Hi, this is Pastor Tom, and I want to welcome you today to our look at Psalm 76.
I love this Psalm.
If you want to know where everything is headed, you do not need to be a prophet.
You just need to look at God's Word.
God's Word tells us again and again where everything is headed towards the end.
And here's where it is.
The end of the story is God's glory.
That's it.
The end of the story is God's glory.
In the end, God will be given glory because of who He is.
And because of who He is, we have been given the gift of salvation.
And because we are saved, we're going to worship God in His glory forever.
So really, it's not an exaggeration to say that there's nothing more important than knowing
the truth about God's glory.
In Psalm 76, it's a Psalm that's all about the truth of God's glory.
It's a Psalm that helps us to get a handle on this truth.
God's glory is just so big.
It can be sort of hard to take into your soul.
If you're like me, when you think of God's glory, it's hard to get deeper than thoughts
of a bright light and some booming voice.
But Psalm 76, it tells us how we can experience the glory of God, how you can experience it
today.
So we're going to look in this Psalm at four truths about God's glory and about what it
means for you to express His glory, to experience His glory, to say it to God and to others,
to take it into your soul.
How do you take God's glory into your soul?
Number one, you recognize this truth.
God's glory is in His name.
Even saying God's name brings God's glory into your soul.
In verse one, in Judah, God is known.
His name is great in Israel.
That one simple verse, God is known.
God has a name and that means you can know Him personally.
God is not trying to hide from you.
He wants to know you and He wants you to know Him.
God's glory is personal.
And here's what that means for your soul.
God wants you to know Him in His glory.
God wants you to experience who He is in His glory.
And one of the ways that you and I take that truth into our soul is by actually just calling
God by His name, saying it into our soul, saying it out loud, saying it in our prayers.
Now you can be as in-depth if you want as calling God by His Old Testament Hebrew language
names, names like Adonai or Elohim or even longer names like Jehovah Jireh, which means
I am your provision, or Jehovah Nisi, which means I am your victory, or Jehovah Shalom,
which means I am your peace, or Jehovah Shema, which means I am there.
No matter what you're facing, God is there.
Or you can use Jesus' favorite name for God.
You can simply call Him Father.
It brings great glory to God and it brings the glory of God into your soul when in your
You don't just say the word Father at the beginning of your prayer.
You hear it into your soul.
He is your Father.
And saying God's name brings God's glory and it brings it into your life.
Second truth about God's glory in this psalm is that God's glory is in His dwelling place.
In verses two and three, let's go two to four.
His tent is in Salem and His dwelling place is in Zion.
There He broke the flashing arrows, the shields and the swords, the weapons of war, selah.
You are resplendent with light, more majestic than mountains rich with game.
So He talks here about God's dwelling place and He talks about the tabernacle of God,
the tent.
The temple of God also becomes the dwelling place of God.
That's the place where God's presence, God's glory, dwelt.
Now if you do a deep study of these Old Testament houses of God, you'll find that God exactly
specified how they were to be built.
How they were built was an expression of His glory.
Each candlestick, each table, each curtain said something about the greatness, about
the character of God.
So to take in God's glory, you need to go to God's dwelling place.
And God's dwelling place today is no longer in a tabernacle or a temple.
The Old Testament is clear.
God's dwelling place is in each of His people.
It's in you as one of His people.
God's glory dwells in you as a follower of Christ.
Now I got to tell you, I don't feel that glorious.
I don't know about you, but I don't feel that glorious.
But the glory isn't in me.
It isn't in you.
It is in Christ.
Christ in you is the hope of glory.
So to express and experience God's glory, you need to trust what God says about you.
God has put His glory into you through His Spirit.
That is a wow.
But that means God's glory in you through His Spirit is a way that you are able, as
you live out who God has made you to be, to live out His glory in your life today.
There's a third truth about God's glory in this psalm.
In verse 7, we learn the truth that God's glory is God's alone.
Verse 7 says, "You alone are to be feared.
Who can stand before you when you are angry?"
Now those words, you alone, only God, you alone are to be feared.
These verses tell us, and we need to talk about what this means, that we are to fear
God in His glory because God's glory is God's alone.
So that means for me, and I struggle with this, you might too, that any time I fear
something else, I am looking away from God's glory and I'm attempting in that moment to
give glory to some person or some thing that will never truly have glory, that doesn't
deserve to be feared.
To put it simply, I'm making them bigger in my mind and I'm making God smaller in my mind.
But if I can get my heart to a place of fearing God alone, all the other fears start to melt
away.
Now, to fear God, this is where we get confused sometimes because we only use the word fear
to mean quaking in our boots, terrified, horror movie kind of things.
To fear God is not to run away from Him in terror.
To fear God is to run to Him as the only one that I can trust, the only one who truly loves you.
So to fear God means that you see His greatness, His grandeur, and you're willing to stand
on that greatness, stand in that place of His greatness because you know it's the only
safe place, it's the only secure place.
That's a funny thing.
People will run away from God because they're scared that He might see what they're doing
or get involved in their lives and they run to scary places.
But we will run to God.
Out of our fear of God, we lose our anxiety.
We lose our human fear because of our godly fear.
Nothing can diminish God's glory, but I can diminish it in my mind by fearing something else.
Now there's a fourth truth in this psalm about the glory of God.
God's glory, this psalm tells us in the last few verses, is in our commitment.
In your commitment, you can see God's glory.
Verse 11 says, "Make vows to the Lord your God and fulfill them.
Let all the neighboring lands bring gifts to the one to be feared.
He breaks the spirit of rulers.
He is to be feared by the kings of the earth."
God wants you and I to obey Him in His glory.
You give glory to God every time you do what He tells you to do out of this heart of trust,
out of this heart of love for Him, of awe-filled exuberance for who God truly is.
So these verses say you make and you fulfill your commitments.
It's one thing to make a commitment, "Yes, God, I'm going to do this," but then to fulfill
it.
Both of those bring God's glory.
We bring God glory when we make the commitment, He hears your heart.
We bring God glory when we fulfill the commitment.
He sees your actions.
He sees both.
Now, in our human frailty, we all have that, we can tend to shy away from even making commitments
because we know how often times we've failed in those commitments.
Listen to this, making a commitment brings glory to God, fulfilling a commitment brings
glory to God, but I want you to know you can bring glory to God even if you have failed
in a commitment, if you will turn back to God, if you will ask Him to teach you and
grow you even through that failure, if you'll turn that failure into a recommitment.
So instead of fearing your failures, just turn them into recommitments.
So the question behind this point is, what commitment do you need to make right now to
bring glory to God?
What's God been talking to you about in your relationships, in the way that you serve others,
in the way that you spend time with Him?
What commitment do you need to make to bring glory to God, or what commitment have you
made that you need to bring, to fulfill to bring glory to God, or what failure have you
had?
That instead of living in fear of that past failure, you need to turn it around today
into a recommitment to the glory of God.
Now I've got, as we end this look at God's glory, one final truth, and it's from the
New Testament.
Romans 2 10 says this about God's glory, "But there will be glory and honor and peace
from God for all who obey Him, whether they are Jews or Gentiles."
As we give God glory, this verse says that one day He will give back, there will be glory
and honor.
He will give back to us this gift of glory.
Now we're not glorified like God is, but God gives us the gift of living in the glory of
who He is, and that just causes us to give God more glory.
Heaven is going to be a glorious place.
So let's spend just a minute talking to our glorious God.
Our Father, we thank you for who you are.
We don't think, at least I don't, often enough about your glory.
It's easy to think about the daily tasks or the daily needs, but your glory is above them
all.
So I pray first of all that you'd help us to think more about your glory, about your
name, about your dwelling place, about what it means to fear you, about what it means
to make commitments to you.
And in those thoughts, God, I pray that you would speak your glory into our soul.
It makes us into the kind of people that you want us to be, and we know that.
And so we give this to you.
We give glory to you in Jesus' name, amen.
Join us tomorrow.
We're going to look at Psalm 77.
It's a psalm that leads us to meditate on the greatness of God.