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- Hi, this is Pastor Tom,
and I want to welcome you to a look at Psalm 66 today.
Let me start by reading the first two verses of Psalm 66.
Shout with joy to God, all the earth.
Sing the glory of his name.
Make his praise glorious.
I want to start with a question.
How do you do that, that last phrase?
How do you make his praise glorious?
This Psalm talks to you and I
about four things that we can do today.
What do you do to make God's praise glorious
in your life today?
Here's four things.
Number one, you say what God has done.
Listen to verses three and four.
Say to God how awesome are your deeds,
so great is your power that your enemies cringe before you.
All the earth bows down to you.
They sing praise to you.
They sing praise to your name.
We have a need to speak out God's greatness.
One of the keys to making God's praise glorious
is actually saying it, speaking it out,
where it can be heard.
And these verses remind us, speak it out to God.
Speak it out loud to God.
Speak out loud to God what a great God he is.
God is not prideful.
God does not have a big ego.
It's not gonna make God sin
if you tell him what a great God he is.
In fact, it's what we're made to do as his creation.
So you speak out the greatness of God.
And I want you to notice specifically
what these verses say to speak.
Your enemies cringe before you.
Speak that out that God is greater than all of his enemies.
Satan is God's greatest enemy
and he cringes before the power of the Almighty.
And I just want to say to you,
whatever enemy you are facing right now,
that enemy cringes before the awesome power of God.
It may seem overwhelming to you,
it may seem undefeatable to you,
but that enemy that you're facing
cannot defeat the power of God,
cringes before the power of God.
So you say what God has done, this Psalm teaches us.
Now, in order to say what God has done,
you have to make a habit of the second direction
that this Psalm gives us.
And that is number two, you see what God has done.
Listen to verses five to seven.
Come and see what God has done.
How awesome his works on man's behalf.
He turned the sea into dry land.
They pass through the waters on foot.
Come, let us rejoice in him.
He rules forever by his power.
His eyes watch the nations.
Let not the rebellious rise up against him.
So you see, you make it a habit to notice what God has done.
We spend so much time seeing these days.
We're filled with these times of seeing
what's on this screen or that screen, from apps to movies.
This reminds us we need to spend specific time
seeing what God has done.
Now, let me encourage you some specific ways
that you can do that.
You can do what the psalmist does in this Psalm.
You can see what God has done
through what he tells us in his word.
So here, he sees the power of what God did at the Red Sea.
He brings it to mind.
He turned the sea into dry land.
They walked through.
The stories that you see in the Bible,
the power of what God has done, you bring those to mind
and you picture them even as much as you can in your mind.
You picture the power of the resurrection.
What happened when Jesus broke out of that dark tomb
into the light of resurrection.
You picture that in your heart and your mind
and in that way, you're seeing the power of God.
You're seeing what God has done.
So you see what God has done
through what he tells us in his word.
A second way you can do that
is you see what God has done in his creation.
You just look at what God has made.
This last week, I was near the beach
where there were some rocks
and the waves were coming in
and constantly crashing against these rocks
again and again and again.
These huge sprays of water were coming up
from where the waves hit the rocks
and it was, I couldn't stop watching it.
I couldn't stop seeing the power of it
and it's just a small reminder of the great power of God.
We need to build times into our lives
where we look up and we see the stars.
We look out and we see the ocean.
We look closely at a small flower and the beauty of it
and we see what God has done in his creation.
A third way you can do that
is you can see what God has done
in the lives of those who are around you.
I want to encourage you,
if you want to see what God has done,
learn to ask for stories of God's awesome work.
Ask people, what's God been doing in your life?
What stories have you heard about how God has been working?
And take those stories seriously.
Take them to heart.
See them in your mind's eye.
If you want to make God's praise glorious in your life,
you gotta see what God has done
because then you can say what God has done.
Now, that's the first two.
Then there's the third one.
I bet you've guessed what it is.
Number three, you share.
You share what God has done.
Verses eight and nine, praise our God, O peoples.
Let the sound of his praise be heard.
He has preserved our lives
and kept our feet from slipping.
That phrase, the sound of his praise, it is so vital.
Notice that this is written together.
You share it.
He's talking to a group of peoples together.
He talks about our God and our lives and our feet.
It's not just about what God has done for me,
just about what God has done for you individually.
It's about what he has done for us together
and us proclaiming it together.
And anytime someone proclaims
what God has done in their life,
all those of us who know the Lord,
we make his praise glorious together
by sharing in that moment of what God has done.
It's called here in verse eight, the sound of his praise.
What does the sound of his praise sound like?
Well, it could be a shout.
It could be the loudest sound that you've ever heard,
people shouting with joy to the Lord,
singing with joy to the Lord, or it could be a whisper.
It could be one of the quietest moments that you've heard.
I'll never forget being in Seoul, Korea,
at a large stadium, the Olympic Stadium actually there,
120,000 people were there,
and Pastor Rick Warren was speaking.
It was just after Purpose Driven Life had come out
and people wanted to hear
about how to live a purpose-driven life.
And the stadium was absolutely packed with people.
I'll never forget walking around that stadium
and the sound that I noticed was the quietness.
In a big stadium like that, you expect this loud sound,
but instead there was this prayerful attitude
and everybody that was there, a packed stadium,
120,000 people, but I heard the sound of his praise
in the quietness.
So you can hear the sound of God's praise
in a lot of different ways.
Now, there is a strong reminder at the end of this Psalm
about something that we need to say and see and share
as we are praising God.
As you're praising God, when you grow in praising God,
when you make his praise glorious,
you grow to the place where you can also praise God,
even for his testing.
Yes, we can praise God for the beauty.
We can praise God for the good things, for the blessings,
but you can begin to see the blessings
even in his testings.
Listen to verses 10 to 12.
"For you, O God, tested us.
You refined us like silver.
You brought us into prison
and you laid burdens on our backs.
You let men ride over our heads.
We went through the fire and the water
and you brought us to a place of abundance."
So making praise glorious means
that you go beyond praising God
for just what seems good or easy.
You begin to praise him
in any and every circumstance in your life.
You praise him for the blessing of the good
and you praise him for the testing
that comes even in our suffering.
And you begin to recognize as you do that,
that God's greatest blessings often come
out of those testings.
I just want to say to you right now,
if you're feeling like I don't have anything
to praise God for in my life right now,
I want to invite you to look again.
Even in the suffering you're going through,
even in the testing that you're facing,
God is at work.
God is at work in ways that will be seen
in your character, will be seen in your life
for all of eternity.
You make his praise glorious by praising him even then.
Now, out of all of this,
I want to listen together to this burst of praise
that ends Psalm 66.
This is what we need for our lives today.
Listen to verses 16 to 20.
Come and listen, all you who fear God.
Let me tell you what he's done for me.
I cried out to him with my mouth.
His praise was on my tongue.
If I had cherished sin in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened.
But God has surely listened
and he heard my voice in prayer.
Praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer
or withheld his love for me.
Let's pray together.
Our Father, we do praise you that you don't reject us.
You invite us into a relationship with you through Jesus.
And in that, we praise you
that we can see all the things that you're doing
in our lives and in the lives of others.
And we can make your praise glorious
as we say that to you.
We can make your praise glorious
as we share that with others.
God, help us to remind ourselves
of how important praise is in our lives today
and to spend our heart, to spend our mind,
to spend our time praising you through this day today.
Give us that gift, we pray,
through the power of your spirit in your name, we pray.
Amen.
Well, join us tomorrow.
We're gonna look at Psalm 67.
It's a prayer for three of our greatest daily needs.
(upbeat music)
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