Psalm 96 "The Big Beautiful Vision"

[0:00] Hi, my name is George Sinclair. I'm the lead pastor of Church of the Messiah.

[0:15] ! It is wonderful that you would like to check out some of the sermons done by Church of the Messiah, either by myself or some of the others. Listen, just a couple of things. First of all, would you pray for us that we will open God's Word well to His glory and for the good of people like yourself?

[0:32] The second thing is, if you aren't connected to a church and if you are a Christian, we really, I would really like to encourage you to find a good local church where they believe the Bible, they preach the gospel, and if you have some trouble finding that, send us an email. We will do what we can to help connect you with a good local church wherever you are. And if you're a non-Christian, checking us out, we're really, really, really glad you're doing that. Don't hesitate to send us questions. It helps me actually to know, as I'm preaching, how to deal with the types of things that you're really struggling with. So God bless.

[1:12] Just bow our heads in prayer just before we begin. Father, we ask that you would send the Holy Spirit upon us. You continue to send the Holy Spirit upon us.

[1:26] Father, you know how earthbound we can be, how small our vision of you can be, how preoccupied we can be with small things and neglect to think of you or remember you.

[1:39] And so, Father, we ask that your Holy Spirit, in your kindness, would bring this scripture deeply into our hearts, that we might more and more and more be gripped by the gospel and live with a big understanding of just how big you are and how you rule over all things. And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son and our Savior. Amen. Please be seated.

[2:13] J.R.R. Tolkien, in his book, The Lord of the Rings, it's also in the movie. There's a scene towards the end of the three movies, or all of the books, where Gandalf says to Pippin, I think it's Pippin, no it's Sam, Gandalf says to Sam, or sorry, that everything sad will become untrue. Everything sad will become untrue.

[2:42] He didn't give a Bible passage to go along with this, but if he was, if Tolkien was to have given a Bible passage to go along with this, excuse me, it's allergies, nothing else.

[2:56] It's not because I smoke cigars or cigarettes or anything like that, it's just allergies. If there was to be a Bible verse to support this profound truth that everything sad will become untrue, it would be the psalm that we're looking at today. So it'd be a great help to me if you got out your Bibles and turned to Psalm 96. Psalm 96. I mean, I think in some ways, if I was to give it a title for the psalm, it would be a beautiful vision of what is, but it could also be used as a, or as a subtitle is why it is that everything sad will become untrue. And it's just a short psalm, 13 verses, and here's how it goes. Oh, sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth, sing to the Lord, bless his name, tell of his salvation from day to day, declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples, and just pause before I go anything any further. Jason did a very good job of reading the psalm, and I did an all right version of just reading that. Here's how you need to imagine hearing the psalm. You can hear some kids in the background, and those of you who've been here after the service, there's all these kids running around all excited, running around back up there, and down the sides, and in the church, and up the aisles, and doing all of that type of stuff, just running like crazy. And you know how excited and crazy kids can get, like a whole pile of five-year-olds and seven-year-olds? So what you need to imagine when you're reading this, and we're going to have to imagine it three times, because for those of you who are grammar nerds, there's three parts to the psalm, and all of the three parts of the psalm begin with crescendos. Sing, sing, sing, ascribe, ascribe, ascribe, let, let, let, let. They're all these crescendos. That's how it's designed to be in the original language. So what you need to imagine, and this is really hard for us, because you see, one of the consistent mistakes that Christians make about God is we think that he's really old, and we're young. But actually, the problem for us a lot of times with the Bible is that God is younger than us. That it would be far better for us to think of God as an excited four-year-old than somebody old and potentially easily grumpy like me. We're tired, potentially, like me. So what you need to imagine is imagine that one of you go out, and all of a sudden, like a whole gaggle of five to nine-year-olds all come up, and they grab your shirt, grab your hands, and say, come on, you got to come, you got to see this. You know, come, come, come. No, no, you're going too slow. I mean, parents know what it's like when you have kids like that. You're going, no, no, no, come on, you got to go, you got to go.

[5:39] That's what you need to imagine. So imagine that the Bible, they don't tell you who the psalmist is, but this is God using the psalmist to say to us, oh, sing to the Lord a new song. Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord. Bless his name. Tell of his salvation from today. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples. It's like a whole pile of seven-year-olds all excited, trying to grab you and bring you along, and they're all excited. That's how you should read it.

[6:06] It's really, really bracing. There's this crescendo, and it's really interesting. Look, notice the very first line, oh, sing to the Lord a new song. I mean, on one hand, it's one of the reasons why we shouldn't just sing old things, although it's good to sing old things, and it's good to hear it. For some people, an old song is a new song because they've never heard it. I remember when we'd introduced contemporary music into this church, and there was this very grumpy lady who just was grumpy all the time. I think she thought that being grumpy was one of the essential fruits of the Holy Spirit, and one day she complained about all these modern songs being sung, and the song that she was complaining about was, And Can It Be?, written in the 1700s by Charles Wesley, and when I told her it was written in the 1700s by Charles Wesley, she actually said to me, You're lying.

[7:01] That was how grumpy she was. But anyway, so sometimes it's good to read single songs, but what the new song is referring to, it's similar to what in the book of Lamentations says, His mercies are new every morning. It's to have an experience, a fresh experience of God's mercy and kindness and grace.

[7:19] So pray, oh, sing to the Lord a new song. In other words, Lord, grant me a new experience, a fresh experience of your mercy and of your grace. And so you have these three whole sets of commands.

[7:31] Oh, and just one other thing, which is sort of cool, another grammar thing, sorry. Look in verse 2. Sing to the Lord, bless his name, tell of his salvation from day to day. About 200 years or so, 100 to 200 years before Jesus came, Jewish scholars translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, Greek. And when they translated that word tell, they translated it with the word that we get evangelism from, which is actually one of the three main verbs used in the New Testament to talk about what we're to do when we teach the Bible. It's actually where the word evangelism from. Anyway, so they have all these commands. So you can just imagine, okay, so you have a whole pile of kids, you know, sing, sing, sing, come on, tell, declare. They're driving, you're trying to get you along, and you're, I don't know, you just want to drink your coffee, and you're feeling a bit grumpy, and all that type of stuff. So you say, okay, why? Why? So the way the psalm is structured is you get these sets of commands, then the why or the what. Like, what is the truth that demands a type of implication?

[8:34] And so that's how it all was. It's going to be a series of, like, do-do-do, let's do-do. And then, okay, the parent pauses, or you pause, and they finally get the kids to say, what's going on? And they tell you what's going on, and they understand that what's going on implies that you should be doing this, and that's how the psalm is structured. All three cases. So you get that in verses four to six.

[8:56] What is it? And what you're going to see here, beginning, you already get to see it. You're going to get this powerful, the whole psalm is a powerful, beautiful vision of the real world, and how we should live in it. It's not, Phil, I mean, there's going to be aspects of it that are going to shock us. In fact, in a moment, we're going to read something which is very shocking to Canadians in general, and Canadian Christians. But it's so consumed with this positive vision that it's not really polemic, but because it has a positive vision, it's going to bang up against things in the world that don't fit with it. And so here's the things which we are to understand are true. Verses four to six. What are the truth? For great is the Lord. Verse four. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. Here's the bit. For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him. Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. And in verse five there, for all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols. You know, sometimes I tell you that if you know the original language, you have a bit of a different nuance. Actually, the different nuance here is even harder for Canadians to hear. It actually literally says, it's a very good translation, because you see, another word for idols in the Old

[10:23] Testament, there's several words for idols, but one of the main words for idols is worthless nothings. Worthless nothings. Allah, a worthless nothing. That's what the psalmist saying. Krishna, a worthless nothing. That's what the psalmist saying. The gods and goddesses of native spirituality, worthless nothings. Whoa, we Canadians say. Now, it's really funny about that. You know, I mean, the whole, most of Canada is quite prepared to tell us that we're completely loony. You know, our views on sexuality, our views on money, our views on power, a whole pile of things, they're willing to say that we're loony. And if you go online to listen to Muslim apologists, what they'll tell you all the time is that we Christians are completely and utterly wrong. If you go into India right now, the Indian government is ruled by a party that will tell us that people like us are dangerously wrong and don't have any place in the country, at least to come from outside. So why is it that we feel so uncomfortable just saying something like this? Atheists will tell us that we're ridiculously wrong, right?

[11:34] When Richard Dawkins talked to Iann Hersey Alley, who used to be one of the leading atheists who were good friends, he said to her, but good grief, Iann, like the incarnation, the resurrection, that's completely and utterly ridiculous. How could you believe it? Well, you know what? If there is a God that does exist, the triune God is described in the Bible, who has created all of all things, then any God who claims to be God that is not that God is in fact a nothing.

[12:06] Here's another way to put it. Wes Huff, a Canadian apologist, has become famous through his Joe Rogan.

[12:16] At first, I think it was Billy something, a conspiracy theorist, and then Joe Rogan, and now he was just about a month or so ago on Flagrant Podcasts. He's got, I think, several million views. He was for three hours peppered with different objections to the Christian faith, and one of them was, of course, this common idea by many people that all religions ultimately teach the same thing and lead you to the same place. And Wes Huff gave this absolutely brilliant response to it. He said, what would you say if I said that I went into the local library and I read every single book in the library, everything from The Cat in the Hat to Mark Kearney's book on, you know, Mark Kearney's latest book on values, and Nietzsche on the death of God, and Karl Marx on the Communist Manifesto, and just say I read every single book in the library, and I'm here to tell you they all say the exact same thing.

[13:08] Well, you'd know that there's two possible reasons somebody would say that. The first and most likely reason is they didn't read any of the books. They just went and sat in the library and made something up out of their head. The second thing is if they actually did read them, they don't understand them, because those all the books in the library can't say the same thing, and all the religions of the world can't, they all say completely, massively different things on lots of important matters.

[13:34] And so this is just saying something which it flows from the positive vision. In fact, I'm going to sort of jump ahead a little bit about what this positive vision is.

[13:47] When we read the whole psalm, you're going to see a whole pile of things describing who the Lord is. And it's going to say that the Lord's beauty is infinite. It's going to say that His glory is infinite. It's going to say that His strength is infinite. It's going to say that His knowledge is infinite. It's going to say that His justice is infinite. It's going to say that His goodness is infinite. It's going to say that His splendor is infinite. It's going to say that His rule is infinite. It's going to say that His love is infinite. But at the same time there are not nine different infinites. There's just one infinite because there's just one God, the Lord, Yahweh, the Father in heaven. His beauty is infinite, glory infinite, strength infinite, knowledge infinite, justice infinite, goodness infinite, splendor infinite, rule infinite, love infinite, and there are not three infinites. There's just one infinite. There's just one God. And if that's true, all these other things that break things up in reality up, I mean, that's, you know, at the end of the day, in the deepest part of who we are, we long for something like what I've just said and what this psalm is declaring to be true. Because you see, religions and spiritualities and contemporary thought are always breaking these things up into very different categories that are often in trouble with each other. I'm watching the last season of the Harry Bosch episodes, and he has a conversation with his daughter. And it's a very classic problem that you see in life all the time. And basically, she's talking to him, and she has a problem because, you know, there's the truth, and there's what's right, and there's also loyalty, and there's also, you know, compassion. And she has a problem because the four of these things are all fighting with each other, and she doesn't know what to do. And

[16:01] Harry's response is, you just have to figure out how much of the gray you can live in. Now, I mean, on one hand, of course, in a fallen human world, we often feel these things in tension.

[16:12] But, you know, if you think about it, how can it be love if it's not true? How can it be love if it's not good? How can it be justice if it's not true? How can it really be true if there's no aspect of goodness to it? And surely beauty is connected to all of these things, and integrity is connected to all of these things. And so we live in a world where we see all of these things as types of separate types of things. But one of the glories of this psalm, the positive, beautiful vision, is that they're all, there's this, all these things exist. They're real. They're worth acknowledging and living within, and they all ultimately come from the one Lord.

[16:54] And any other God or Lord that is not the Lord is a nothing. We shouldn't be afraid of them. We shouldn't be afraid of them. Now, that's the first of the crescendos. The second set of crescendos, and now, so you just have to think about yourself. The kids, you know, they grabbed you over there. Come, come, come. And they grabbed you, and they're taking you. They got you to about there. You know, you paused about there, and you said, why? And then they gave you this answer, and then they say, now they're going to say the next group of things that are going to sort of get you farther on. And those are the crescendo that comes in verses 7 through 10. And here's how it goes.

[17:33] Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. Bring an offering and come into His courts. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. Tremble before Him all the earth. Another crescendo, but the three, ascribe, ascribe, ascribe, and then going off into other types of things. And then the reason is, say among the nations, which is sort of the last of the crescendos, the Lord reigns. You pause the kids.

[18:01] Why do you want to, why do we have to do all these things? Because the Lord reigns. The world is established. It shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity. These are these three profound truths for you to understand and live in. And when it says here about the ascribe, give, you know, notice what it says, verse 8, ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. So the word ascribe, the word give, is a type of acknowledgement of what is. It's declaring what is. So what it isn't is, it isn't as if, you know, I was to go out with a couple of the kids and we're looking up the clouds and we say, you know what, look at that, look at those clouds over there. Don't, doesn't it sort of look like a unicorn? You know, the kids being kids, they'd say, oh, well, some of the kids might say, yeah, that sort of looks like a unicorn. And one of the other kids, one of the older ones, probably a boy, would say, no, no, no, that's just an upside down ice cream cone. Like it's not a unicorn whatsoever. But you're just sort of looking at the clouds, trying to imagine what they look like. That's not what the command to scribe is. It's more as if, you know, I've maybe had some eye surgery or I've had drops in my eyes so I can't see very well.

[19:19] And they want me, as my eyes start to clear, people are asking me to notice what's really there. Are your eyes, can you see it? Like if you're in Vancouver and it's a sunny day, can you see the Rockies? Aren't they glorious? Can you see them? Aren't they glorious? That's what the command is. To see and to acknowledge and to declare, to see and to ascribe every people on the planet. It doesn't matter if you're in Rwanda. It doesn't matter if you're in Burundi. It doesn't matter if you're in Uganda. It doesn't matter if you're in China or Taiwan. It doesn't matter if you're in the United States or Canada. All the families of the people, all of the nations, all of them. The declaration is for all of them. And we're to see his glory and his strength. The glory due his name. In verse 8, to bring an offering to come into his court. We're to worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. Tremble before him all the earth. Verse 10, the Lord reigns. The world is established. Why? Because he has established it. It'll never be moved. He will judge the people with equity. And here's another one of those words here. This translation was done in 2001. Equity is no longer the right word to use. I'm going to be... It's not controversial. Here's... The common word now for equity is the opposite of what this means. Equity now means discriminating against people and treating them differently to get certain socially approved outcomes. That's what equity means.

[20:59] You discriminate against people based on certain characteristics about them. And you discriminate and you discriminate so that you get the results that you want. And this word is not equity. It's not...

[21:10] That's what the word is in Hebrew. The word is equality. The complete opposites. For... There's a PhD dissertation out there for somebody as to how the word equity went in 20 some odd years to now mean the opposite of what it originally meant. And so the word should be translated as equality if they were to update their translation. So that's why you have to keep updating translations because words change their meaning. And... But here's the thing. You know, earlier I said, here's the beautiful vision. There's a simple, coherent harmony and unity between all of those things. His infinity, his glory, his beauty, his truth, his knowledge and justice. There's a simple harmony and coherence between them. They're different, but they don't conflict with each other. They embellish each other. They help explain each other. The more you understand just how important the truth is to the Lord, then the more you can understand and trust that his justice is going to actually be just. And the more that you can understand his goodness, then you understand that the truth is going to be connected to his goodness.

[22:18] These things all fit together. And here now the psalm is bringing out this other aspect of this profound unity. That there is... The Lord is the one and only creator. The Lord is the one and only establisher of all things that exist. The Lord is the one and only judge of all of the living and the dead.

[22:40] The Lord is the one and only ruler over the entire created order. The Lord is the one and only ender. In other words, the one who will bring things to an end. He is the one and only king. He is the one and only savior. And there are not seven. There is just one. And it is the Lord. He is the creator. He establishes everything. He rules over everything. He will judge everything. He will bring all things to an end. He is the one and only king. And he is the one and only savior. That is who he is. Now there's a bit of a question.

[23:20] There's an implied riddle in the psalm. Like why is the word salvation there? Salvation implies doom. It implies that you're dead, doomed, and done. And something has to happen to change that.

[23:40] Well, here's part of the brilliance of the psalm. We don't know when the psalm was written, but part of the psalm, almost identical wordings used in 1 Chronicles. So it's probably from around the time of King David.

[23:58] So it's a thousand years before Jesus. And the psalmist's insight was that there is something about the human condition that means that even though there's sacrifices, even though there's rituals, and they've all come from God, unless God does something truer and greater, there is no hope. It has to be the creator and the ender and the judge and the righteous one who does something. Otherwise, we can't be fixed. Here's another way to look at it.

[24:32] If you were on the right wing of the political spectrum, you probably had a lot of mocking things to say at the end of Biden's term when he pardoned a whole pile of people.

[24:44] You probably said to yourself, I would never pardon those scumbags. They should get the absolute worst, most justice they can possibly get. How dare he just completely and utterly deny justice and go ahead and pardon them?

[24:58] Now, most of us who would have said that probably didn't say it around the end of Trump's term or won't say it in a couple of years when he does the exact same thing. That's what presidents do. They pardon people.

[25:13] They pardon guilty people. And in a sense, there's no justice. I mean, occasionally it might be that there's an act of redressing something which was an unjust sentence, but it's often cronies and fundraisers and others who've gotten in trouble.

[25:24] And there's a simple declaration by the president that they're now pardoned. And you have, in a sense, a type of salvation, but it's not really salvation because it's not just. And you see, here's the problem. We can hear all about this stuff with, if we're really serious about it, if in fact God is going to judge me equally as he judges every other person, and he's going to judge based on a completely perfect true knowledge of me from his standards, how could I possibly pass that judgment?

[25:56] Like, how could I possibly do that? So you see, here's what often goes on. It's often how religion and spirituality works. It's a little bit like, well, you know, I think he should give me a pass because, well, like, because I'm me.

[26:14] And because I'm a bit of a big hearted guy, like I like all of you guys, he should give all of you guys a pass. But I can give him a whole long list of people. He shouldn't give them any type of pardon. Well, see, that's, if that's how it works, then God's not really just and he's not really good.

[26:31] And how does it all fit? Only the gospel. The psalm sets a riddle before the hearers in David's day and Solomon's day that only the gospel would reveal. And what it reveals is that, you know, and that's why if you read John 17, at the end of John's gospel, the God's glory is most perfectly revealed in the crucifixion of Jesus.

[26:56] God's glory isn't most perfectly revealed in the Rockies or if you don't like mountains and you like big sky on the prairies or parts of the Arctic.

[27:10] Or if you like lush jungles in the Amazon. God's glory isn't most perfectly revealed there. Although God's glory is revealed in all of those places, his glory is most perfectly revealed when Jesus dies upon the cross.

[27:24] Because, you see, what you see there is that God's justice is completely just. There is to be a just punishment for wrongdoing.

[27:37] And you also see his mercy. Only the Creator can stand for his creation. And so what we see on the cross is that as I, in a sense, in the future, God's, because God's done this for me already, I can't stand before God's judgment.

[27:58] And it's as if at the same time that I'm acknowledging that before God that I cannot stand. I, I, the, the price that has to be paid for the wrong that I have done is too much for me to bear.

[28:09] It will completely unmake me. I, I will become forever excluded from his presence. That God, the Son of God, the Creator, comes in, in a sense, puts his arm around me or puts his arm around you.

[28:21] And he says to God the Father, justice must be fulfilled. And I love George. I love you.

[28:33] Please allow me to stand in his place. So that the judgment and all of the punishment and the penalty that should fall on George will fall on me.

[28:44] And that's what we accept in Christ. We accept this substitution and exchange. So the God's justice, everything that I have done wrong is in a self dealt with.

[28:56] And only the Creator can stand for his creature like me. And it falls on him that I might be free. And I can stand before God saying, God, in, in your mercy, God, the Son of God stood in my place, condemned in my place, he stood that I might go free.

[29:17] That's what the gospel is. And so this Psalm with this powerful vision is also putting before people a riddle that only the gospel solves. Now, I still haven't got to why it is that everything sad will one day be untrue.

[29:35] Although you can begin to see it, especially with this doctrine of the gospel. But we have the final crescendo, which will help to bring it home. It's verses 13, 11 to 13. And with the other crescendos, there's three.

[29:48] Sing, sing, sing. And then there's ascribe or give, you know, give, give, give. Give, give, give. And now the fourth one. And now the image changes. It's no longer the kids dragging you along.

[30:03] It's all of us together now calling out to God. These last things are we're all calling out to God together. And here's what we call out. Verses 11 to 13.

[30:14] Let the heavens be glad. Let the earth rejoice. Let the sea roar and all that fills it. Let the field exult and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord.

[30:25] For he comes. For he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness, in his integrity. So here's this spectacular vision.

[30:37] You know, Jesus, when he, I think it's in Luke, Luke's version of when Jesus comes into the city, the just, what we now call Palm Sunday. So it's just a few days before he's going to be crucified.

[30:50] And, and, you know, they're singing Hosanna. There's this, this story is that people are calling Hosanna and praising the whole towns in an uproar. And, and people are throwing their clothes down to stop the dust and, and, and branches.

[31:02] And, and, and some of the grumpy people who are there who don't like Jesus say, you got to tell your people to shut up and stop them from saying what they say. And what does Jesus said? He says, if I stopped them, even the stones would cry out.

[31:15] The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament proclaims his handiwork. And, and it's almost as if what this is capturing here, it's, it's a little bit like, well, it, I, we wouldn't hold the dogs back because Louise would really enjoy it.

[31:33] But, you know, when I, we have dogs. Louise loves dog. I don't, it's not so much that I love dogs. I love Louise and Louise loves dogs. So we have dogs and she spends all the time with the dogs and all of that type of thing.

[31:47] And, and, and so when Louise comes back, you know, I, I come back and they sort of, not looking at me, they're looking for her. And it's like they pounce on her, right? Tails wagging, tongues, all of that type of stuff.

[31:59] They're very friendly dogs. If you come over to our house, we have to have somebody holding the dogs back, right? And at some point in time, after we're, we're pretty sure that the dogs are going to be a tiny, you're prepared, we let the dogs go.

[32:14] It's like saying, let her rip. So we're saying to God, let them go, let them go. And it's as if this image that one of the things that happened in the Garden of Eden, if human beings hadn't have fallen, that we would have lived in this world and we would have lived in a world where every day we saw, we heard the rivers praising God the way rivers are to praise God and mountains praising God the way mountains would praise God and trees and plants and animals.

[32:45] And we would live in a world filled with music of them in exaltation praising God. That's the real world. And because of the fall, God has held that back.

[32:57] But in the new heaven and the new earth, we will live in a world where we will hear the Gatinos. If we're here in an area like this, the Gatinos are praising God, the fields are praising God, the rivers are praising God, the rain praises God, the wind praises God.

[33:12] We will live in a world where what we call inanimate nature, it'll be inanimate in a sense, but it has its own mountainy way of praising God. And God has held that back.

[33:24] And so the end of the psalm is that God, Jesus is coming back, the Lord is coming back, let him rip, let him go. That's the world that we're going to live in. Romans says that creation groans, longing for the day when the sons of God and the daughters of God will be revealed.

[33:41] That's what this is referring to. They're getting it from places like Psalm 96. You see, if you look at this psalm, wherever God is, there is singing and joy.

[34:00] Wherever God is, there is singing and joy. And one day we will be before God face to face.

[34:12] And everything sad in our life will become untrue. Everything sad in my life and yours will become untrue in Christ.

[34:30] So, in closing, we have a big God. Therefore, problems are small compared to this big God. And we have a God who is really big, but he's not big to crush, but to save and ennoble and to bring out joy.

[34:49] We have in Christ a Father in heaven who loves you. This is his world. So pour out your heart to him in prayer. Learn to adore him and go and sing and tell and pray.

[35:03] This is our Father's world. This is your Father's world in Christ. And he is a big God. And he loves you. And he will bring all things to their proper end.

[35:16] And there is a real and true Savior. And that is why we should tell others about him. Why? God wants more people to sing his praises. That's why we share the gospel.

[35:29] I invite you to stand. Let's pray. Father, scientists talk about, like, everything just sort of, in a sense, being dead matter and just mere energy.

[35:50] But, Father, the world is filled with beauty. Father, even these newest shots from a more powerful camera of distance galaxies just show, Father, this.

[36:02] You can't do things without making them beautiful. And all things have been created by you. You hold all things together. There is no other. You and you alone will bring all things to completion.

[36:15] You and you alone, Father, control these things. And you and you alone have acted to do what needed to be done for us in sending Jesus to be our Savior.

[36:26] Father, you are a good God, a true God. You will return and bring all things to an end. And you will judge evil. And nothing evil can stand before you.

[36:37] And we ask, Father, that you grow in us the habit of adoration, that you grow within us just an ever deeper knowledge of how big and powerful and almighty and glorious you are, that you are our Father in heaven who loves to hear us pray to you about small and big things.

[36:56] So, Father, help us to live in light of the gospel and in light of these truths day by day. And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son and our Savior. Amen.

[37:07] Bye.