Praise the LORD

Sunday 15th October 2023

Praise the LORD, all you nations; extol him, all you peoples.
For great is his love towards us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures for ever.
Praise the LORD.
Psalm 117 (NIV)

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Praise the LORD
“This tiny psalm is great in faith, and its reach is enormous” (Kidner).  Indeed.  It is the shortest psalm in the Bible, and yet it contains the heart of the gospel and the message of the Bible.

It give us our chief task and responsibility, which is to “praise the Lord.”  That is how the psalm begins and ends.  Our lives are to be filled with praise.  We are to praise the Lord with our lips and voices, of course, but such praise can only come from hearts that are already praising him, and it must be shown in lives which honour the Lord whom our lips praise.  Is that, I wonder, how you begin your day, and how you end it: praising the Lord?

The psalm also tells us who should be praising the Lord: it is “all you nations… all you peoples.”  All the peoples of the earth should be praising the God who made them and who gave his Son that they may be redeemed and so become his chosen people.  And it is those of us who have been redeemed who have the responsibility of calling on the nations to praise the Lord in our evangelism.  Are you involved in calling on others to praise the Lord?  And do you share the global vision of the psalmist?

The Bible does not tell us to praise the Lord without giving us reasons for doing so, and this psalm gives us two.  First, “great is his love towards us”, and we now know more clearly and fully than the psalmist just how great is that love: “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1).  Do you regularly and routinely praise the Lord for precisely this, that he gave his own Son that you may become his child?

The second reason for praising the Lord is that “the faithfulness of the LORD endures for ever.”  This means that “God’s plans and promises are as fresh and intact now as on the day they were made; and they will remain so” (Kidner).  And so we praise the Lord, among other things, for the forgiveness of sins, the gift of eternal life, the presence of the Holy Spirit and the new creation to come.  Why not stop now, read the psalm again, and praise the Lord for some of these things?

Father, teach me and help me to praise you and to call on others to praise you, and to praise you for the reasons you give: your great love and enduring faithfulness.  Amen.

Yours warmly, in Christ,
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)