Phil: Well, we’ve got some time here. I’m not gonna be in a hurry, but let’s just see. I mean, it’s hard not to start with something like Psalm 100. You talked about the perfect example of a worship passage, very short Psalm written by David, and he says, “Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.”
Most of the time I don’t feel like shouting. I don’t know that I have the voice to do it, but that’s a pretty positive expression, isn’t it? There’s a number of things he tells us to do in that shout to the Lord. I mean, you know, if you see something great and you’re rooting for a team, let’s say, and something great happens, wow, how easy it is for us to shout and have that excitement.
What the Lord wants us to do is for Him to come to the place where what He has done for us, what He is doing for us, His character, His being is so wow that we’re so focused on that that it just comes forth as a wow. Why in the world are we more excited about a home run than we are about the Lord?
And it’s not something where we gotta come out with, you know, some outward expression, but isn’t that the condition of our heart? God wants to bring us to that place where we can not only just, Yeah, Lord, I know you’re here, but I’m sure bummed about how things are. Lord, I worship you. Lord, I am so glad for who you are and what you promised me that I’m ready to shout about it, Lord. I don’t want to take this lightly.
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with sad, I mean, gladness, worship the Lord with gladness. Sometimes we can go through what we say is worship, but there’s not much gladness behind it. But I’ll tell you, if the channel is open, can He not make Himself known as Who He is, and how He feels about us, and what He’s done for us? Shouldn’t that be real? Yes.
How many times do we, through our own unbelief and just focused on ourselves and our circumstances, get in the way of that. That becomes more real to us than the reality of what He’s done and who He is. I’m afraid that’s the way it is with me far too much. I’m conscious of it just reading some of this and thinking about it.
The Lord’s reminded me, you know, why do you stay where you’re at all the time? Why do you feel the way you feel? Or at least you give into it? Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know what I’ve done? Don’t you know where you’re headed? You’re in my hands. Your life is in my hands. Yes, I’m taking you away. That requires a lot of faith. That requires that we’re gonna have to walk by faith and not by sight. But that doesn’t change the facts.
We go by earthly facts in a world that will pass away. And all these things are temporary, and we treat them as facts, and we react accordingly when the facts that we need to react to are what He has promised, and what He’s done, and the fact that He’s here. He’s never gone anywhere, never will.
So shout, worship, come before Him with joyful songs. Praise God! I thank the Lord for His presence today. I believe there’s some joyful songs that went up. But, you know, that isn’t just for when we come here and go through that particular part of a service. That’s meant to define our life. Oh, praise God!
Do people see us as depressed people just hanging on or as people who have a reason to rejoice? Boy, if you got that in this world, you’re gonna stand out like a light, by the way. Didn’t somebody talk about that recently?
Then he says this, the next thing we do after shouting, and worshiping, and coming, he says, Know that the Lord is God. There’s some knowledge that goes way beyond textbook knowledge, secondhand knowledge, because I say it, and you say, Well, Phil said it, so it must be so. No. God needs to say it and He needs to say it to your heart. And He will if you want Him to.
Are you willing to let Him have His way in your heart and your life? Or are you just want what you want, and then you want to get what you can out of Him? I’ll tell you He is, if we ever see Him for who He is, He’s worth everything. He is worth our lives, our destinies, everything. Nothing in this world is worth clinging to over Him. Praise God!
Know that the Lord is God. Man, does that come into play with our daily news? I don’t care what area of human society you look at today, everything in this world is a house of cards. Only God is allowing it not to collapse right now. And if it does, when it does, God’s gonna be with His people. He is still God. Whatever He allows the devil to do, and He is allowing him to do a lot, He will never leave His people, nor will His promise fail anymore than it did with Jesus. The devil thought he’d won, didn’t he? He thought he had won.
This very song that was just sung. Praise God! You know, by the way, you remember the testimony of the gal who wrote that? She literally, on one evening, was planning to go home and commit suicide. She was so down, her life was so worthless, she was so depressed, she had the stuff to do it. And a friend, I don’t remember all the details, but a friend convinced her to go to a revival service of some kind and just said, Okay, why not?
And she went, and the Lord got a hold of her heart that night. And I think that was one of the occasions where the testimony was where the Lord was saying, Well, if you’re gonna throw away your life, how about giving it to me? And she did. And you see the truth of the song. You got somebody who has a testimony. Those are not just words she learned in Sunday school.
Thank God for Sunday school and all of that. But this is not just secondhand religious information that she was putting into that song. This was something where she met the Savior, and she realized, My life is not defined by my earthly circumstances. And all of that is defined by His love and what He did for me at the cross. What I thought was worthless is worth everything because He has set the value of my life by shedding His blood so that I could live with Him forever and be free from all of this. Thank God!
Know that the Lord is God. It is He who made us, and we are His. Well, that’s a good thing to know, isn’t it? He has made us, and we are His. We are His people. The sheep of His pasture. Praise God!
Now, David knew something about that, didn’t he? God had put in him a sense of what it meant to be a shepherd. Of course he wrote, The Lord is my shepherd. But there he was with a sense of responsibility, and care, and protection, and now he sees, Ah, I’m a sheep. I’ve got a shepherd. I belong to Him, and He cares for me. You know, I cared for the sheep, but I mean, how much more does He care? I could be that wandering sheep that gets in the wrong place. He doesn’t stop caring about me. And you see how Jesus developed that same thought with a sheep that wandered away and got in the briars. Thank God, all right?
We are His people, the sheep of His pasture. But now it gets beyond acknowledging His greatness. Now there’s another dimension that needs to come into it where he says, Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. So now we’re actually able to not just sit here as it were, and acknowledge facts. Now we can actually go someplace.
I mean, I realize it’s something that happens not physically, but it’s real. Is this real or not? Yes. Are these just words, or is there a place in the spirit that we can actually walk through and leave the place where we’re at and go to another place? Anybody in a bad place today? God’s got a better place for me, for all of us. But how do we enter that? How do we actually come into a place?
I mean, imagine going into this palace and you come and there’s these massive gates, and you know that there’s something amazing on the inside, but here I am, I’m on the outside, and I need to get in there. How do I do that? And he tells you. Enter His gates with thanksgiving.
You know, the Lord wants us to come to a place where we are so in tune with Him that we can thank Him for everything? Boy, that takes some doing, doesn’t it? We got a lot to overcome because there’s a lot of stuff we’re not too, we don’t wanna be too much thankful for, but always for everything. Says in everything in one passage and for everything in another one in Paul’s writings.
To be able to thank Him and to recognize, God, you’re not allowing anything in my life because you hate me. You are allowing it because you love me, and you see a need, and you’re wanting to help me. And so I’m gonna take a different position. Here I am. I need some relief in my spirit. I need to come to a better place. I’m just not feeling right about stuff and about even you. I’ve got questions.
And what is the Lord’s prescription for that? We come into His presence, we worship Him, we acknowledge Him, and all of that’s good. But now I need to come and say, Lord, I thank you. I thank you for this thing that I’m having to face right now. I say, Thank you, Lord, because I know now it’s touching me personally in a very real way. There’s something that I don’t really naturally feel very thankful about, but I’m gonna translate my knowledge of Who You are into something that’s personal.
And guess what? There are gates that just open and God can take us to a better place where we’re not sitting there under that shadow and under that struggle that we so often go through. Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise, give thanks to Him and praise His name.
And, of course, there’s a good reason for that, and he says this, For the Lord is good, and His love endures forever. His faithfulness continues through all generations. I mean, you wanna stop and change the atmosphere in your life? Go and just read this and meditate on it, but not just read it like it’s some, you know, formula. This is meant to define our relationship with our Creator. He wants us to experience that. Because I’ll tell you the, we’re never gonna experience this God of love unless we get some of this.
You know, the devil will say, Oh, He’s just an egomaniac. He just wants people to fawn over Him. His nature is love, but what is love really about? I mean, what is the nature of love? Who is love focused on? It’s focused on somebody else. If I have what God calls love, it’s not about me. It’s not self-love, it’s love. It’s the power to do good for somebody else. That’s His heart.
And, oh, how we close our gates. We crawl into our little, have our little pity parties, or we’re so distracted with what we want or earthly affairs, and we just, here He is longing to share all of His goodness with us, and our hearts are kind of blocked off.
Oh, my God, clear out all the cobwebs and clear out all the, open up the channels so that we can begin to experience that. And we experience it by returning it to Him. And I’ll tell you, when He fills us up, then it begins to flow over. That’s what He’s looking for.
May God help us to understand something more about what real worship is so that it’s not just a thing we do. I mean, I’m glad for the young people doing that. It’s exactly what is a great thing. And you can have a time where you do focus on that, but I mean, shouldn’t it define our lives? Is this something where we say, we come to a worship service, and we go through that, and we go and say, Okay, done that, been there. That needs to define how I see God and how I see myself every day.
And the devil will constantly attack and try to undermine that. And I’ll tell you, that’s where you get into those circumstances, like David wrote about. Where are you, Lord? How long? But I will. There’s a choice that David learned how to make when he was in those circumstances.
And you see that over and over in his Psalms. Some of them are just like this one, just nothing but praise God’s good, Praise God! Hallelujah. Other times it’s, oh, Lord, I was in a bad, bad place. I mean, you think about some of the Psalms that we sing in our music.
How about Psalm 34? I mean, we sing about that all the time. I will extol the Lord at all times. That second word is kind of important, isn’t it? What is it again? I will. Choice. Yeah, it’s a choice. Exactly. This is something where we have to make a choice. God’s not gonna just dump this on us. We’re gonna have circumstances where we’re gonna have to make a choice to do what He’s talking about here.
I will extol, I’m gonna praise Him. His praise will occasionally be on my lip. Wait a minute, will always be on my lips. I will glory in the Lord. Let the afflicted hear and rejoice. So now it’s getting beyond me, isn’t it? The fact is, you and I have a lot of influence on the people around us. There’s an atmosphere we exude. That’s kinda scary, isn’t it? When you think about some of what we exude. Kind of stinky, and I’m talking about in the spirit.
God help us to have something about us that just says, Whoa, what is it about them? I sense life. I see the Creator, but He’s here. He’s walking around next to me. They don’t see things like I do. We live in a scary world, and they’re not scared. How is that possible?
Glorify the Lord with me. See, now he’s reaching out to others. God’s been so good to me, but I want you to join me. I wanna make this not just between me and Him, but a testimony of, I wanna tell you about how great this God is. Join me in this. Let us exalt His name together.
And now, where does all this come from? I sought the Lord, and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears. So David was in a place where he had a lot of fear. I mean, that’s the reality. We can experience fear. The question is, do we embrace that, and hang onto it, and say, Well, this is my lot in life. I probably deserve this. On and on and on, whatever it is that causes us to remain in a prison house.
But here’s David, who was in a fearful place, obviously one of these times when he was running for his life, but he looked to the Lord. You remember that time when they, right before Saul’s death, when they were living among the Philistines? You remember the story about how they, the Philistines, wouldn’t let him go into battle, and they went home and they found everybody gone? The Amalekites had come in and run off with everything, including their wives, their possessions, and the men were ready to stone him?
What did David do? He encouraged himself in the Lord. He didn’t say, Come on, guys, we can handle this. He said, God, I’m looking to you. You have allowed all of this, and I love you, and I am trusting you. Lord, just tell us what to do.
Isn’t that a good thing to be doing? Seek God and do what He says. Where have we heard that before? Those of you who remember Brother Thomas, we heard it a lot, didn’t we? What a simple solution to life. I sought the Lord. And that was a testimony. I was in a bad place, but I sought the Lord, and He answered me. He delivered me from all my fears.
Now, the testimony: those who look to Him are radiant. There’s brightness. Their faces are never covered with shame. This poor man called, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. Praise God!
We had some wonderful testimonies this morning, and I thought about this verse. Almost spoke up, but this was a perfect example. Some of the examples we heard in the men’s meeting this morning were testimonies like this. I was in a really difficult place, a challenging place, but this poor man cried, and the Lord heard him. Saved him out of all of his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps round those who fear Him, and He delivers them. You know, if you know the Lord today, there are angels that stand by you? I have to confess, there’s times I’m ashamed, and I stop and realize, You know, the angel was here and he saw that. I’ll tell you, they put up with a lot. But, you know, the angels know. The angels know, and they worship the Lord. They worship Him.
You get just a little bit of a deeper view of what worship is really about. Yes, it gets expressed the way we do it in song, and it should. And I confess, so oftentimes I’m playing the piano, it’s awfully easy to get lost in the music side of it. Well, that’s part of it. God created musical skill and all of that. But the one thing that matters is that I’m literally lifting my heart to Him and recognizing Him. I’m conscious of His love, and I want to connect with it, and I want to return that love to Him, and I want the atmosphere that surrounds me when I’m doing that to be something that other people see you.
I don’t want ‘em to see me and say, Wow. I want them to see me and say wow to God. Wow, what a Savior. I wanna know Him too. And I wanna partake of Him.
And you know, as we each, we’re gonna go through seasons of need. Every one of us is going to go through seasons in our lives where we need one another. That came out again in the men’s meeting this morning. And God has ordained that in those times, He’s gonna have people in the body of Christ that He can touch, that He can draw their heart to Him, and they can lift up prayers, they can praise Him, they can be in that relationship where they’re here and you’re in a place where it’s low, and they can pour out the life of God and strengthen you. And then there’s gonna come a time when it’ll be the reverse, and they’ll be in a position to share God’s life with you.
May God help us to cultivate not just an activity, not just pouring out praise to Him as though He’s an egomaniac, but just entering into it, opening the channels. Because if that’s not what we’re doing, what’s going on in here? Where are the channels at?
If you’re trying to get something out of this world to fill the channels as they were in your heart, good luck with that. It’s getting crazier and crazier. But our hearts were made. We were created in His image. If He is a God of love, self-sacrificial love, and He made us in His image and He’s restoring that image. Isn’t that what He’s seeking to produce right here and right now?
And sometimes that takes a lot of sacrifice. It takes a lot of faith to be able to say thank you when we don’t feel like it and to trust Him when we don’t see Him. But I’ll tell you, there’s something that is eternal that has worked.
May God give me and give all of us the grace to worship Him in spirit and in truth. That’s what Jesus said was gonna happen. God is Spirit, they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. I don’t want to go through the form. I want to have something that’s real that’s going on. So we just start where we’re at and say, Lord, help me to worship. Amen. Give me the heart to do it.
Scripture Carl quoted this morning, and we refer to it so often, He works in me to will and to do. So even when I don’t want to sometimes, even when I want to but I can’t. In every instance, I need to be able to turn to the Lord because it’s through Him that I’m able to do it.
And while we’re doing it, isn’t it amazing to think He’s here? He’s here, helping us together to worship the Father. What an amazing thing. May God give us that sense, that consciousness of Who He is and how worthy He is, and learn how to live a life that’s full of worship and praise and not just going through a form. May we understand, may we do that, but may we understand what we’re doing and really do it in the spirit, and the Lord help us. Praise God!
