They say you preach what you know so here I go.  There is a whole genre of music called “Soul.”  Arthur Conley recorded “Sweet Soul Music” in 1966 on Stax Records produced by Otis Redding.  Otis Redding had a single called “Pain In My Heart.”  Some years ago I read the following description about Otis on some liner notes – “When Otis sang ‘Pain In My Heart’, you knew he felt it.”  I’m talking about soul, and when you hear it, you know it.  Deep feeling.  It transcends any one particular genre of course and can be found anywhere.

Two thousand years before all of this, Jesus spoke about loving God with the entirety of our being.  “You shall love” was the response to the question in Mark 12 about which commandment was the first.  Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’  The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’  There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)

We are in the middle of examining our response to the love of God.  We stand on the foundation of the truth that God loves us and let us not rush away from that great truth.  “Because you are precious and honoured in my sight, and I love you,” were the words of the Lord spoken through the prophet Isaiah.  “We love because he first loved us,” wrote John.  We’re in the middle of talking about the good and right and fitting and proper response on our part in the light of God’s love for us.  Our “I love you back” to God if you like.  We’re in the middle of three weeks of sitting with what our “I love you back” to God looks like.  Mind.  Heart and soul.  Strength.  Mind.  Soul or spirit.  Body.  What might it mean for us to love God with all our heart and with all our soul?  Let’s pray.

I said last week that we are not to compartmentalize these parts of ourselves that the Shema and Jesus describe here.  Heart.   Soul.  Mind.  Strength.  We’re emphasizing one each week (two this week with heart and soul which are similar if not synonymous).  They speak together of loving God back with the entirety of our being.  All that we are.  All that we have.  All that we have been gifted by God.  We spoke last week about our minds, our thoughts, our perceptions of everything.  This week we are looking at heart and soul or spirit.  It’s a part of ourself that is hard to put into words.  The centre of our being.  The seat of life.  The seat of our wills and intentions and emotions. 

Ultimately, we’re talking about our love of God that goes beyond words.  Someone has put it like this - “The spirit is the beyond-rational, emotional, experiential center of the human soul. It is where we feel our relationships.”  It is the part of us that hears words like “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” and just has to cry out “Amen!” and maybe even lift our hands if we are so inclined and maybe even burst out into song with a “He is Lord, He is Lord, He is risen from the dead and he is Lord, every knee shall bow, every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord!”

How are we feeling?  We’re talking about a joy that goes beyond circumstance or our own situations or our own personalities.  We’re talking about the sweetest name I know, as another hymn goes.  I feel that.  The sweetest name I know.  Jesus.  Don’t use it lightly.  Don’t play him cheap.  Don’t misuse it please if you care about me at all.  I found out a while ago that there used to be an ice cream place in Toronto and they called themselves “Sweet Jesus.”  Apparently, they’re only selling direct to restaurants now.  I’m not one to picket though I’m not above a personal boycott.  I remember thinking at the time “That name means so much to so many.”  Maybe the best response is to echo Jesus’ prayer for God to forgive for they do not know what they are doing.

What is the good and right and fitting and proper response of our souls to the name of Jesus?  We’re getting right to the practice and the practice is praise.  Where do I go when I want to consider praise?  Straight to the Psalms!  Last week we were speaking of the renewal of our minds.  We spoke of how the first step in that is presenting ourselves to God as living sacrifices – saying every day “Here I am Lord, I’m yours.  Be in all I do and say.”  We spoke of the entirety of our lives being an act of worship.  Today we are talking most specifically about worshipping together – about praising God together.  We can and should praise God on our own as well as in smaller numbers than might gather on a Sunday morning.  We might sing or we might speak praise on our own.  Remember “Glory be to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen” Remember “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  By his great mercy, he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”  Let those words permeate our souls and be never far from our thoughts and our mouths.  We always start with hearing and so hear the invitation.  “O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise (like a shout) to the rock of our salvation!  Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!”  This is the call to worship.  There is joy about.  Come let us sing, let us make a joyful noise, a joyful shout, a joyful cry to the rock of our salvation.  Our rock.  Our shield.  Our defender. With joy, you will draw waters from the wells of salvation, of deliverance, of rescue.  Give thanks to him, call on his name. Let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.  This is our invitation.  May it be one we take up consistently and meaningfully.  I know that some people aren’t easily able or at all able to get to a Sunday gathering.  May we come to where you are and sing songs of praise together, or sing songs of praise over Zoom.  We stand in a long line of people who have sung praises to God with joy and thanks.  We’re not going to stop.  Even in our last days, we gather and play and sing praise.

Why, why do we do this?  At this point, I want to clear up a couple of possible misconceptions about praise.  There may be those who say something like “God must be very needy to need to have us praise Him all the time.”  As if we are enablers in God’s egotism.  To this, I need only say let us be careful not to make God in our own image.  I heard praise described in a sort of comedy documentary on the meaning of life I saw recently.  I won’t name it or recommend it.  I felt in the end it was rather a waste of time.  Christians were described as praising God in order to appease him. Why do we do praise and what are we missing if we don’t?  Praise of God forms us.  Praise of God shapes us.  Praise of God is not simply for the dopamine hits that music brings.  Praise of God reminds us of who God is.  We’re going to talk more about loving God with all our strength next week.  Praise of God is a physical, bodily, manifestation of our allegiance to and commitment to and participation in the new covenant sealed by Christ’s blood.  Listen again to the song – “For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods.  In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.  The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.” (3-5)  In a world of many gods that claim to be worthy of our worship/time/attention/love, there is God.  In a world full of uncertainty, all is in his hand.  From the depths of the earth to the heights of the mountains.  It’s like us saying “I searched high and low.” In other words, everywhere.  From the depths of the earth to the height of the mountains in his hand.  In other words, everything.  There is a joy in knowing this, isn’t there?  All is in his hands.

Praising is not just about singing and joyful noise.  There’s a second call to worship in Psalm 95 which has to do with coming before God in awe and reverence.  “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” (6) Our corporate worship gathering is unlike any other corporate gathering.  In some church traditions, it looks like kneeling.  It may look like bowing or bowing our heads at least in holy fear and trembling (and by holy fear, we’re talking about awe and reverence of God).  May our worship services reflect both joyful noise and holy awe.  Holy silence as we’ll practice a little later when we pray.  Praise of God is an acknowledgement of who God is.  Saviour.  Deliverer.  Rescuer.  Shepherd.  “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.” (7)  We praise God as creator.  We praise God as deliverer and name ourselves as the sheep of his caring hand.

Aren’t you glad you came to (digital) church today?!   

We’re talking about loving God with our souls/spirits.  We are saying that praise of God together is vital here.  Praise is not simply about making us feel good, warm.  Praise is a proclamation of who God is as creator and deliverer and a tangible and physical manifestation of our intention to live in radical trust in God.  When we learn by the example of others, there are two ways it may go.  We may learn by a good example and feel led to copy them.  We may also learn by a bad example and learn what not do to.  The second part of Psalm 95 sounds like a warning about the latter kind of example.  It starts with the call to hear, as we’ve been hearing from the beginning of this series (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one…”).  Hearing keeps our hearts soft.  “O that today you would listen to his voice! Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah, in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.” (7b-9) What is going on here?  We read about Massah and Meribah (test and quarrel) in Exodus 17:

  From the wilderness of Sin, the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. ² The people quarrelled with Moses, and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’ Moses said to them, ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?’ ³ But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’ ⁴ So Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.’ ⁵ The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. ⁶ I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.’ Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. ⁷ He called the place Massah^[a] and Meribah, because the Israelites quarrelled and tested the Lord, saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’

Dear sisters and brothers, the Lord is among us.  The call on our lives is one of radical trust in God.  The people of Israel had seen God’s deliverance, and the call was to keep on trusting, keep in hearing, keep on obeying.  Our praise together signals our trust in the faithfulness of our shepherd.

So we keep on singing together.  Paul knew about the centrality of praise in our life together in Christ.  The turning point in his letter to the Colossians comes in 2:6-7 – “As you, therefore, have received Christ Jesus, the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and build up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”  Being formed in the image of Christ is neither automatic nor instant.  Paul’s urging is always to keep on keeping on it the life.  The image of being given a new set of clothes in Christ is a familiar one.  Here it’s like an overcoat or parka of love “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”  What rules in our hearts?  “And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which you were called in the one body.  And be thankful.”  What does this look like?  “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.”

Don’t worry about how in tune you are (you can learn!).  The key thing is a thankful heart.  Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.  Actual Psalms, we’re still singing them.  Hymns and spiritual songs.  Newly written.  Hundreds of years old.  Spontaneous expressions of praise or formalized musical notation.  Use it all!  It’s all part of a life in which everything we do in word or deed is done in the name of the Lord; for the praise of his glory; to make God’s ways known.