I have found myself with all distractions removed. It's all quiet in my study, and my heart has still wandered. Why? Because my heart did not have an attitude of worship. In America, we try to shut out the world so that we can tune into God. David had learned how to tune into God wherever he was. And it may have been, I think, one of the reasons why the Lord led me to interrupt our Joshua series to have this, you know, mini-series on the attributes of God, learning how to relate to God and see God as present in everything, every area of our lives. But in David's case, he was caught up in a thunderstorm. He didn't need to go to the temple or the synagogue to be spurred to worship. He constantly lived before God's heavenly temple. So let me end by reading that quote from R.C. Sproul Sr. one more time. The big idea of the Christian life is Coram Deo. Coram Deo captures the essence of the Christian life. This phrase literally refers to something that takes place in the presence of or before the face of God. To live quorum Deo is to live one's entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, and to the glory of God. May that become more and more a reality for each one of us. Amen. Father, I thank you from the beginning of this service to the end in the way in which you have been touching our hearts. Thank you for ministering through clay vessels like Gary and through the musicians. Thank you, Father, for meeting with us. We love you, and it is our glory to worship you. We want to learn to worship you better. And so I pray that You would fill us with Your Spirit, that You would illumine our minds and enable us to see You as present, 24-7, wherever we may be, and to not exclude You from certain aspects of our life. We want to know You and to know the power of Your resurrection in all that we do. And so we pray, Father, that you would indeed be with us and that we would seek your glory in everything. In Jesus' name, amen.