Let's open our Bibles now in Psalm 146, 1, 4, 6. We will read this Psalm tonight, 146. Psalm 146, beginning in verse 1 through the end of this psalm. This is the word of the living God, and God speaks to His church by saying, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth. On that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob. whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever. who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisons free. The Lord opened the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bound down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the sojourners. He upholds the widows and the fatherless. But the way of the wicked He brings to ruin. The Lord will reign forever. Your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the Lord." Let's pray. Close your eyes. Let's talk to God again. Our Heavenly Father, we read Your Scripture and this call to pray. Praise Your name. And we want, God, to see the glory of Your name through this psalm. Work on us, God, through the works of the Holy Spirit. Open our eyes, our ears, our hearts to You, and help us to identify what we need to change to praise You according to Your Scripture. We pray all of these in Jesus' name. Amen. We are also covering tonight Lord's Day 47. You can find Lord's Day 47 in our Forms and Prayers book, page 254. It's just one question. 254, Lord's Day 47. I read the question. I invite you to answer. What does the first petition mean, answer? Hallowed be your name, ye nations. Help us to truly know you, to honor, glorify, and praise you for all your works, and for all that shines forth from them. your almighty power, wisdom, kindness, justice, mercy, and truth. And it means to help us to direct all our living, what we think, say, and do, so that your name will never be blasphemed because of us, but always honor and praise. Thank you. We are before one of the most important phrases in the Lord's Prayer. We are covering the Lord's Prayer here, so I remind you about the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, and Jesus told us to pray like this, our Father in heaven, I don't know if you're already looking to this phrase, hallowed be your name, but the idea is to sanctify the name of the Lord, to put the name of the Lord so high that no other name can be compared to His name. The idea is that when we look to His name and when we are praying to Him, we should realize that we are not dealing with a being like us or with a normal God of man or with something invented by someone else. When we are talking to our Father in heaven, we are talking with the Lord of everything. We are looking to the only One who is holy and completely holy. We are looking to the owner of the universe who made everything by His Word and who controls everything because He is the One who rules the nations, who rules the universe, and everything depends on Him to exist. If God wants, He can just put an end in everything exactly like He made everything come to existence. And this is the God that we are being called to praise in the Psalm number 146. I could go through Matthew 6 verse 9, but I prefer to take one of the Psalms who speaks about how we can do that practically to help us to understand what it means to say, Hallowed be Your name. And that's why we are moving our eyes to this psalm. And we know the psalms, they speak about everything. We have so many different kinds of psalms. We have psalms that will bring lament. They will cry for help. They will ask the Lord for His power. They will praise the Lord. But by the end of the psalms, There is only one thing that this book is offering to God, and that is praise. At the end of the Psalms, we will find many psalms composed to glorify and to praise the name of the Lord, because the book of Psalms recognized that when we look to God, there is only one thing that we can offer to Him, and that is our praise. Praise the Lord, it's the first phrase and the last phrase of this psalm, and will be repeated many times among the last psalms. But the idea here is that we should praise the name of the Lord. Something that you don't know, maybe, or sometimes we don't recognize because of our lack of understanding of the Hebrew language. It's that this psalm, as other psalms by the end of the book of Psalms, they use a name of the Lord that we only can find when Moses received, when Moses met God in the burning bush. And there God said to him, I am what I am. And this name, he's represented here by the words lore in verses 1, 2, 5, 9, and 8, 9, and 10, because here this psalm is calling us to look at him like he showed himself to his people. I am what I am, we must pray that I am God. And why is this important for this psalm and for the doctrine that we will cover tonight? It's important because we must understand first who is that God so then we will be able to praise Him like He should be praised. The problem of many Christians around the world is that they don't understand who is their God. And sometimes because we don't understand, we cannot approach Him in a proper way. We sometimes go to church as a lot of people go to church just because it's Sunday and we must go to church on Sundays to fulfill the commandment. But sometimes we don't recognize what is the meaning of coming to God's presence to offer a service to Him. And this is what this psalm will try to help us to understand. The first two verses, they will speak about the author of this psalm saying, my soul prays the Lord. I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God while I have been. The intensity here, it's made by purpose. The idea of the psalmist is to introduce us to the praise of the Lord by showing that we are not able to praise Him if we are not completely in this movement of praising His name. And this is what Heidelberg is also bringing us in the first part of the answer. Help us to truly know you, to honor, glorify, and praise you for all your works. The idea is that when we understand, when we know God, we will understand that it is only possible to praise Him when we focus everything we are and everything we have for Him. So, how can we pray with our soul? How can we pray as long as we live and while we are existing? It's only possible if we look to Him as He is. And if you understand that, you will see that the only way, for example, using a simple way to explain this, to praise God while we are here tonight is putting all our efforts to look to Him while we are here. It's interesting because we come to the church on Sundays and sometimes we don't see what is in our hearts and what we are really thinking in before coming to God's presence. Sometimes we come to church and while we are singing we are following the letters, we are following the tones, but our minds they are not singing and we are not joining the others in that singing. Because our hearts are so full of so many things that are around our mind, and our minds are so busy thinking so many things that we need to do today or in the next week, that we just come, we attend, and we go home. But the service doesn't change us. The service doesn't help us to find His face. The service doesn't help us to understand what is joy, what is pleasure for being in the presence of this holy God. Sometimes we don't understand that we have in front of us tonight the God Almighty, the Creator of the universe, as this psalm will say later, the One who made everything exists, and He's in our front, and instead of destroying us because of our sins, He's loving us because of the blood of Jesus Christ who saved us from our sins. It's not every day that we can come to the presence of a king. It's not every day that we can come to the presence of the Creator of the universe. Actually, for us it is. because we are His children. But if you understand that, you will approach Him like you're supposed to do, and you will come to His presence knowing that tonight, it's today actually, when we meet the church to serve Him, it's the day that we will find God. we will find the one who can take care of us, who can save us, who can deal with all the situations in our lives, and the only one who can save us from the sin. This is a unique situation, and sometimes we don't see the greatness of this. But here in the first two verses, the author is going much deeper than a service. I use the service as an example, because he is speaking about praising the Lord with his soul as long as he lives and while he exists, because the psalmist knows that there is no other response for a Christian than to praise God in every situation and in every day of our lives. That is why our service to God is the result of our week with God. If we go every day to the presence of our God, if we go every day to the Scripture to listen His voice, if we go every day to pray to Him to have a good relationship with our God, if we go every day to sing Him, to praise His name with our mouths, with instruments or whatever we have to glorify His name, or service on Sunday will be different because it will reflect what we have been doing during the whole week. But our call is not to praise Him only on Sundays, but it's to praise Him all the time in every And then the psalmist brings some reasons to help us to glorify His name, to say like in the prayer, Hallowed be Your name. And the first one is in verses 3 and 4, because our trust It's only a good thing if we trust only on God and not in someone else in this world. Princes, they are being the example in these two verses, and it's very interesting to see how people put their trust in princes instead of believing in God. It's amazing to look sometimes to the life of many Christians in the past. If we go, for example, through the Reformation, we will see that the Reformers, they were being persecuted almost everywhere in Europe by that time. But they were not afraid. They were working hard to produce something to glorify the name of the Lord. And it's funny to see some of them. Like Calvin, for example, he was in many different situations by which he was trying to put his trust only on God. I don't know if you know his history, but this man, he had 38 different diseases. And all of them he could not heal with a medicine or something like this because there was no medicine for any of those diseases. He was sick every day in his life, basically. And it's not only one pain in the arm or a headache or something, but it's 38 different things. that could take his peace out and make him stop to trust, for example, in his God. How can you worship your God having so many problems? Well, it's very interesting to see that in his books he never complained about all those situations in his life. We know about his life, about his health, because other people wrote about him and not because he was complaining while he was writing the doctrine that he offered to God. And he produced so many books, he composed songs to praise the name of the Lord, he produced prayers that until today we can read and we can recognize he praising the name of the Lord of his salvation. Because nothing in this world, or the fears of this world, or any man in this world, they could take his trust from God. He trusts God, as we are supposed to trust God. Look to the Scripture by itself. Look to the book of Acts. And let's remember how the people of God were being put in jail, they were being persecuted, they were being murdered, and still they were trusting their Lord. By the end of the Scripture, God wrote a whole book, Revelation, to His people who were being destroyed by the Roman Empire because they were Christians. And in that book, God was saying to them, continue to trust on me because I will guarantee your salvation. And this is what it matters. I am saving you forever. So it doesn't matter what we are passing through during this life. He is our Lord and your Savior. He continues in verse five through nine. bringing many other reasons to praise the name of the Lord. And the first thing he says in verse 5 is, blessed is he who help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God. The God of our salvation, it's the God who will never leave us alone. It doesn't matter what we are facing or it doesn't matter the situation that we are passing through, He is the steward God. He will help us in any situation and we can put our hope on Him because His promises will ever be fulfilled. There is nothing that God said in the Old Testament and in the New Testament that didn't happen, only those who belong to the future. Of course, but when God said that He would take care of His people, He fulfilled His promise. He planned to send a Messiah. He sent the Messiah. He saved His people from their sins. They rejected Him so many times, and He said, I will keep my covenant. They said, we will praise other gods. And he said, no, you will come back to me because I am your God. He never leave us alone. He will never let us go to a wrong way because he's the one who is saving us. And if we are here today, it's not because we can trust in ourselves, but it's because He's still being a good Father for us because He's keeping us in His presence. So many motives to praise Him, right? And He's the Lord of creation. Verse 6 will introduce us to this situation. He made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them. How can we approach a God who can make everything that exists from nothing and not praise Him for His acts? Look to yourself now. Look to your body, to the perfection of your body. Even if we have problems in our bodies, they are still perfect. a brain give orders to an arm, to a leg, to a heart. I don't know how I am doing this, but my heart is still beating. I have no idea. I am not doing anything to make my body work, but it is still working. It's not magic. It's God's creation. Now look to the world around us. So many people, billions of people, and God is giving food to every one of them. Look to the birds. Let's go to Matthew again. Look how God is feeding them every day. They are not worried about tomorrow. They are not anxious about many different things who could happen around them. No, they are just trusting in their God, and they are still there singing every morning. Even when winter comes, They are still there singing, and we still can see them flying and showing God's grace when almost nothing can survive outside. This is God's creation, God's perfection. God is perfect in everything, and when we realize that, we must hallow His name. We must sanctify His name because He is something. He is a God that cannot be compared to anything else that exists in this world. The only answer is praise Him, praise Him. He is the one who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food for the hungry, verse 7 says. And it's very interesting to see this because here the justice in contrast to the oppression of this world is something that really bothers many people around the world. The biggest question for many of those who claims that they don't believe in any God or they don't have any faith is that how can a God exist and evil still exist in this world? Well, the Scripture says that no evil will be an evil without an answer or a response from our God. God will come to judge the nations. He will give the answer for those who oppress His people and for those who oppress other peoples. He is a God who cannot accept sin, and He cannot accept oppression in the world that He creates. And it's very interesting because every man who oppresses this world, they already die or they will come to their end. And once they die, they will realize that there is a God in heaven. And in the last day, Jesus will come to judge again and only those who had their sins paid by Him, by Jesus Christ Himself, they will find mercy because God is a God of justice, and He will execute His justice for the oppressed. He will give food for the hungry, and sometimes We don't see how this is already real for every Christian around the world, even those who are in lack of food to feed themselves, like in countries where there is persecution to the church. I can tell you many reports from Christians who are in prison, and they don't have food because those who arrest them, they don't give them food to punish them, to force them to deny the name of Jesus Christ, and still they are strong. They are not complaining, but they are telling to the other believers that God is feeding them with salvation. with hope for the everlasting life. Something that food in this world cannot give us. There is no tree of life anymore where we can find life and live forever. The only life, everlasting life, can be found in the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. He's feeding us with life forever. And He's setting us free, free from the bondage of sin, free from our desires, free from Satan who is trying to corrupt the church and destroy our relationship with God. He's giving us freedom every day. He is still opening the eyes of the blind, not like Jesus made in the beginning of the church while He was here among us, but He's opening our eyes today. If we are looking to Him and if we are seeing our God like He is, it's because He's opening our eyes, helping us to see that we have a Father in heaven. And if we can recognize Him as a Father, it's because this miracle already happened with us. The love of our salvation is taking care of His people. He's working hard every day and during the night to save us. And what we can do seeing this report about our God that Psalm 146 gave us? Well, the answer is what Heidelberg is telling us and what this psalm is also calling us to do. we must direct our all living, what we think, say, and do, so that your name will be never blasphemed because of us, but always honored and praised." This is what Heidelberg says. our life must praise the name of our Lord. With our breathing, we should praise the name of our Lord. With what we think, we must glorify His name. We must do every effort we can to please Him, to glorify His name, and to show to this world there is a God that must be praised. And when we do that, when we put every effort that we have to glorify Him, to praise Him, to please Him, we will be able to sing like this song call us to sing, praise the Lord of my soul. I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. desperately need to praise Him because He deserves to be praised for everything He made for us. I don't know the number of believers that are God already saved, but I know from the Scripture that today, tonight in heaven, a number that we cannot count from every nation, from every tribe, from everywhere in this world, they are singing praises to the name of our God. And we who are here, we are joining them in this praise because we can also recognize that He's our God, that He's our Savior. And this is our response. We must fight for this deeply. We must fight everything in our hearts who is keeping us from doing this. because we must love Him with all our strength to be able to praise the name of our Lord. Hallowed be Your name, O God. Let's conclude applying this to our There is an author named Kevin DeYoung, and he said that everyday things will try to suffocate us to leave what this psalm and what Heiderberg is calling us to do. It's very hard to say, Hallowed be your name, if we are full of other things in our hearts and in our minds. But it's Jesus Christ by itself who calls us to bring all of this to His presence, and He will take it from us. We have a wonderful Father. We have a wonderful Savior, and He doesn't want you to fight alone. Your burden is not only yours. He wants to take your burden for Himself, and He wants to bring you peace. Don't let your mind, in your everyday things that are bringing concern to your heart, make you stop to praise the name of the Lord. Our life It's a life who should serve the Lord in worship. When we wake up every day, we must worship Him. When we go to our work, we must worship Him. When we face trials, we must worship Him. because in every situation in our lives He is there blessing you and taking care of you. You are never alone. You are never in lack of His love and in lack of His kindness and mercy. Our life should be lived to praise Him, not just in a moment like we are doing here, but in every breath that we take, we should praise Him and glorify His name. And of course, all of these bring us to the same thing that Psalter is saying in the first two verses. with everything we have, with everything we are, we are called to praise His name until our last breath, breath. So, brother, sister, it's time to change your lives again, to offer Him ourselves as a good sacrifice to our Lord. Let's pray. Let's talk to our God again. Our Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Scripture. Thank You for the teaching of this song. And we ask You, Lord, that You can work on us tonight helping us to say, hallowed be Your name. May God, our minds, our hearts, our body, and everything we have, will praise Your name. And in everything, we will realize that Your grace and mercy are keeping us safe. Please, God, help us to live a life for You. Help us to make our hearts and minds empty, to be able to glorify Your name. Help us to put everything we have in Your hands, every concern, every anxiety, and may we will be able to celebrate your name as the Psalter called us to do. With our soul, God, we want to praise your name. Until the last day of our lives, we want to join the congregation of the saints, praising you and glorifying the name of our Savior. make that happen on us and help us to pray, hallowed be Your name.