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The official audio library of sermons preached at Kingstree Church in Sabina, Ohio.
We are made to live on God alone.
We are made for Him.
Your soul is made for Him.
Every brokenness inside of us is because in one way or another we've put fuel other than
God into a vehicle made to run on God alone.
We've tried to eat something other than God, which is when we're made to feast upon Him
alone.
And so when He says, Praise my name, He's not saying I'm so
You know, needy that I need you to praise me.
He's saying, Your soul is dying.
Praise me.
The following message was recorded at King's Tree Church.
May the Spirit use it to help you see, savor, and sing the beauty of God in the crucified
and risen Jesus Christ.
This morning we're in our seventh sermon in the series going through the Psalms.
This is our second to last sermon.
But even though it's not the final sermon in the entire series, it does bring us to what
might be called the pinnacle of the series, the mountaintop of the Psalms.
Because if you remember, the Psalms are structured in such a way that they move from
lamentation into praise.
Remember, when we started this series, I laid out for you each of the five books that the
Psalms are built up of.
Each of those five books has a particular
um Emphasis of either lamentation or praise.
And in the beginning, you have a lot of lamentation and only a little bit of praise.
And as you're moving through, that balance is out.
And then at the end, the Psalms have a lot of praise, and the lamentation has gone away.
And what that's what that shape is showing us is that this whole book is teaching our
hearts to praise the Lord.
The whole book is bringing us through a journey from the night into the day, from sorrow
into rejoicing, from lamentation into praise.
And of course, praise has its place in sorrow and in the night and in lamentation.
It's it it belongs there as well.
But there's this sense in which praise is especially the morning song.
It's it's the time morning as an M-O-R-N.
Morning, the does the dawn is breaking, and praise befits the coming of day.
And that's what we're coming to this morning, to the place where the Psalms have been
moving our souls, shaping our souls, making us by God's grace into a people shaped like
this: lamentation unto praise, sorrow into joy.
And if you think about it, the whole the whole series has been structured that way.
We started with looking at lament, and then we looked at different types of lament.
Then we moved into trust, which is the hardship is still upon me, but I'm holding fast to
the Lord.
Then we looked at thanksgiving, which is as the light is beginning to break, I'm giving
thanks for what I'm seeing the Lord doing.
And now we're moving into praise.
And this shape, this shape is not incidental, this movement.
From lamentation to praise.
That's the shape that God has woven into the book of Psalms.
It matters that the prayer book of God's people is shaped like this, because this is the
shape that He's working through this book into our own soul.
It's the shape, if you think about it, of the crucified and risen Christ.
And as I hope to show by the end here, it's the shape ultimately of all creation.
This movement from darkness into light, from lamentation into praise.
Now, we're going to be in Psalm 146.
We're going to jump around a little bit, but Psalm 146 will be kind of our home base for
today.
But before we look at the text and get into the sermon, I want to just do what I've done
the last few weeks, which is to lay out for you a working definition.
What do we mean by praise?
What do I mean by praise when I'm talking about talking about it today?
And to do that,
I need first to give a working definition for worship, because praise is kind of a subset
of worship.
You have worship here, and praise is a particular expression of worship.
So one workable definition for worship is this: worship is the whole souled treasuring of
something and anything that flows from that treasuring.
So worship is treasuring something with your whole soul, all that you are.
And then anything that comes out of that treasuring, words, deeds, actions, thoughts, that
all that is counted as worship.
That's how Paul can say all of life is worship, because all of life ought to be a
outworking of what we have seen of God in Christ, a working out of the supreme treasuring
of God in our life.
Now, praise is a subset of this.
Praise, I would define this way.
Praise is declaring the particular excellencies of that object that we treasure.
So praise has a particularly uh declarative element to it, a making known element to it.
Here's the object I'm treasuring in my worship, and praise is however I make known the
excellencies of this, through words, through songs, also through actions.
Through my own values, through what I do in my life.
As I am making known the excellencies of this object, I'm praising, I'm praising this one
that I'm treasuring here.
And that might sound complicated, but we all know what this is by our own experience.
So just think about it.
You've experienced something amazing.
Whether it's a movie, you're like, wow, that was a that was great.
I can't wait to tell someone about that.
A meal that was the best you've ever had, a person who's just so great or so funny.
A place, you know, a state park or a particular walk.
When you experience these things, if you're by yourself, what you want to tell somebody
about them.
I think you've experienced that before.
You you have something happen, a meal, a movie, a story, a song, whatever it is, and
you've loved it, but there's some piece of that that then wants to tell somebody, this was
so great.
you'd love this movie.
this person is so funny.
you've got to come see this park.
You want to tell people about it.
And that is praise.
That's praise.
You're expressing the excellencies of it.
it's this part is so great.
This part of the story is just the best.
This meal was just the the flavors came together.
Doing that is praise.
Doing that is praise.
And the Psalms are shaping our souls so that they do that about God in Christ.
So that.
We have souls that have seen and are seeing the desirability of God in Jesus Christ.
So that we have souls that are not just seeing it, but savoring it, treasuring it, loving
the excellencies of who God is in Christ.
And that this then translates into a singing, which doesn't have to be verbal, it can be
any action, our our proclamation, the living out of the excellence that we've seen.
And savored.
The psalms are shaping our souls to be like that, to be praise-oriented souls.
Just push this up a little bit.
The psalms are shaping us to have praise-oriented souls.
So that's what I'm hoping to show for you this morning.
Let me pray, and then we'll get into these things more specifically.
But let me pray first.
Father, it is it is one thing to stand here and talk about praise.
It is another thing for us to live lives marked by the praise of you, even as we are
feeling the groaning of this present world in our bodies and all around us.
So I ask now this morning that you'd give me grace to be clear, to be helpful, that your
word would be unfolded rightly, and that the Holy Spirit would
would cause the excellencies of Christ to be seen by his people, savored by his people,
and sung in all of our lives as praise to you.
So come, Father, I pray, gather us into the hallelujah that you are working in all the
world.
We pray these things in Jesus' name.
Amen.
So you even even as I just prayed, the majority of this sermon is going to be looking at
this word hallelujah, which you're probably familiar with, but the word itself means
praise the Lord.
It's a call to praise the Lord.
So we're going to be looking at that.
But before we do, I want to touch on the structure of the Psalms of Praise, because there
are a number of Psalms of Praise.
It's the second most common genre and it has a particular structure.
And the structure is very, very simple.
It's a summons to praise, the reasons to praise, and a summons to praise again.
Call people to praise the Lord, tell them why, call them to praise the Lord again.
That's that's the structure, not super complicated.
Let me read it for you.
I'm gonna read Psalm 146 and see if you can hear that structure as we go through it.
Praise the Lord.
Now pause.
Every time you see praise the Lord, that word in Hebrew is just hallelujah.
It's being transliterated as praise the Lord, but it's hallelujah.
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 will perish.
Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope.
Is 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 prisoners free.
The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.
The Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the sojourners.
He upholds the widow 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.
So look at our structure here.
First, it begins with a call to praise, the summons to praise in verses one and two.
Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord, O my soul.
I will praise the Lord as long as I live.
Now, as I said, that word praise the Lord is the word hallelujah.
We'll return to that at the later on in this sermon.
But what I want to draw attention to is.
He's not only saying, Praise the Lord, all of you, communally, but then he turns around
and says, Praise the Lord, O my soul.
So he's calling himself also to praise the Lord, which is important because he's not
waiting to feel like praising the Lord before he does.
It begins not by saying, Hey, I feel like praising the Lord, so I will, just
spontaneously.
It begins with a summons.
Praise the Lord, my own soul.
Praise him, speaking to his own soul.
Because as I said with Thanksgiving, the same is true here.
If we just wait until we feel like praising, maybe once in a while we will, but it's not
going to be super common.
It's not going to be one of the things, it's not going to be as common as we find it in
the Psalms.
If we just pray what we feel, then our prayers are going to fall into the ruts of our own
personality.
And we're just going to begin praying our personality to the Lord over and over and over
again.
That's why He's given us a particularly structured prayer book that says, praise the Lord.
You need to praise the Lord, but I don't feel like it.
You need to praise the Lord.
Still, it's right here.
It's right here.
And so it is important that the Psalms of Practice to praise the Lord.
And as we read them as our own prayers,
We are calling ourselves to praise the Lord.
That's important.
That's part of the structure of this book.
So it's legitimate to recognize sometimes I don't feel like praising the Lord.
That's that's legitimate.
That's true.
Sometimes my soul is like the mower after winter, and you go out to start it and it's just
not starting, not starting.
What's going on with this thing?
It's cold.
That's what our souls are like.
If you just wait to say, I don't feel like praising the Lord, I'm just down, I'm
frustrated.
But reading these psalms, praying these psalms, having these psalms before us, saying, I'm
going to sit down and read this as my prayer.
The psalm then calls us, praise the Lord.
And we are carried into that.
And the Psalms also help warm up our souls because that's the second thing.
There's a call to praise, and then there's reasons for praise.
Look at verses three through nine.
Really starting in verse five.
Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is the Lord his God.
Look at the litany of things the Lord does, makes the heavens and earth and sea, keeps
faith forever, executes justice, gives food to the hungry, sets the prisoners free, opens
the eyes of the blind, lifts up those who are bowed down, loves the righteous, watches
over the sojourners, upholds the widow and the fatherless, and brings the wicked to ruin.
Every one of those
Is a world for our soul to explore.
But the point that I'm giving you now is the Psalms are saying, they're putting these
words in our mouth.
The Psalms are spoon feeding us like little petulant children.
The Psalms are spoon-feeding us the right things to say, the right things to feel.
So that as my cold heart reads these words, I'm saying, Blessed is the Lord who made
heaven and earth.
Blessed is the Lord who keeps faith forever.
And as you're reading these things, the Lord is working on your soul, warming it up,
bringing it to the point where over and over and over again we're able to feel what's
true.
We're able to feel what's true.
These are given to us to pray when we don't have the words.
What a gift when I don't have the words because of grief or frustration.
Or coldness or numbness of heart to sit down and say, Father, give me words.
You give me the words.
And he puts these words of praise in our mouth.
And he puts these reasons to praise him in our mouth.
And that is a grace, and that is a gift.
And that's what the Psalms of Praise do.
And then it ends with another summons to praise.
The last line in verse 10: Praise the Lord.
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord.
That's where this is all leading.
That's where the Psalms are leading us.
And I'm going to hopefully uh give you a glimpse of that's also where our souls are going.
That's the purpose of our souls, and that's where all of creation is going, this idea of
praising the Lord.
Hallelujah.
So we've got the structure of the Psalms of Praise in our mind.
Let's move now to look at how hallelujah is the goal of
Of the Psalms and of our souls, to be able to be a people who say, In the heights and in
the depths, in the joy and in the sorrow, who are able to say, Hallelujah, praise your
name.
The Psalms are shaping us into that kind of people.
That's the goal of the Psalms.
Now, I've already explained this a bit, so we'll touch on this first part quickly.
The Psalms are broken into five books, and it moves from lament to praise.
That right there is an argument.
This is the goal of the Psalms, to get us to praise.
Also, every one of those five books ends with a praise to the Lord.
Hallelujah.
Every one of those books ends with the phrase, hallelujah.
And so there again we see this is the purpose of the Psalms.
And the whole Psalter itself, the whole book of Psalms, ends with this repeated uh
Gathering together of psalms of praise, praise, praise, praise.
And the whole book of Psalms ends with Psalm 150, which goes like this.
Praise the Lord, praise God in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty heavens, praise him
for his mighty deeds, praise him according to his excellent greatness, praise him with
trumpet sound, praise him with lute and harp, praise him with tambourine and dance, praise
him with strings and pipe.
Praise him with sounding symbols, praise him with loud clashing symbols.
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord, praise the Lord.
That's how the Psalms end.
So I think it's quite clear these psalms are about praising the Lord.
God in his sovereign wisdom has put a 150 chapter, 2400 verse, hallelujah, at the center
of
Of the inspired scriptures.
That's what this book is.
That's how he has shaped the Bible.
And that matters because this book is given, as I've said over and over again, even this
morning, this book is given to shape our souls.
So if the shape of this book is praise the Lord, it's shaping us to have souls that say,
Praise the Lord.
So that's the second thing we'll move to now.
Hallelujah.
It's the goal of the Psalms, it's the goal of our
souls.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that proclaiming with all that we are the surpassing excellencies of God is
actually the purpose of our existence.
And it doesn't have to just be in words, but to have a life that burns with a luminosity
that says, God in Christ is great.
That's what we're made for, to praise the name of this God, to praise
The excellencies of this God.
Now, when I say that, I want to make two clarifications, and we're going to spend a little
bit of time on these because this is important for us experientially.
Two clarifications.
First, when I say our soul, the goal of our souls is to praise the Lord.
I want to be clear that this praising is not a duty, it's our deepest pleasure.
And secondly, I want to be clear that this praising is not for God's sake, but for our
sake.
So let me look at those two together.
First, praising the Lord is not a duty, it's our deepest pleasure.
I'm going to give three reasons for that.
So if you have your notes, this is where they'd be helpful because we're digging into a
particular point.
But I but I think it's important for us to see this because when somebody says, you know,
we're created to praise the Lord, you might think, well, I gotta do that.
Okay, I guess I've got to do that.
No, it is it is the greatest pleasure of our souls.
Three reasons praising the Lord is not a duty but a pleasure.
First, to praise is the consummation of our gladness in that which we are praising.
To praise an experience or a person or whatever it might be, that act of praising is the
consummation of our gladness in.
What we are praising.
So again, back to the example I used just a moment ago.
You have a meal, an incredible meal.
You watch a movie that's just perfectly put together.
You hear a beautiful piece of music.
You visit an incredible place in the world.
And you love the experience, but what do you want to do?
You want to praise it to someone.
You want to tell someone.
You want to share it with somebody.
If it's as small as, hey, listen to this joke that I heard.
Or if it's as big as you've I want you to meet the woman I'm hoping to marry, or whether
it's the story is just awesome, you've got to read it.
Whatever it is, the treasures, the things we value, we want to tell others about.
We want to praise to others.
And praising like that is not a duty.
You don't say, well, now I gotta go tell five people about this movie, about how good it
was.
Who am I gonna tell?
No, praising is the crowning joy of that experience.
You think you go out of the theater thinking, I can't wait to tell whoever it is.
I can't wait to talk to them about this meal or whatever it is.
It's the crowning joy.
And in fact, by praising the experience, we enter more deeply into the joy of that
experience.
So too with God, our joy in him, our satisfaction in him is deepened and crowned as we
praise him.
As we praise him, as we speak of him.
As hallelujah in its various ways comes from our lips and from our lives, we are gathered
more deeply into the joy of him.
You tell somebody about his goodness, you talk to people about it, or or you write a poem
about it, or you journal about it and share a thought with somebody, or or you are sit
down with your grandchild and tell them why the Lord isn't going to forsake them, whatever
it might be.
As we speak about him, we enter into the joy of him.
More deeply.
And in fact, our joy in him will be less.
And our life in him will be shrunken if our soul doesn't know how to praise him, if we
can't speak of him, if we can't join in that praise.
So that's the first piece.
Praising is not a duty, it's our pleasure because it's the consummation of our joy in the
Lord.
Second, praising the Lord is our deepest pleasure because it gathers us into something
that is more than ourselves.
Human beings were created to orbit a center.
That's that we're created to orbit something at the center.
We are not created to be at the center.
We begin to break down and get frustrated, and people get hurt, and problems spring up all
around when we are at the center.
We're not made to be at the center.
It's like putting
Gravel into your car and expecting it to run.
It wasn't made for that.
It's going to break a lot of things.
We are made to orbit the center.
And yet the culture drives us continually at every single point, saying, You're the
center, you're the center, you're the center.
You'll only be happy in the center.
And that's, of course, a demonic lie.
Because being at the center is where bitterness and anxiety and frustration and anger and
envy and fear and lust, all those things flourish when I'm the center of my world.
But when we are orbiting a center, when there's something bigger than us that we are
orbiting around, gazing upon, when we're gra when we're gathered into the gravitational
field of something bigger than us, that's where freedom is.
That's where peace is.
That's where rest and hope, love and generosity, the fruits of the Spirit, that's where
they're found.
As we orbit the one for whom we're made.
And praise helps us do that.
Praising the Lord, speaking his excellencies to our souls or to one another, praise helps
to orient us around the center of God in Christ and takes us out of the center, which is
our joy.
You don't want to be at the center.
You don't want to be at the center.
I don't want to be at the center.
And yet we keep trying to get back in there.
But that's where death is.
That's where the gravity is.
All the gravity presses on the center.
And we stand there and think, this is great.
I want everybody to I want to be the very center.
And we're just going to be crushed by the gravity.
We're meant to orbit the Lord, and praise, praise helps us to do that.
Third, praise is our deepest pleasure because it sets our eyes on.
Reality.
It sets our eyes on reality.
Now, maybe some of you, this isn't true.
You're not all wearing glasses as I am, but you have these little floaters in your eyes,
which you can see sometimes.
Like just little like clear things that float around, and you guys are thinking, wow, he's
got a problem.
No, no.
Some of you know what I'm talking about.
There's little floaters that are floating around in your eyes.
And if you pay attention to them, it can be really distracting.
And you're like, it's just, it's always there.
It's always moving around.
And if you're focusing on them, it's going to be frustrating.
But if you say, I'm just going to look at life, I'm going to look at what's around me.
I'm going to look at reality.
I'm going to look at the people I love.
I'm going to look at the world that's beautiful around me.
Those floaters just kind of disappear.
You don't think about them.
They're not there.
In a similar way, I'm not saying one-to-one.
In a similar way, the pain, the hardship, the sorrow, the loss, the difficulties.
The the anxieties and the this is so important, the stressors of this life, they're like
these floaters.
Not in the sense that they're meaningless.
I'm not saying everything's meaningless like that, but in the sense that they're not what
we're supposed to be looking at.
They're not ultimate reality.
They're not the main thing.
And praise helps us look past the floaters of anxiety and this situation, that situation,
this pain, that look.
Pass them upon what is reality, upon the one for whom we are made.
Praise gathers us up into the song of heaven so that we can see the hardships of this
life, not as false and meaningless, but as rightly ordered around the center.
So for all these reasons, praise is not, I guess I gotta do it.
No, it is our joy, it is our pleasure, it is, it is, it is what our souls are made for.
Secondly, though.
Praise is not for God's sake, but ours.
You've you've maybe heard this, you've maybe thought this.
Boy, all these calls to praise the Lord.
Maybe God's kind of unconfident in himself and and and egotistical and he needs people to
kind of praise him.
That's a that's a shallow God, isn't it, who needs a lot of praise.
But that that's the broken way to think about this.
Think it imagine if oxygen were sentient, if oxygen were a person.
Okay, would oxygen be vain or egotistical or unconfident in its own goodness if it said,
You need to breathe me.
You need to breathe me.
Are you gonna say, phew, oxygen, always thinking about yourself?
You're so egotistical.
You want me to just breathe you and and thinking that's oxygen saying, I'm so great.
No, we are we will die a painful death if we don't breathe oxygen.
We must
Breathe oxygen.
We're made for it.
So if oxygen were to say, breathe me, oxygen's not trying to build up its own ego.
Oxygen is loving us by saying, You've got to breathe me.
You are going to die.
Breathe me.
That's oxygen's love for us.
So too, you see where this is going.
We are made to live on God alone.
We are made for Him.
Your soul is made for Him.
Every
Brokenness inside of us is because in one way or another, we've put fuel other than God
into a vehicle made to run on God alone.
We've tried to eat something other than God, which is when we're made to feast upon him
alone.
And so when he says, praise my name, he's not saying, I'm so, you know, needy that I need
you to praise me.
He's saying, your soul is dying.
Praise me.
You must.
You must enter into this living, receiving, treasuring, and singing of my excellency,
because that's what you are made for.
So praising him is not for him, as if we would take a breath and say, There, oxygen, you
happy now?
Are you happy?
I breathed.
No, no, no.
Our praise of God is our deepest joy because it's our life, it's our spiritual
respiration.
We will suffocate spiritually.
If we are not praising God, we will suffocate spiritually if we're not praising God, if
we're not saying hallelujah.
So that then moves to one more point I want to clarify before we move to our final point,
which is all of creation as having hallelujah as its goal.
This is listen to this.
Hallelujah, this word we've been talking about, praise the Lord, this thing we've been
talking about.
It is impossible.
Possible apart from the crucified and risen Jesus.
There is no praise the Lord apart from Christ.
There is no hallelujah apart from Jesus slain and raised up again.
Well, how is that?
How can I say that?
Because praise the Lord, praise Yahweh, hallelujah.
It is a call to praise a particular person.
It's not just praise, it's praise.
Yahweh, praise this God, praise the God of this Bible, praise the God who makes himself
known here, and that God will be known in no other way than in his slain and risen Son.
Crucified and risen Jesus is the final and defining face of God.
And now that Christ has come, you cannot, we cannot think of God.
Apart from the slain and risen Christ.
His face is Christ.
Before the coming of Christ, he wasn't known.
It's as if God was standing with his back to us or just the side of his face, and it was
enough to say, praise the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But now that Christ has come and made himself known in his death and resurrection, there
is no such thing as praising Yahweh apart from knowing him in the slain and risen Jesus
Christ.
Which means when we say hallelujah, praise the Lord, we're ultimately calling ourselves
and others to know Christ.
That word, hallelujah, praise the Lord, has embedded in it.
Know Christ, know who God is in the slain and risen Jesus.
So, in that sense, if I've said hallelujah is the goal of our souls, we also have to
realize that.
Hallelujah has an evangelistic bent toward it.
To be able to say hallelujah implies I'm calling myself and others to praise God as he's
known in Jesus, which means they need to know God as he's known in Jesus.
If they're going to praise the Lord, they need to know the Lord they're praising.
And so hallelujah includes this element of making him known.
And now you might think, oh, well, I'm not good at that.
You know, I'm not good at
Telling other people about Jesus.
We just had Ryan here last week and he's a missionary and he can do that sort of thing.
But here's what I'd say: the way we make Jesus known to others so that they can praise him
is just by praising him.
Our praise of the Lord is our making him known.
You don't have to do anything more than that.
How do you make known how good the meal was?
Just say, boy, you the pizza at this place, you've got to try it.
It's delicious.
Or the movie, boy, you won't just wait for the end.
You're gonna be amazed by what happens at the end.
That's how you're telling people about the movie.
You're just praising.
You're just talking about it.
How does how does a football fan praise his team or tell you about his team?
Well, it's gonna be very clear, right?
Everything he's wearing, the way he makes time for it, like he's making that known to you
just by praising his team.
We make Christ known, not through some anxious, fiddly, well, maybe I can tell you
something.
I don't know, I'll you know, this nervous evangelism make.
Christ known by praising him to the people around you.
Let me.
I have hope because Christ is risen.
I want to tell you how much hope I have.
I have peace because I belong to a Savior.
How do you get through this situation?
Because I belong to one who died and rose again, who's the best thing I've ever seen, ever
known in my whole life.
We make him known by praising him.
So hallelujah.
Is a call to know God in Christ, but hallelujah is also making God known in Christ.
And it's unto this that we're called in our life and in all of history.
And that's where we're going to end today.
All it hallelujah.
Praise the Lord, is not merely the goal of the Psalms, it's not merely the goal of our
souls, it is also the goal of all creation, all of history.
Everything God is doing and has done is coming to the point of proclaiming hallelujah.
Let me give you a place where we see that.
Sa Phili Philippians two.
This is well known.
We read this a lot, but I'm gonna read it for you again.
Philippians two, this passage pictures for us the shape of all history, the shape of all
reality.
Philippians chapter two, verses nine through.
Eleven.
I'll I'll start in verse six.
But just you can either turn there or just listen with me.
Actually, verse five, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be
grasped, but he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the
likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself.
By becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every
name, so that the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under
the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the
Father.
Now, when that text says Lord,
Paul is drawing upon a passage in Isaiah 45 where the Lord in view is Yahweh.
So even though the word here in Greek is the normal word for Lord, Kyrias, Paul is drawing
upon an Old Testament text where Yahweh is being referenced.
So what Paul is saying here is every knee will bow and every tongue will confess Jesus
Christ is Yahweh.
He is the Lord, and that will be to the glory.
of God the Father.
This, Christian, is the pattern that every moment and every molecule, every memory and
every experience, every person and every passion in all of history is moving to this
moment.
Everything is moving to this moment.
And everything we could say then is being conformed to hallelujah.
All of reality, if you play back the recording of all reality, ever listen to a
Slow, slow motion recording.
You can't hear what it's saying.
It just sounds like sound.
And if you slow it way down, it just sounds like it just points, little points.
You have no idea what's being said.
Imagine every one of those as a second in history.
The whole thing played out.
Some of them are deep and weighty and sorrowful, some of them are high, but you're like,
what is going on?
Just all this sound.
When you put all the sound recording of history together.
And you play it back as it will be played back, it will say, Hallelujah, praise the Lord,
praise God in the slain and risen Jesus.
That's what all this is saying from the beginning to the end.
That's what your whole life is saying.
That's what everything is saying.
Hallelujah.
Praise Yahweh as we know him in Jesus Christ.
And you get a picture of that here.
First, there's a summons to praise, just like the Psalms of Praise.
There's a summons to praise.
Where?
Creation itself.
Creation, just the being of creation, is a summons to praise the Creator.
Just by saying, Let there be, God summons all of creation to praise the one who said, Let
there be.
So the beginning, just the fact that anything exists, is a summons to praise.
And then we find the reasons to praise laid out here.
He
Humbled himself, being equal to God, he humbled himself by becoming obedient, being born
in the likeness of men, taking on the form of a servant, becoming obedient even to the
point of death, and then being raised up from the dead.
That is the reason to praise the Lord.
All the reasons we could lay out, the ones we saw in Psalm 146, he's protector of widows,
father to the fatherless, he takes care of the needy, he performs righteousness,
everything we could ever say.
About why we praise the Lord is bound up in this.
Christ takes on flesh, bears the sins of his people, dies in their place, rises up again,
gathers them to himself as their Lord.
The crucified and risen Jesus and the gospel of his cross.
This is the reason we praise God.
At all every other reason is built into that one, because Christ is the embodied character
of Yahweh.
And then finally we see here that all of creation is gathered to this final point, this
summons to praise in verses 9 to 11, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.
And you know what you can put in there, not just angels and demons and humans, every
memory, the knee of every memory in your life.
Right now, there are perhaps memories that stand brazen in their opposition to God.
Look at me, you'll never get over me.
I'll never bow.
You'll never get over this pain.
You'll never get over that you did this.
You'll never get over this situation.
The knee of every memory will bow to Christ.
Every memory in your life will confess him as Lord.
Every experience in your life will confess him as Lord.
Every moment in your life will bow its knee to Jesus Christ and say, He is Lord.
That is the moment that is before us.
Every moment and molecule in our lives and in all creation will confess Jesus Christ is
Lord to the glory of God the Father.
That is where this is going.
That is what our lives are for, to be folded in to this hallelujah, to play their part in
that broken up sound wave that we don't hear yet.
We can't hear it yet, but we play our part.
And when it's played back, the depths and the heights will all be part of this hallelujah
to God in Christ.
So to release our little dreams and goals and trophies and kingdoms and to be joined to
this great hallelujah.
That's the purpose of our existence.
And maybe it includes your our goals and dreams and trophies, maybe it does, but to just
say,
Look, this is this is what I'm here for.
To be into this, to praise this one, to be gathered into this moment for my life.
I mean, our lives are like this.
Our lives are just so fast.
And pray, Lord, may this life, when it's played back, be hallelujah.
Just be praise to your name, so that it can be part of that greater word that you're
speaking in all creation.
To sing hallelujah with our hands and our feet and our mouths.
So long as we have the use of them, with our money and our time and our skills, with our
weakness and our sorrows and our losses, with our failures and our sufferings and our
brokenness, with our joys and our victories and our blessings, to have all of that say,
hallelujah, to praise God and the crucified and risen Jesus with all that we are.
That's what you're made for.
That's what I'm made for.
That's what we're made for.
That's our great joy and our healing and our life.
And the Psalms help us do that.
The Psalms help us do that.
They shape our soul so that in all things we can praise God in the slain and risen Jesus.
And we can embody that together.
We can embody that praise now as we come to this table.
This is part of it.
This this this is this is part of it because in Revelation chapter five, John has a vision
that includes.
All of space and time.
And what he sees is the slain and risen Lamb standing at the very center of the throne of
God.
And he sees all of angelic and earthly creation, all of the visible and the invisible, all
of time and all of space gathered in worshipping orbit around the center of the slain and
risen Lamb.
And that moment is really a visionary expression.
Of what we just read in Philippians.
That moment is a vision of what God is doing and making of all things.
And in a very real way, we here in Sabina, Ohio, are entering into that moment right now.
That moment, because this little wooden table is representing for us the throne of God.
And these elements on this table.
Are picturing for us the Lamb enthroned upon the altar throne of the whole universe,
reigning as Lord and God.
And as we come to this table, to this throne, to this Lamb together, we are
representatives of the redeemed creation.
We right here, in all of our weakness, we are representatives of the whole redeemed
creation, gathering around the throne of the Lamb and praising him.
As we come to his table to take him and to confess with our whole bodies, this one is my
savior.
This one is my Lord and my God.
This is the reason I praise him.
The broken body, the spilled blood, the risen one who reigns now from the throne.
This is why I say hallelujah.
And this is why all of creation will be gathered into that hallelujah.
He was slain.
His blood has ransomed a people for God.
And behold, he is alive forevermore.
Worthy is the Lamb.
So let's come and worship him together.
Let me let me pray and then we'll move into this time.
Father, we praise your name.
We praise you as the excellent one, as the one who has given us a savior like no other.
We praise you, Lord Jesus.
There is no one like you.
There is none among the gods.
There's none among the philosophers.
There's none among the entertainers and the rulers and the kings of this world.
There's no one who gives anything as you give it.
There is no one like you.
And we praise you as our Lord and our God and our King and our Savior.
And we thank you, Father, that you are working all things to sum up all things in this
Christ.
So that every tongue, every moment, every memory, every experience will confess Jesus
Christ is Lord to the glory of your name.
Thank you for that hope, Father.
We praise you in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Thank you for listening to this message from Kingstree Church in Sabinah, Ohio, to see
more of the beauty of God in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
Come worship with us on Sundays at 10 a.m.
or visit our website at Kingstreechurch.org.