Praise No.2 Praise Him in the Sanctuary

All glory, all glory to thee, all glory to thee, all glory to thee. ♪ Alleluia, to thee we give our praise ♪ ♪ From heaven, may sweet hosannas rain ♪ ♪ The glory of angels, now raising clear the skies ♪ ♪ And full of heaven and earth, may they turn their glories high ♪ ♪ For we are at last, to thee we give our praise ♪ We're reading Psalm 100, Psalm 100. The heading says, a psalm for giving thanks.

So let's think back over the last few days of some of the things that we can give thanks to God for as we hear these holy words from scripture. Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness.

Come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us and we are his.

We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name.

For the Lord is good and his love endures forever. His faithfulness continues through all generations. I'd like to turn with you to the book of Psalms and about halfway through my address we'll be particularly concerning ourselves with Psalm 100.

Now let me explain for folk who are visitors here that it's our custom on a Sunday morning and to some degree as well on Sunday night to go through biblical passages or to take a particular theme of scripture and to look at its various facets or to work our way through the verses of scripture. And at the moment I'm engaged in just a very short series of addresses on the subject of worship. I felt last week or two weeks ago that I should return to this although I'd in some senses glanced through it on a Wednesday evening in our Bible studies a couple of years ago.

But praise is of course not only as I used the metaphor last week, a stream that widens and widens and widens as you go through the Bible, it's also part and parcel of the reason why we're gathered together here. I once remember and pardon me for repeating this but some of you wouldn't have been present on the occasion. I once remember a woman coming to see me, a very brilliant woman, one of the cleverest women I've ever encountered, very, very quick brain.

She had been in the Catholic Church for many a long year. She'd turned heretic, she'd turned apostate, she'd renounced her faith although she had been a nun, and she'd written a book against Christianity. And I got hold of the book, read it, heard she was on the south coast, wrote to her and asked her to come and talk to me, which she did.

And I've never forgotten the encounter, I've prayed for her, subsequently unfortunately a couple of years ago I read in the press that she committed suicide. But one of the things that she had to say to me was this, look I don't understand why it is that you lead your people here in the tabernacle to sing hymns and songs and so on and so forth. And I started to analyse her own experience of Christianity and came to the conclusion that it was utterly false, don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying this of all Catholics by any means, but as far as this lady was concerned it was the truth.

She had never fallen in love with the Jesus of Scripture, she'd never really made a heart commitment to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and as a result to her, singing hymns and intoning psalms in her convent had gradually got under her skin until she rejected the whole thing. I think she was one of the saddest people I ever met, and the final time that I had conversation with her, I remember I ran her to her home, and completely cutting across all that she'd been arguing with me over past sessions of discussion, utterly illogically she said to me as she closed the car door, Pastor Sergeant, please pray for me. And considering that she didn't even believe in God at that point I thought how curious.

But you see the reason for me telling you this is that this woman never really entered into a spirit of praise, because she never really entered into a spirit of conversion, you cannot thank God for that which you have not received. This is why again last week I was referring to the civic act of worship, the civic services. One can understand the reason why they're put on at Westminster Abbey and so on and so forth, but in one sense it's perfunctory, it's going through an act.

You cannot thank God for what is not real in your own experience. And so we're looking at this matter of praise which is part and parcel as I say of our tabernacle services as we sing our songs and these grand old hymns from the revivals of days gone by and as we bring to the Lord the worship that's due to his name. Last week I was content to try to speak to you about worshipping from the heart, praise him from the whole heart.

I was speaking especially from the psalm which says bless the Lord oh my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name. Did you hear that psalm properly? Bless the Lord oh my soul, not Lord bless my soul, it's the other way around isn't it? Bless the Lord oh my soul, see that's praise. Prayer is Lord bless me, praise is Lord let me bless you.

That's an incredible thing to understand, if you understand that then you can almost switch off for the next 25 minutes or so because I've got little to share that can add to your understanding. There were three main words in the Hebrew language actually that are rendered in the Old Testament in terms of praise. The first word is the Hebrew halal which actually refers to the corporate response, the spoken response of people to ministry that's moved them.

Now there are many many examples of this, I selected just one in Nehemiah chapter 5 and verse 13. Nehemiah has been correcting the people because they have been exploiting one another, offering loans and then taking in an enormous interest and Nehemiah says the people of God shouldn't do that, they shouldn't exploit vindictively any other member of the body of God. And so in the verse 13 the preacher there in a demonstrative fashion says I also shook out the folds of my robe and said in this way may God shake out of his house and possessions every man who does not keep this promise, the promise to set their house in order financially, so may such a man be shaken out and emptied.

Now the congregation didn't sit mute in those days, it's like preaching in Latin America where sometimes you wonder if the congregation is doing the preaching or whether you're doing the preaching. At this the whole assembly said amen and praised the Lord, halal. They enjoined in what the sentiments of the preacher were, they came alongside what he was saying, they made a corrective, they praised the Lord, halal.

The idea of corporate response to the ministry that has been received. You get further examples of that in the book of Psalms, Psalm 22 verse 22, I will praise thee in the midst of the congregation. But then you get another term in the Hebrew language for praise which is translated by the word praise in the English idiom, it's the word yadah and in Psalm 42 and verse 5 you've got the psalmist along with other people responding to the blessings of God.

Why are you cast down, Psalm 42 verse 5, the man is speaking to himself, why are you so cast down O my soul, why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. And that term praise means to stretch out the hand. Here's the man you see, he's part of a congregation and in one sense he's depressed, you come that way? Today I realise that this could be a great difficulty for some people, taking on the whole area of worship, the whole subject of worship and the last thing you feel like doing is worshipping God.

Well here's the psalmist you see and he's got this particular condition and so he speaks to himself, that can be the beginning of wisdom, not necessarily a sign that your brain is weak and weakening, he speaks to himself and he stretches out his hand to the Lord. Very often the Hebrews would do that not only metaphorically but also physically. In fact I would say that that was the norm in Hebrew worship rather than the unusual.

I do remember and I never really understood it and don't to this day, I remember someone coming to me some years ago, an elderly person and saying of a man who was a very close friend of mine that she didn't appreciate the way he prayed because when he was praying he sort of moved his hands, you know, oh Lord and want this from you Lord and so on and so forth. He really got into his prayer in a sort of physical way and it really put this dear lady off. I said to her, well there are two ways in which I can help you.

The first is realise the passion that this man has, he's trying with his body to convey the burden of his mind and secondly, close your eyes, then you'll have absolutely no problem whatsoever. You see, the stretching out of one's hand to the Lord, I'm not suggesting you must do it, but I'm suggesting that it is helpful so to do. Moses lifts his hand to the God of heaven and his hands are supported, you remember on that occasion, by two of his colleagues as the Israelites are fighting in the valley beneath.

The Apostle Paul, when he moves into the New Testament, or rather when we move into the New Testament and we read of what he has to say, he talks about men lifting up holy hands in prayer. Metaphorical, I doubt it, very much doubt it because of his Hebrew background. Remember what I said to you last week, the Lord Jesus, the Apostle Paul, all the ones that you come across in the New Testament, they were not born Lutherans, Presbyterians, Fiecites, whatever that is, Pentecostals, they had no denominations, thank God in those days we have the problem of denominations today, they didn't.

They were born into a Jewish culture and our Lord Jesus worshipped the Lord in Jewish fashion and biblically speaking, our own orientation towards worship must come from the Bible and that must be our corrective if necessary, not just our tradition. Not that tradition in itself is wrong, but tradition must always bow to the express directive of Scripture. So you've got in Hebrew understanding of praise, the whole congregation with their voices praising the Lord, in terms of vocal expression of assent, you've got this idea of the Hebrew stretching out his hands to the Lord, sometimes because he wants to express his love, sometimes because he wants to express his concern and his desires in terms of his petition.

And then finally, and I could have given you many references, there are 30 or 40 for each use of the different verbs, finally the word zamah, which you will come across in the Hebrew Bible in Psalm 47, let's turn to that for a moment and have a look at the way that praise is being expressed to the Lord in this particular instance. Psalm 47 and verse 6, sing praises to God, sing praises, sing praises to our King, sing praises. Well at least you get the message of what the Psalmist is trying to express, don't you? This is one of the Psalms that could quite easily have been tucked in during the last few Psalms in the book, where reference is made to Hebrew musicians also enjoying the praise of God.

It has a great deal to do with song, it has a great deal to do with melody, it's got a great deal to do with using the musical gifts that God has given. Now as I say my friend, I'm not just selecting one example, there are many, many examples in the book of Psalms, and I could take you to Chronicles and so on and so forth. I was going to count all these instances in the Old and New Testament, well I couldn't have done it in the New Testament because that was written in Greek and I'd have to work from a different yardstick.

But there are so many, many references to the idea of praising the Lord as a company of people joining our voices in praise to God, stretching out our hands, using our bodies if you like, prostrate before the Lord, standing before the Lord, very, very rarely in Scripture crouching before God as we generally speaking do, and then the concept of blending your voice before the Lord and bringing your musical gift to the Lord, and using all these different means of expressing your love and your adoration for the Lord God. Now, it seems to me that all this is well brought together in the most significant Scripture in the book of Hebrews, going on to the New Testament, in which reference is made to our Lord Jesus and a comment on His own prayer style. You've probably never looked at this verse in this context before, but most clearly this is how we are to understand it.

I refer to the second chapter of the book of Hebrews, where reference is being made to our Lord Jesus and the influence that He has upon His disciples, who are called sons, by extension, people like yourself and myself, you use that word son in a bisexual sense, we're all sons of God in this degree, and we read as you get to the end of the eleventh verse, so Jesus is not ashamed to call them ourselves brothers. He says, speaking of Himself, I will declare your name, now talking of God the Father, to my brothers in the presence of the congregation, I will sing your praises. This is how Jesus looked upon the times of worship that He had in the days of His own ministry on earth in the company of the disciples.

He was leading the praise of the disciples before the Lord in the presence of the congregation amongst the brothers that you have given me, I will sing your praises. And our Lord Jesus has very much, at the back of His mind, there is no other conclusion you can come to. He has the concept of the praise of God in the psaltery, the book of Psalms.

Now you recall that when our Lord was stepping out from the upper room, from the intimacy of being with His disciples, into the darkness of the night where He would be betrayed, where He would have to suffer all the trauma of Gethsemane and that great intercession prayer that He offered to the Father, you remember the last thing He did was with His disciples engage in singing, and the singing was from the book of Psalms. In fact I think I could isolate the Psalms that they sung to you, but that would take me a little bit of time. I'll just have to accept my teaching in this area.

So here you see is a back cloth to congregational praise in the Old Testament transferred into the New Testament and enhanced by the ministry of our Lord Jesus. Now let's go back to my friend, this nun, or this ex-nun. What was the problem? Well, Pastor Sargent, I don't understand why you have such a large congregation in the center of this town, and you advise them to, you encourage them to sing hymns.

She said, isn't hymn singing sort of serenading God, and doesn't it seem somewhat infantile that this God wants to be praised, as though He's a sort of spoiled husband who is always looking for the compliments and the congratulations of his wife, and so forth. She brought it down to that sort of almost cynical, sarcastic level. Yet let's just pause for a moment, and let's ask ourselves, what is one of the most exquisite things in life, all right, in terms of human relationships? Do you remember if you had a happy family home, do you remember the heights of joy that were yours as a little boy or a little girl when dad or mom came along and congratulated you that you'd done something well? Or maybe in a church service like this, you come along because you have, after the service you've been blessed by somebody's contribution, and you go to the person and you shake them by the hand or you put your arm around them, as the case may be in your relationship, and you say, thank you.

Thank you for what you've done. It was real help to me. There's a warmth and a glow, not only in you giving a praise, but in the reception of praise.

Have you ever thought how the whole of nature seems to join in a testimony to the fact that praise is one of the grandest expressions of emotion that there is? The birds seem to praise the Lord. We talk about the dawn chorus, do we not? I was out running on Friday, and I was up my shanktonbury and sisbury ringer, and there to see the new sheep, the new lambs, am I being, you know, am I going a little senile? Is this my dotage coming up when I say that it seemed to me they were terribly happy to be alive, and with the hop, skip, and jump and the acrobatics that some of them were engaged in, it seemed as though they were offering a physical expression of thanks for the gift of life. Praise is sort of basic to human relationships, and the psychological oddities that sometimes doctors and pastors have to cope with often have their psychological problems traced back to this.

Nobody ever expressed any sense of value or worth in that individual. Not so to go through life, and nobody indicates an interest in you. One of the great problems, I tell you, in evangelical churches is to get the horizontal responsibility right in terms of fellowship with one another.

Not only are we called here to have communion with God, He puts us in company. And when we engage in social, in spiritual intercourse with one another, when we share something of the love of God in our hearts, when we express to one another our appreciation of them because God has given their friendship to us, then I say we're honoring the Lord. In a very, very special sense, we are engaged in worship because worship is not just vertical, it is horizontal.

It is praising the Lord in the fellowship, in the company of His children. I believe in the communion of saints. I don't believe that that is fulfilled by sitting alongside someone for half an hour or an hour, depending on the length of service, on a Sunday morning.

And that is it. Praise. We praise because it's a natural thing to do.

And the greatest expression of praise that we can ever deliver is the praise to the Lord, our God, who has done so much for us. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Forget not all His benefits.

C.S. Lewis says, I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. All enjoyment overflows into praise. Why praise the Lord? Because you love Him and because there's a delight in praising.

There is such a wonder in one's own soul, such a fulfillment when you really praise God from the depths of your being. How do you prepare for praise? Well, three ways, or let me quickly suggest four. There is a means, isn't there? There is the mind that you use, there is the response of the moment, and there is the mood.

Let's take those four Ms. They'll be helpful for you to remember them. The means? Well, when Elijah, or rather Elisha, is in difficulty in knowing the will of God, you read in 1 Kings 3, verse 15, he makes the request, bring me a minstrel, or if you like, bring me a harpist. The music helped him.

Look, the time that we spend in singing on a Sunday morning or evening or Wednesday before the Lord is not sort of a fill-in, you know, get them going before the preacher gets going. That really is a most immature way to look on this. I find that I need the help of singing, I need the help of praise to move me into a sense of consciousness of the presence of God.

I need means. Cananiah, in 1 Chronicles, chapter 15, verse 22, was a man who was particularly gifted in leading the people in music, in song, in singing. That's good.

Means were used in the Old Testament and also in the New. What is it, brethren? When you come together, each one of you has a song, and so on and so forth, says Paul. Use means.

Use your mind. Bless the Lord, O my soul. We're not mindless people.

Forget not all his benefits. You use your rational nature in praise. Why should I praise this God for all that he's done for me? What Jesus has done for this soul of mine, the hearth has never been told, therefore I praise him with my mind as a stimulus.

The moment. Well, it's good, isn't it, to spontaneously burst forth in praise to the Lord. Here were children playing around in the temple area as our Lord Jesus moved in on one occasion, and they kept rushing up to him and saying, Hosanna to the Son of David.

And Jesus was delighted. And the disciples, well, they seemed to be a little delighted, but the establishment weren't. You didn't do that sort of thing.

Why? Well, it wasn't in the book. It wasn't in the Jewish liturgy. Imagine a little child in a school playground running up to somebody and saying, Yippee! It's a thing that kids do, not so spontaneous, unpremeditated.

Here they were. Our Lord Jesus has come through Jerusalem's golden gate. They've been present.

They've heard of this. They realize in a naive way that this is a special person. And so they dart in and out of those temple courts.

And they cry, Hosanna, Hosanna to the Son of David. And Jesus said that perfected praise was illustrated in the reaction of those children. He never said that about anybody else's praise.

He never said that about anyone else's praise. But in Matthew 21 and verse 16, you'll discover he gives that accolade to these kids. There was biblical content, but it was simple.

It was not private. It was public. It was not exclusive.

It was inclusive. Three cheers for Jesus. I remember once one of the most sober men that I ever knew going to a particular meeting of ministers, and there was such a sense of the presence of God, and the singing was so wonderful that all of us who either heard later or were present on the occasion, who discovered that this man was saying, Let's give Jesus three cheers, nearly fell off the chair because it seemed so incongruous.

And yet, in one sense, it was so wonderful. He didn't lose anything by it, and neither is it something that you can ape. It was the spontaneity of the moment.

He was taken up with the thought of what Jesus had done. But when someone's done something good for you at the human level, you're inclined to say thank you. Why should it be a liturgical process within the church? I don't know.

Here's Martin Lloyd-Jones. He says, You can be so afraid of disorder, so concerned about discipline and decorum and control that you become guilty of what the scripture calls quenching the spirit. There is no problem of discipline in the graveyard.

There is no problem very much in a formal church. The problems arise when there is life. A poor sickly child is not difficult to handle, but when that child is well and full of life and vigor, then you've got your problem.

But what mother wouldn't settle for the problem rather than sickness, calming the child into inactivity? Means, mind, moment, mood, exchange the garment of heaviness, says Isaiah in 61 and the third verse, for the spirit of praise. Not easy, is it? I was trying to deal with one dear lady last week who felt little like praising the Lord. She'd just lost her husband.

Yet sometimes you have to speak to your own heart, don't you? Bless the Lord, oh my soul. Well, I've lost my husband, but he's in heaven. I can praise God for that.

I'm sick, and it's not easy to praise the Lord, but I could even be sicker, so let's praise the Lord that at least it's just at that level. You speak to yourself. Do you know Carrie Ten Boom, that lovely Dutch Christian woman, when she was in the concentration camp in Germany, each morning she stood up and she sang the hymn, Stand Up and Bless the Lord.

This hundredth psalm is known as the old hundredth, right? It's a unique psalm. It has with it all the aspects of worship that remain perennial or should be perennial in the experience of God's people down the years. One commentator reckons that this psalm had in mind and was used by all the non-Jews, the proselytes, those who have been converted to Judaism as they came from their various countries and they zeroed in, they came towards the temple, shouts for joy to the Lord all the earth.

A psalm for giving thanks, the only psalm so designated in the whole of the psaltery, and this psalm speaks of the joy that should be ascribed and the worship that should be given to the Lord for all that he has done. Worship the Lord with gladness, all the earth. The day will come when the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God.

One day our Saviour shall return and this particular prophetic aspect of the psalm will be fulfilled, for every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. That day has got to come, but you and I can anticipate it as we worship the Lord now with gladness, as we come before him with joyful songs, sometimes repetitively, always, however, with the area of reason and thought and convictions as the stimuli being uppermost. Know that the Lord is God.

There are certain basic things that we know about God in this psalm. We know, one, the Lord is God, two, we know the Lord is our Creator, three, we know the Lord is our Owner. It is he who has made us.

We know the Lord is our benefactor. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture, and we know that the Lord is always good. The Lord is good and his love endures forever.

Five reasons to stimulate us. The hymn writer puts it, let those refuse to sing who never knew our God. You can't sing praise to God unless you've entered into something of the experience of this psalm in which we're told that God is our God, that God is our Creator, that God daily is our benefactor, we are his sheep, the sheep of his pasture, all the symbolism that that brings to mind in terms of what our Lord Jesus has done to rescue us, the great shepherd of the sheep.

Well, as a result of that, we should be entering into his courts with praise. Look at verse four, and into his gates with thanksgiving. Did you not know that in the tabernacle, God's place was represented in terms of the Holy of Holies? And you got to the Holy of Holies, which was surrounded by a linen fence, through one gate which was breaking into the fence, and that gate was called the gate of thanksgiving.

And the court into which you went through that gate was the court of praise. That's the back class to that verse. Enter his gate, the gate of thanksgiving, into his court where praises are being ascribed to the Lord, and you discover, as another psalm tells you, the 22nd and the 3rd verse, God inhabits the praises of his people.

He's there at the headquarters where praise was geographically, physically made in Old Testament days. Now, the same obtains today. He's in the center of the praise which is offered by his people.

That's why our Lord Jesus said, I will praise your name amongst the congregation. And so we ask God that as we come to worship him here in the tab, our worship may be enlivened, may be stimulated. We may sometimes have to tune our hearts, as dear Les Stride used to tune his violin, as I said last Sunday evening.

Sometimes your strings are relaxed, they're limp over the bridge, and you need to stimulate yourself, you need to tune yourself into praise. Do you use moments to do that? Or do you just sit in your pew and think, well, let's get through the evangelical liturgy of the service? A plague on liturgies in service. We can't criticize those who are liturgical in their denominations if we ourselves are in the same groove with a hymn and a prayer, a hymn and a prayer, a hymn and a prayer, and a sermon, a hymn and a prayer, and a thing, as someone has summarized the evangelical liturgy of most churches.

Praise is engendered where the Lord is. The spirit of the Lord is not just when the preacher throws away his sermon notes. The spirit of the Lord is present when the people of God make a joyful noise to him and bless him.

And sometimes that joyful noise is followed by a blessed silence. The Lord is in his holy temple, and all the earth keeps silence before him. So many moods, so many different reactions, so much that is valid in terms of our worshipping the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

Says one preacher, a drop of praise is an inexcusable acknowledgment for a notion of mercy. Did you give God more than a drop of praise? Are you going to this morning? Mary Magdalen says, give unlimited credit to our God. Unlimited credit.

The congregation of the Hebrews, when they came together, they were spontaneous in the praise that they offered the Lord. They were enlivened because God had done something for them. Do you know something? He's done more for you than he had for them.

He's given us the Lord Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. He raised him from the dead to prove that we are his children. The Old Testament Hebrews, they had an anticipation, but they didn't live to see that, nor to enter into the good of it as you and I have.

So we have even more right than they to enter the courts of praise, enter through the gate of thanksgiving, and to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Not because the preacher said so, not necessarily in a perfunctory fashion, but because in our heart of hearts, this is what we want to do more than anything else. Let's sing that song, When I Look Into Your Holiness.

601 in Songs of Fellowship. We'll bring it up on the overheads in a moment. Some of you will know this by heart, you'll not need to look at your book or at the relevant spot on the wall.

Then tune all your emotions into the ascribing of praise to our God. As you say, what C.S. Lewis has told us, and a greater authority scripture has made plain, that the reason why we live is to worship, is to bring honor to our great God and Father, to our Lord Jesus, and in thankfulness for the gift of the Spirit. Let's stand and sing.

Let's sing it all accompanied. Let's sing it all together. Let's sing it all together.