Sermons

Psalm 95 - Don't Harden Your Heart to Worship

September 27, 2020 Speaker: Reid Strahan Series: The Psalms

Topic: Worship Passage: Psalm 95:1–11

This morning I want to talk with you about the danger of hardening your heart to lively and passionate worship.  This is the core message of Psalm 95.    

Psalm 95 is a Psalm of David but it is not merely the thoughts of David!  The writer of Hebrews begins his quote from Psalm 95 with these words, “As the Holy Spirit says”.  THIS IS WHAT THE SPIRIT OF GOD IS SAYING!

1 O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord,
Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving,
Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms (or songs of praise) 

For the Lord is a great God
And a great King above all gods,
4 In whose hand are the depths of the earth,
The peaks of the mountains are His also.
5 The sea is His, for it was He who made it,
And His hands formed the dry land.

6 Come, let us worship and bow down,
Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
7 For He is our God, And we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand.
Today, if you would hear His voice,
8 Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
As in the day of Massah in the wilderness,
9 “When your fathers tested Me,
They tried Me, though they had seen My work.
10 “For forty years I loathed that generation,
And said they are a people who err in their heart,
And they do not know My ways.
11 “Therefore I swore in My anger,
Truly they shall not enter into My rest.”

This Psalm is a call to joyfully worship God.  “Come! Let us sing for joy to the LORD! Let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation. Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us shout joyfully with songs of praise to him.” Then we are warned against closing our hearts to God’s voice.  “Today if you hear his voice do not harden your hearts”.

We should not harden our hearts to anything God says to us, but, in Psalm 95, this strong warning immediately follows the call to joyful and passionate worship in God’s presence.

We can harden our hearts to God’s voice, in many ways but there are few things so many people resist as God’s call to worship!  Some say I will worship God my way, but they stiffen their backs to expressing worship as God prescribes for us!  Spurgeon said, “Some harden their hearts by resolving not to show emotion in regard to spiritual things”.  

This is a clear and present danger to our spiritual lives.  If we are not careful, we can remain so concerned about being proper and dignified, that we will resist the kind of worship God himself desires from us. For some, “I’m not comfortable with that” becomes the ultimate guiding principle for everything, including worship.

Matthew Henry said, the psalmist stirs us up to praise God, for it is a duty which ought to be performed with the most lively affections, and which we have great need to be excited to, (because we are) very often backward to it and cold in it.

Psalm 95 calls us from a stiff and rebellious response to God, to unrestrained joy and singing in his presence. God is recruiting worshipers, who will worship him with wholehearted affection and expression. We should not push back by saying, “that is just not me”, or I’m just not comfortable with that.”  

Joy-filled praise was a mark of the great revivals.  John Wesley said, “In riding to Blenton, I was full of delight, and seemed in (the) new heavens and new earth.  We prayed, we sang, and we shouted all the way!”  Howell Harris said, “My food and drink was praising my God. A fire was kindled in my soul and I was clothed with power..”  Wesley described his meetings “as filled with cries of those, on the one hand, who were pierced through as with a sword, and of those on the other hand who were filled with unspeakable joy”. Lex Loizides wrote an article about these great revivals, called “Noisy Meetings”.  He said, “May God give us such revival scenes, with multitudes gathering to hear the good news of the grace of God in Christ and church meetings filled with foretastes of heavenly glory”.  

Psalm 95 begins with an appeal to “Come”.  Strong’s Hebrew concordance says this Hebrew word means to come, to walk, to go. It is sometimes translated “to move” It is an invitation to come from wherever you are, to ANOTHER place.  

I am convinced that we do not worship more because we intuitively know that at times our hearts are NOT in a state of joy, singing, or thankfulness.  We are just not feeling it.  So we assume that we CANNOT, or SHOULD NOT worship God with joyful singing, or thanksgiving, or shouts of praise. We think that would be fake, or just emotionalism.  And it would be that, if we left our hearts in their present state and just put on an outward act.  But the call of the Holy Spirit is to our whole being.  We are to get up and move, or “come” from where we are, into this place of joyful singing, joyful shouting, and thanksgiving, before God.

Of course you don’t always feel it, or you wouldn’t need this appeal to come.  If you are already in a place you don’t need an invitation to come to that place.  God knows how our hearts sometimes struggle, and how much bad stuff can fill our hearts.  And graciously and lovingly, he speaks to us, in WHATEVER state our heart is in and says, COME! Come into this better place of joyful worship!

Many times we come into church on a Sunday morning with our hearts on personal problems, family problems, work problems, a big win or a disappointing loss by our favorite team.  Some may be nursing an offense or harboring a critical spirit.  And sometimes it is a huge challenge to move hearts to worship.  Of course we can’t do it by law or by force, or shaming, but we are to come into God’s presence every Sunday morning with joyful singing, worship and praise!  An evangelist once asked, in a meeting, how many came in with thanksgiving and praise in their hearts. Apparently not many raised their hands, so he had them all get up and go back outside and re-enter with hearts full of praise.  And they had one greatest praise services those people had ever been at.  

This is a call to us as a congregation.  It doesn’t say, let ME sing and shout joyfully, it says, let US! We are called to come, as a people, to worship. God designed us to walk with other believers and worship with other believers. Of course we praise God by ourselves. But we are called here to worship God together.  Many place low priority on worshiping with others, because they think they will do just fine without it. Yet they are not growing or maturing because of their isolation.  Many do not faithfully worship with others because they think the Christian life is mainly a matter of their own personal experience with God.  But, we have a holy obligation to stimulate and encourage others by worshiping him with glad hearts together! 

God reveals to us here, in Psalm 95, the kind of worship he has in mind for his people.

First: God wants us to come before him him with joyful singing.  “Let us sing for joy to the Lord!” and “Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.” Joy is not the only way we express worship but it is to be dominant in our worship.  We can cry out to God in desperation, we can sing in great reverence and even silence, but God wants us to have joy in his presence!  God is not only pleased with solemn, slow, quiet worship! 

I always smile when I think of Larry Norman’s words, “I ain't knocking the hymns, Just give me a song that moves my feet. I don't like none of those funeral marches. I ain't dead yet! 

Michael Brown wrote an article, “Whatever happened to upbeat praise songs?” I’ve noticed something missing in the midst of my ministry travels. In some of the meetings, every song is slow…I’ve found myself asking, “Where is the joy and celebration? Where are the songs you can dance to and jump to?...Sometimes our worship can be so somber... And I wonder, “Are these a reflection of our emotional state? Perhaps we need a change?.. I’m burdened to see the fullness of joy in our worship and praise.” 

Second: Our joy is to be expressed with volume and energy!  “Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation”. The ESV says, “Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation”.  Our praise is not to be silent or restrained.  Worship is to be expressive and exuberant.  Our worship should sound like we are making a joyful noise because we ARE!  We think of worship as private and silent. But it is to be public and loud. Bible teacher Robert Diffenbaugh pointed out that “when we are told to sing a song worshipfully we know that this means we are to sing slowly and quietly”.  But that’s an idea of worship ingrained in us, and not necessarily God’s idea for our worship, certainly not for all our worship.

Third: We are to come to God with thanksgiving. Psalm 100:4 “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him.  Bless his name!”  Ephesians 5:20 “Sing and make music in your hearts to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Our worship is to be permeated with thanksgiving for all God has done for us through Jesus Christ. 

Paul said, “Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him, established in your faith, and “overflowing with gratitude.” Colossians 2:6,7 

*Why are we to come with all this joyful exuberance and gratitude in God’s presence?  Verse 3 “For the Lord is a great God.  And a great King above all gods.”  God is greater than any angel, or any supernatural being.  Colossians 1:16 says “For by him, all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him.” We know very little about the invisible world.  But we know our God is the creator and supreme ruler of all gods!

The God we worship created everything that exists and he owns it all. He holds in his hands the deep places of the earth and the mountain peaks belong to him. He made the sea.  His hands formed the dry land. It all belongs to him! You cannot go anyplace on this earth that God did not make and does not own! 

But he did not just make all the physical creation.  He made us!  Let us kneel before “the Lord our Maker” or “the Lord who made us.”  You and I did not come into existence on our own.  We have a body, a mind, a soul; someone gave us that! 

Olsip Mandelstrom, a Russian poet wrote: 

“Somebody gave me this body—what do I do with it now?
It's a very remarkable body, and nobody's body but mine. 

I’m alive and I breath, I’m strong and tall-

won’t somebody tell me who to thank for it all.”  

The poem is written with a sense of wonder that we live and breathe, but it has a sense of despair, because it does not recognize that God is the one who made us. 

Our worship flows out of knowing God as our Creator AND his loving care for us as our Shepherd. The Children’s Catechism asks, “Why should you worship God?”  The answer: “Because he made me and takes care of me.” 

That is taken from verse 6 of this psalm! “Come! Let us worship and bow down; let us kneel in the presence of the LORD, who made us. 7For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the flock in his care.” 

*In addition to coming before God with joyful exuberant singing, we worship, we bow, we kneel before him in awe and wonder.  We are humbled by his greatness and his loving care for us.  Out of all people God has chosen us to be his own.  He is our God! We are his people, the flock in his care! He has committed himself to us, and he has devoted himself to our needs as a shepherd devotes himself to the care of his flock. So we worship, we bow, we kneel.  

We should not be afraid or ashamed of getting on our knees before the Lord in private or at times in church.  Paul told the Ephesians that when I pray for you, “I bow my knees before the Father’.  Spurgeon said, “Prayer is heard when knees cannot bend, but it is (fitting) that an adoring heart should show its awe by prostrating the body, and bending the knee.”  

There is nothing so life-giving, so liberating to your heart, as to bow down before the Lord and submit yourself to him and to commit yourself into his loving care.

*Following this invitation to worship, is a serious warning.

Verse 7,8 “Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as in the day of Massah in the wilderness, when your father’s tested me.”  Meribah means quarreling, and Massah means testing.  At this place, God’s people quarreled with Moses and poured out bitter complaint and discontent.  Here is the story from Exodus 17:

They...camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” And Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” And the LORD said to Moses, “Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go.  Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.” And Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the LORD by saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

God’s people were not joyfully praising him, or thanking him!  Just the opposite!  They grumbled, complained, and quarreled.  They thought they were merely grumbling against Moses, but they were grumbling against God. They were bitterly discontent with their circumstances.  And they put God to the test, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”.  It says, they erred or went astray in their hearts.

Our hearts are not in the right place when we complain, and quarrel and accuse. Our hearts are not is the right place when we resist God’s call to passionate joyful, grateful worship.*Some here may need to repent of resisting the Holy Spirit in this area of worship!  If you have heard his voice, respond. 

*Some here may need to be freed from the shackles of the stiff and formal worship of their religious upbringing. 

*All of us need the inward work of the Spirit of God to enable us to freely and joyfully worship our God.

More in The Psalms

January 3, 2021

Ten Reasons To Build Your Life On the Bible

December 27, 2020

The Curing Power of God's Love

November 29, 2020

God Is the Answer To Our Fear

Join us Sunday at 

9:30am