Thy Saving Health Among All Nations

We don't do this a great deal, although we did it last Wednesday night. I'm going to ask if we do it again today. Psalm 67 is on page 185, way in the front of your hymnal.

This will be the text, and not just for today, but really it's what I feel the Lord is dealing with us as a fellowship on, recently and probably will be for some time. Page 185, way in front of your book, Psalm 67. If you don't feel in the mood to read it, that's fine, but we'll read it in unison, those whose eyes are good or who are inclined to do so.

It's only seven verses. Okay? May God be merciful unto us and bless us. When you have more time, and I'm sure there are many here who know that psalm by heart, but when you have more time to just look at it, and you'll notice that this psalm talks about two things that have to come together in order for us to be able to really experience heaven on earth.

The two things are God's mercy and man's praise. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we pray in the Lord's prayer. And for that prayer to be answered, it's necessary on our side, God's mercy is constantly coming down, for us to hallow God's name to the point that it really rises up from our hearts as true praise.

In the gospel that Milton read, when the ten lepers cried out for healing and Jesus healed them of their leprosy, that was a sign of heaven. But it wasn't heaven. When one of the lepers, when he sees he's cleansed, turns around and starts praising God with a loud voice, and throws himself down at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks, that's heaven.

This man has now passed from darkness to light. He's come out of what he was into before, and he's begun to experience, in fact, the atmosphere of God. With his mercy, God draws near to us.

And with our praise, we draw near to God. And when God's mercy and our praise come together, water, living water, gushes forth out of the rock. Light begins to shine in the darkness.

The earth all around that point is filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Now God's mercy is constant, just as sure as the rising of the sun, more sure than the rising of the sun each morning. God is continuously with us and all the time pursuing us in love and mercy.

But when God's mercy is not met by our praise, not thanksgiving, it's like unrequited love. It's hindered, it's frustrated, it's thwarted. And we are all aware of the fact that all too often we're like those nine lepers who take their healing and go on their way without even a word of thanks.

We eat God's bread, breathe God's air, walk between God's angels, live under God's protection without even lifting up our hearts so much of the time. And sometimes of course we go through the motions of praise. And sometimes it's extremely beautiful, aesthetically beautiful, or to our aesthetic sense.

We say all the nice words and we sing beautifully and yet our hearts are still turned in upon themselves. In order for our praise to truly come forth and rise up and touch God's mercy, we have to have some help. And so in Psalm 67, Let the people praise Thee, O Lord.

Let all the people praise Thee. It's a prayer. And it may seem strange.

Why does anybody have to ask God to let the people praise Him? They can praise Him any time they want to. Nobody's stopping them. And yet we're incapable of praising God.

We don't have any praise in our hearts until our eyes are open and we begin somehow to see a glimpse of God's goodness. And it was told King David, The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and all that belongs to him because of the ark of God. So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the city of David with rejoicing.

And when those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling. And David danced before the Lord with all his might. And David was girded with a linen ephod.

So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the horn. As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michael, the daughter of Saul, looked out the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord and she despised him in her heart. Now the reason David could sing and dance like that with all his might was because David had got hold of the glory of God.

He'd seen it. He was beside himself with joy. He couldn't help himself.

And this just flowed out of him and reached out and touched God's mercy and the whole surrounding area was just like covered with the glory of God and everybody was praising God. Almost everybody. As the ark comes in to the city, here's Michael, David's wife, and she doesn't see the mercy of God at that moment.

All she sees is her husband acting like a fool. This guy jumping up and down, showing his legs to the maidens of the city. You know, this is ridiculous and she's very upset.

All right, the prayer, let the people praise thee, O God. Let all the people praise thee. Lord, enable Michael to see that she can praise God too and dance and sing.

Palm Sunday. For a short time, all of a sudden, all the people of Jerusalem, almost all, are just overwhelmed with praise which they themselves can't understand. Suddenly, with tremendous unity, there is a roar of praise.

Hosanna to the son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. This happened because God let the people praise their Messiah.

Pulled back the veil and gave them a glimpse of the coming glory. Pentecost. When the people, the believers, are now filled with the Holy Spirit and they begin to give testimony to God's goodness in other languages.

They were praising God because God was letting them, allowing them, inspiring them. So it has to be with us. We don't get some help on this, it isn't going to happen.

And when we say, let the people praise the Lord, what we're really saying for ourselves and everybody else is, open our eyes that we may begin to see. Because when we see, we'll have to praise Him. That doesn't do any good.

To say, come on you guys, praise God. Sing louder. Show God that you mean it.

That doesn't do any good until it's in here. And for it to be in here, I have to see God. Now what we're seeking is not just a one-shot Palm Sunday experience.

Or a once-in-a-lifetime Pentecost. Praise God for those and may they happen to us all. But what we're really seeking is a life of praise that goes on day in and day out and is joined to God's mercy.

Welded to it so that from this union of God's mercy and our praise continuously flows a river of living water that the earth may be filled with God's glory as the waters cover the sea and that His way may be known upon earth and His saving help among all nations. Let the people praise Thee, O Lord. Let all the people praise Thee.

There are two prayers that this congregation, I believe, needs to be praying, all of us, at this time. Let the people praise Thee, O Lord. Send forth laborers into the harvest, O Lord.

And these two really are connected. Today we're looking at the one prayer. Let the people praise Thee.

And God will surely answer that. Clearly He will answer it and He will answer it in several ways. First of all, God will ignite our hearts with praise when we allow Him to wash us in the land's blood.

True praise always begins at the cross. What does David say in Psalm 51? Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, Thou God of my salvation. And my tongue shall sing aloud of Thy righteousness.

Now, it's not only David who needs to be delivered from blood guiltiness, surely. Who of us doesn't? As far as God is concerned, I'm convinced of this. The only genuine praise there is is praise that rises from a heart that has been to the cross.

You know, this liturgy that we use on Sunday mornings. Sometimes people think that was written by a bunch of weaselly old men who were just trying to think how they could deaden everything. But that's not how it came about.

The liturgy, like language itself, came about through use. These were believers for centuries and centuries worshiping God, and it was a form that developed. It's not the exclusive and the only form.

Maybe it's not the best form for this one or that one, but it's a form that developed by people who had the sense to realize that the place you begin is at the cross. And so it starts out. A verse from Psalm 32.

I said I would confess my transgressions unto the Lord, and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. It understands that has to be the confession. Where am I? What do I need? Lord, cleanse me.

I'm dirty in here. God, be merciful to me, a sinner. That's not just for some guy who isn't saved yet.

That's for us all. And if we hop over that matter of asking for forgiveness and go right on to dancing in front of God's throne, we'll soon find ourselves with a pharisee. God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are.

God, I thank Thee that I know how to praise You, Lord. I'm not dead like them other people. Surely in each of our lives today we brought some kind of crud in our hearts, something that needs to be washed out.

And some of us are weighed down with guilt, and some of us are totally unaware of how messed up we are. But we start out at the cross. Lord, Lord, Lord, set us free.

Give us light. I don't know if we have enough seats up there, but if we don't, bring them down. We can sit here, whatever.

Secondly, I won't number all of these, but anyway, people get annoyed with the numbering of the points. Anyway, secondly, God will ignite our hearts to praise, true praise in our hearts, when we begin to respond to the Holy Spirit. Jesus says to the disciples, and He says to us, Receive the Holy Spirit.

That's a command. I'm giving Him to you. Take Him.

Receive Him. And many people here have experienced that, and perhaps there are many who haven't. And the Lord is saying, Receive the Spirit.

And for those who have received the Spirit and know what that is, Paul says, walk in the Spirit. Don't just be dancing around, you know, praising God that you've got the Holy Spirit. Walk in Him.

As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. All right. To receive the Spirit, to walk in the Spirit, to be led by the Spirit, all involve a response to the Spirit.

He's here, right now. And He's in our very flesh in many cases, in our very bodies. But He's not a bully any more than Jesus is.

He's not going to make us do something we don't feel like doing or want to do. He will not force His way on us. And so it's possible for us to walk right over Him, walk past Him, ignore Him, and it's only really when we settle down and truly listen that we begin from within to have Him teach us to cry, Abba, Father.

And nobody can call God Father unless the Spirit inspires that. And nobody can call Jesus Lord and know what He's talking about or she's talking about unless the Spirit inspires this. And as we do, praise comes forth.

Much of the time, we are much too busy, you know, and we're too involved in so many things, we don't know what it is to wait and yield to the Spirit, to settle down and listen. Paul tells us that the Spirit helps us in our weakness. He doesn't necessarily help us in our busyness and our fussing and our fretting, see.

But when we acknowledge the fact, come down to the place, we acknowledge the fact that we are weak and that we don't know how to pray as we ought. Then He begins to teach. And then prayer begins to rise and it becomes praise.

God will inspire true praise in our hearts when we yield to His way of love. The love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. But we have to yield to that love.

If I praise God with tongues of men, angels, or what have you, and have not love, I'm a noisy guy, I'm a clanging cymbal, and that's literally true. Lips that are forever gossiping and now start to praise God. And having got clean, it goes like this.

I really truly believe that the praise does not touch God's mercy. Come on in. Come on in.

Find a place. That's okay. Or a heart that is a continuous warehouse of grudges.

You know, I've been all week long marking down in my book everything everybody did wrong to me, and now I come to prayer meeting and I'm praising God. How can a merciless heart praise a merciful God? How can we praise the merciful God when our hearts are hard? Finally, God will inspire, and it has to come from Him. True praise in our hearts.

When we share His concern for all nations. God, be merciful to us and bless us so that we can sit around and have a nice time in the Lord and be spiritually sanitary. God, be merciful to us and bless us that Thy ways may be known upon earth and Thy saving health among all nations.

My house shall be called a house of prayer for the Jew only. Uh-uh. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.

Go make disciples of all people who are at least in the middle class and who don't smell and have good eating habits. You don't have to sit across from them in a potluck and see the food coming out their mouth. Let the people praise Thee, O God.

Who? Why, the Jewish people. Well, maybe the Christian people too. Let all the people praise Thee O let the nations be glad and sing for joy.

All right? When our praise and prayer fellowship becomes exclusive in any way, ingrown in any way, even if we have hundreds of hands uplifted and people come from miles around to see what's going on, if we're not out there seeking the poor, the maimed, the halt, the blind, the rejects like we are, if we haven't got a vision of God yearning and concerned for the multitudes out there, we're a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal and that's all we got going. The purpose of our coming together like this, tasting heaven as we should today, is so that His way may be known upon earth and His saving house experienced by all nations. God's blessing on us comes to us and doesn't immediately become a blessing for those out there.

We are frustrating God's spirit of praise. We hear a lot these days about the coming economic chaos which is due to hit the world followed by war, followed by famine. And I believe that we are to take seriously when the Spirit says this to the church.

But that's not all the Spirit says to the church. My children, dark days are coming. That's all you ever hear.

You better check out where the source of this prophecy is. Because the Spirit is also saying that prior to the dark, difficult days of persecution and tribulation, the earth will be shown God's ways and His saving house will be made known to all nations. And even when the trouble breaks loose, God's saving house will still be made known to all nations all the way through.

This is not a time for the believers to look at the dark clouds and tremble and form their little underground churches. This is a time as never before for us to learn to praise God and to go out there and manifest not only with our mouths but in our living how good God is. Let the people praise Thee, O God.

Let all the people praise Thee. O, let the nations be glad and sing for joy. For Thou shalt judge the people righteously and govern the nations upon earth.

Let the people praise Thee, O God. Let all the people praise Thee. Then shall the earth yield her increase and God shall bless us and even our own God shall bless us.

God shall bless us. And all the ends of the earth through our blessing shall come to fear Him and love Him and worship Him. And every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Let's pray. Father in Heaven, we just thank You and praise You for Your goodness manifested even in the midst of the haphazard, the chaotic, the painful, the tragic, the difficult, the lonely path some of us here have to walk We just thank You that You have manifested Yourself to us and we ask that You would help us to praise You in a way that's pleasing and right and true and good and lasting and that You would raise up in us, among us, and beyond us laborers for the harvest. We ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.