This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

(upbeat music) Welcome back to our look at Psalm 31 to 35. Day four, Psalm 34
today. Psalm 34 is a psalm of celebration.

So today we're going to look together at what we have to celebrate. Psalm 34 is
actually an acrostic in Hebrew. Each verse in the Hebrew language that the Old
Testament was originally written in, each verse begins with a successive letter
in the alphabet.

So it's a psalm that's designed to help us remember what we have to celebrate.
Anytime you did that, it would help you to remember. You go from Aleph to Beth,
from A to B, and that helps you to remember all the things that we have to
celebrate.

This psalm tells us how to celebrate, and then it tells us what we celebrate.
First it tells us how we celebrate. In verses one to eight, listen to this.

I will extol the Lord at all times. His praise will always be on my lips. My
soul will boast in the Lord.

Let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the Lord with me. Let us exalt his
name together.

I sought the Lord, and he answered me. He delivered me from all my fears. Those
who look to him are radiant.

Their faces are never covered with shame. This poor man called and the Lord
heard him. He saved him out of all his troubles.

The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them.
Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

Just look at this list of words of what to do in worship as we celebrate God.
You extol him, you boast in him, you glorify him, you seek him, you look to him,
you taste and see that he is good. Let's just look at those.

First, you extol the Lord. That's not a word I use very often, extol. To extol
is to praise enthusiastically.

And so we celebrate God by enthusiastic praise. And so I ask you, is there any
enthusiasm in your celebration? Now, to see if there's any enthusiasm, check
other places where you would show enthusiasm.

Maybe at a sporting event, or maybe when you're celebrating something wonderful
in your family. All our personalities are different, but based on your
personality, do you have the same level of enthusiasm when you're giving praise
to God? If not, and I gotta check this myself a lot of times, we need to up our
level of enthusiasm.

That's one of the ways that we celebrate, with emotion, with enthusiasm. You
extol the Lord. He also says you boast in the Lord.

We celebrate God by bragging on God. You oughta brag on God because he is the
one you can brag on. He's the one that you can brag about, and you can never
brag too much 'cause of his greatness, and he's never going to get a big head about
it 'cause God is never prideful.

So you learn to boast powerfully. A lot of our human conversations, they are
filled with weak boasts about ourselves. Learn to boast powerfully.

The Bible talks a lot about boasting in God. Here, my soul boasts in the Lord.
First Corinthians 1.

31, "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord. " First Corinthians 3. 21, "No one
should boast about what men can do.

" Proverbs 27. 1 says, "Never boast about tomorrow. " Jeremiah 9.

23 says, "Wise men should not boast of their wisdom. " And Galatians 6. 14 says,
"May I never boast except in the cross "of our Lord Jesus Christ.

" So focus your boasting on God and who he is. Just in prayer, take time to
celebrate and say, "God, you did this, and you did this, and you did this. " You
can talk about creation and the stars that he's made and the mountains that he
formed, or you can talk about your life and the salvation that he's given you
and the growth that he's brought into your life.

You boast in the Lord. Third thing you do is you glorify the Lord. We celebrate
God by recognizing his greatness.

You glorify who God is, how great he is, the glory that he has that is the glory
that none other has or ever could have. The next thing you do is you seek the
Lord. You celebrate God by seeking him out.

You don't wait for him to show up for you. You show up for him. You seek him out
when you're in trouble.

You seek him out when your heart is hurting. God, I need you right now. Do you
realize how deeply God appreciates that kind of worship?

That he sees your heart seek him out in those most difficult times of your life?
Even though your feelings at that time may not be joyful, the celebration of who
God really is is powerful in that moment. You also, he says here, you look to
the Lord.

You celebrate God by looking to him for help, by looking to him for strength.
And then this familiar phrase to some of you, you celebrate God by tasting and
seeing that the Lord is good. You taste, you recognize God did this.

It's through his goodness that this happened. You celebrate God by recognizing
his goodness and what he has given in your life. Sometimes whatever God has
given, we just sort of accept it.

We don't taste, we just take. You ever eat food that way? You eat it so fast you
didn't really taste what you were eating?

Well, sometimes we consume life that way. We just take it down so fast, we don't
take a moment to taste it and to recognize where that goodness came from. It
came from God.

First Peter two to three picks up on this phrase when it says, like newborn
babes, crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation
now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. You've tasted God's goodness
through your salvation, Peter is saying, now crave the food that's going to keep
you growing in that salvation. Once you get a taste of God's goodness, you have
to have more of God's goodness.

You have to have more of it. He also says here that one of the ways that we
celebrate is we fear the Lord. Now, this does not mean to be afraid of God.

This means an awe-filled respect for God. We celebrate God by living in
awe-filled respect towards him, by recognizing that whatever I may think of God,
however much I may think of God, my human mind can't even begin to approach who
God really is. And so I live in closeness and in love to the Lord.

I live invited into his presence, but I also live at the same time in fear of
the Lord, not afraid of him, but recognizing the greatness of the one in whose
presence I am at that moment. And those two things are always held in our hands
at the same time. That's how we celebrate God.

He also tells us in this psalm not only how to celebrate, but what we celebrate.
Listen to verses 17 to 18. The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them.

He delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the
brokenhearted, and he saves those who are crushed in spirit. So we've already
looked in verse four at the fact that he delivers us from our fears, in verse
five that he takes away our shame, in verse six that he saves us out of our
troubles.

Here in these verses again, we're saved from our troubles, and we're reminded in
verse 18 that even when our heart is broken, God is close to us. Even when our
spirit is crushed, God is there to save us. We celebrate all of those things.

As we think about what we celebrate, I'd like to focus on a couple of things in
verses 15 and 16. Listen to these verses. The eyes of the Lord are on the
righteous, and his ears are attentive to their cry.

The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them
from the earth. So David here talks about the eyes of the Lord and the face of
the Lord. We celebrate this in worship.

First, the eyes of the Lord. Celebrate the truth that God has his eye on you.
The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous ears.

They're attentive to your cry. God doesn't have his eye on you to judge you. God
doesn't have his eye on you to condemn you.

He has his eye on you to lead you and to guide you. He wants to listen to you.
He wants to give you all that you need in your life in order to be the person
that God has made you to be.

So you celebrate that truth that God never takes his eye off of you. He is
always caring for you. But alongside of that, the face of the Lord, it's against
those who do evil.

You celebrate the fact that God has his face set against evil. He has his face
set against those who do evil. It may not always seem that way in this world.

We'll talk about that a little bit later this week. But the truth is, even
though it may seem to us like evil is prevailing, God's going to prevail in the
end. And I can celebrate God in worship because I know in the end, his justice
will be done.

So as we pray together today, we don't want to pray a mournful prayer. This is a
psalm about celebrating. So let's pray in the spirit of celebration and just
say, God, right now, I celebrate you.

I celebrate who you are. I celebrate what you've done. I celebrate the fact that
you'll never fail me.

I celebrate your love that's unfailing. I celebrate the way that you look after
every aspect of my life. And I celebrate the fact that you know everything
that's going to happen in my life and are trusting me to live the life that you've
given me to live.

I celebrate the fact that Jesus Christ, you died and you forgave me for my sins
on the cross. And I celebrate the fact that you were resurrected again. And in
that resurrection, I find the new life that only you can give.

And this is just the start. I could go on and on and on. All the things that I
have to celebrate about who you are and what you've done for me, I celebrate you
right now, God.

In Jesus' name, I celebrate. Amen. Join us tomorrow.

We're going to look together at how to trust God to fight for you.