We’ve been talking over the past little while around here about some of the most meaningful questions we can ask ourselves and one another.  They’re not questions that you’re going to have with someone you just met generally, though it’s not out of the question.  The Holy Spirit moved Philip to come alongside a eunuch from Ethiopia and ask him a question (“Do you understand what you are reading?”).  They got into some very deep discussion very quickly! 

We’ve been talking about questions like “In what or whom do you hope?”  Do you hope in anything at all?  In what or whom do you place your faith?  How do you define a good life?  What makes a life good?  What makes a person good?  How can I be a better person?  What might make our world better?  Do we ever consider these things?

Do we ever consider praise?  We’re considering praise today.  To praise.  To honour.  To laud (which simply means to praise publicly).  A song of my youth went, “We’ve come a long, long way together/Through the hard times and the good/I have to celebrate you…/I have to praise you like I should.”

So what or who is worthy of our praise?  If our answer is God, how is our praise going?  What can we learn from the 145^th Psalm, and how might it affect our practice of praise to God?  Let’s come before God in prayer and ask for help as we listen to God’s word for us.

When it comes to matters of prayer and praise, we do well to look to the Psalms.  The prayer that I just prayed is from the 19^th Psalm.  One hundred and fifty songs that made up Israel’s song/prayer book as well as Jesus’ song/prayer book.   We do well to turn to them when it comes to prayer and song.  We do well to turn to them when it comes to praise.  We talked last week about living doxologically.  Living in such a way that our praise and, honour, and adoration of God spills out in our lives.  Any answer that we make to the question “How then should we live?” in our words and actions needs to be grounded in our praise of God.

Praise

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.  We are not just here to talk about praise but to practice it together.  I invite you to sing along with us as we praise God in a most traditional way. (Sing “The Doxology”)  “Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever.” (145:2). The concept of praise is contained in the very word for Psalm in Hebrew.  It’s Tehillim.  It means praises.  We’re looking at Psalm 145 this morning, which kicks off six Psalms of praise that end the Psalms.  It’s the only Psalm that’s introduced as Tehillim – Praise. Of David, as it says in our NRSV Bibles.  The Talmud had this to say about this Psalm – “Everyone who repeats the Tehillah of David thrice a day may be sure that he is a child of the world to come.”

Being in the Psalms changes us.  I would expand that statement out to include every Psalm in all of the variety – whether they be prayers of thanksgiving or confidence or praise or lament.  Being in them, repeating them, and singing them will change us.  In the first few hundred years of the church, some early saints wrote of the sin of acedia.  It’s a Greek word that literally means without care or concern.  Later it became “sloth” (with no disrespect to sloths).  It goes beyond laziness, though.  It describes a spiritual apathy or listlessness, spiritual inertia, a resistance to prayer, devotional practices, worship together.  Someone has said In practical terms, this looks like indifference, boredom, avoidance of responsibility, self-indulgence, or sluggishness. It feels like discouragement, being unfocused, withdrawn, jaded, hopeless, irritated, and worthless.”  Acedia can manifest itself in laziness or in constant frenetic activity that keeps us distracted.  We want to take this Christ following life seriously.  Acedia is something that we need to be on our guard against together.  It’s been said that the cure for acedia is prayer and psalmody.  Singing the Psalms, praying the Psalms.  It has an effect on a person.  It does a body good, as they say about milk. It just does.

Sing praise, sing praise.  V1 “I will extol you, my God and King.”  Look at what the Psalmist is saying here.  I will extol you.  I will exalt you.  I will lift you up.  You are worthy, O Lord, to be lifted up above everything.  This leads us to the question - Why should we praise God?  You may hear people say things like, “God must be very needy if God wants us to be praising him all the time.”  Let us not be foolish about this.  Here’s the thing.  God is in all and through all and above all, and it is fitting and right and good and proper for us to offer him our praise.  Every day.  Forever.  Every day, I will bless you.  What does it mean for us to bless God?  It means to praise.  It means to tell of who God is – not because God is needy but because God is our delight.  Knowing God through the person of his Son and in the power of His Spirit is our delight.  This delight needs to be expressed.   As C.S. Lewis put it, “Our delight is incomplete until it is expressed…  It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.”  We get this.  We like to share things that delight us.  Our delight needs to be expressed to be made complete, and our delight in God is made complete in its expression.

Choose  So, do we choose to do this?  The Psalmist does.  The Psalmist affirms the desire to communicate his delight.  Every day. V2 “Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever.”  I’m talking a lot about songs and singing here, but our praise of God doesn’t need to be sung.  It can be spoken.  We can pause at the beginning and end of our day.  We can pause in the middle of our day and say, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”  There’s a personal aspect to praising God.  A personal aspect to acknowledging that God is above all.  Why?  Because Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, his greatness is unsearchable.  It’s so unsearchable we can’t even express it.  We use images.  We sing things like “Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds, your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgements are like the great deep.” His greatness is unsearchable – inexpressible.   But the Psalmist does his best to express it, as do we.  I’ve always loved the line in Charles Wesley’s “And Can It Be That I Should Gain” – In vain, the first-born seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine.  I think there’s a significance to our trying, no matter how meagre it may seem.  I think that God shares our delight.

Share

Because praise is meant to be shared.  We see this in the next section.  There’s an individual aspect to praise.  An individual decision to respond to who God is and what God has done is doing and will do.  There’s also a corporate aspect to praise. V4 “One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.”  There’s an evangelical aspect to praise – a telling of the good news of Christ.  There is a declaration or a proclamation of God’s mighty acts in praise.  There is an invitation towards others to join in.  “Come let us worship and bow down,” as Psalm 95 famously goes.  Let us praise God together.  Both individual and corporate aspects are shown here – V5b-7: “On your wondrous words I will meditate.  I will declare your greatness.  They shall celebrate the fame of your abundant goodness and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.”

Our praise of God is not only to delight in God’s greatness but to delight and make known his goodness.  God is good.  It can become a bit of a slogan or a bumper sticker-type thing.  May it never lose its meaning, no matter our circumstances.  May it ever more come to have a deeper meaning for us friends, no matter our circumstances.  What would it mean for us to believe that God is good?  How would we want to reflect God’s goodness?  In praising God, we leave ourselves open to being changed by the one we’re praising.  In meditating on God’s wondrous works.  The Psalmist goes back to Exodus 34 for his declaration about God in the second section.  V8: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”  Abounding in hesed.  In compassion.  V9: “The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.”  What would it mean for us to believe that?  For us to take hold of that in the depths of our being?  How would it cause us to see people?  How would it cause us to see creation? 

All

Creation is involved in this, too.  We’ve talked about praising God individually.  Praising God together.  Things then expand ever further out.  V11 “All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord.”  If these were silent, even the rocks would cry out, as someone once said.  In praising God, we’re joining in with something that all creation will do one day.  We get glimpses of it now, too, don’t we?  Creation speaking of the glory of God’s kingdom.  They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom. V13: “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations.”  This thing we’re part of is enduring!  We get the idea of this enduring kingdom by singing and reciting the Psalms, don’t we?  Not long ago, I was singing Psalm 23, known as a Psalm of David.  Of course, it had stuck with me before that here was a guy named David singing a Psalm of David on a stringed instrument.  It struck me in a new way through this day.  Thinking about singing the same words some 3,000 years later.  Thinking about what they meant to the king, thinking about what they mean for me, for us.  That connection to the past we have.  Of course, our praising anticipates the future, too, speaking of enduring.  Praising God is joining in with that chorus that we hear about all over the book of Revelation.  Their delight is in sharing who God is, too.  The Lord who is faithful in all his words and gracious in all his deeds.

What does God’s greatness and goodness look like?  This unsearchable, indescribable greatness and goodness that go together?  There’s a list that starts at v 14.   He upholds.  “The Lord upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down.”  He provides. V15 “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.  You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.”  He’s close.  He’s with us.  V18: “The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.  He fulfills the desire of all who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them.  The Lord watches over all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy.”  If that last part sounds too heart, remember that God is just.  He won’t let injustice stand forever.  Does this sound like bad news?  To many, it’s very good news.  He calls us to act against injustice, too.  He enables us to be part of his setting things right as we look forward to the day when all things will be made right.

Praise

In the meantime, we praise.  Like the Psalmist, we begin and end with praise.  The Psalmist ends by restating the intention he started with. V21 “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord…”   Why?  Because it is right and good and fitting that we should continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, the fruit of lips that confess his name.  Let us take these words seriously together – “Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is the fruit of lips that confess his name.”  What is this fruit? Love. Joy.Peace. Patience.  Kindness.  Goodness.  Faithfulness.  Gentleness.  Self-control. 

“… and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.”  This is the praise in which we are invited to join.  May this be true for all of us as we approach the season of Advent (in which we’ll be singing a lot of praise).  May this assure us that we are indeed children of the Kingdom.  May this change us and cause the God’s Kingdom to be known.  God grant that these things may be true for us.

Amen