That was Michael Bowen's, or part of Michael Bowen's, paraphrase of Psalm 98,
and to a very appropriate tune, I think, Beethoven's Ode to Joy.
Now, I'm aware Beethoven's Ode to Joy at the moment is quite political,
as the anthem of the European Union. Please forget that.
It is a great tune and a great expression of joy.
And I was thinking this morning that Psalm 98 we could describe as the Christian's Ode to Joy.
Perhaps more accurately, the Christian's Ode to Joy in the Lord,
because joy in itself is a great thing, but really what matters is what our joy is in,
and we find our joy and our strength in God.
And the psalmist says when we have a real joy in the Lord,
then we're going to want to sing about it.
That is the great thrust of Psalm 98.
Sing for joy. Sing a new song. Sing for joy to the Lord.
And I hope this morning we can get some feel of the joy that we can have
as we sing together, as we praise God.
If there's one thing to take away, perhaps, it would be this.
God wants us to find joy in singing his praises.
During the course of what I have to say, I'm going to refer very frequently to songs.
Many of them songs written specifically, thinking about Psalm 98.
Some not.
But just to remind ourselves of some of the great songs that we have,
that we can sing, and that we can use to rejoice in our God.
Now before we go into that, perhaps it's worth saying a couple of things.
One is that for some of you, perhaps, joy is the last thing on your minds this morning.
Perhaps because of personal illness or of circumstances,
you find it very difficult to rejoice in God.
Perhaps you even find it quite difficult to sing some of the songs
that we've been singing this morning.
And for a speaker to get up and say, let's all rejoice and be glad,
that could actually be the worst thing for you if you don't feel like it.
So I'm not doing that.
I recognise that many people are going through hard times.
And it's very understandable if you don't feel great joy this morning.
Our prayer would be, and your prayer perhaps,
that God, even in your circumstances, or perhaps by changing your circumstances,
would be able to give you a real joy in him.
The thing I want to say is that not all the songs and hymns we sing are in themselves joyful.
Quite a lot of what we sing focuses on our sin or on the suffering of the Lord Jesus.
And if we sing them with a cheesy grin on our faces,
that suggests we're not really thinking about the words of what we're singing at all.
And yet, even as we sing songs like that or hymns like that,
there is an underlying joy if we know the Lord Jesus.
A joy that our sins are forgiven.
A joy that Christ suffered and died, but that he's risen again and he is now triumphant.
So even in the solemnity, we can also have a joy in the Lord.
So we're thinking about singing, we're thinking about joy as we look at Psalm 98.
If you've got the psalm in front of you, you'll see that it is devised fairly naturally
into three groups of three verses.
And what I want to do is go twice through each of these three groups
and think about two different things.
First of all, I want to think about how we should sing.
What does the psalmist tell us about how we should sing God's praises?
And then I want to think about the why.
Why does the psalmist tell us that we should sing and that we should rejoice?
And we will try to cover the whole psalm in these two passes at it.
Some sections will be covered more in one than in the other.
So first of all, how does the psalmist say that we should sing?
Can I go forward rather than backwards?
There we are.
So he says we should sing freshly, we should sing enthusiastically,
and we should sing inclusively.
So verses 1 to 3, particularly verse 1,
the psalmist says that we should be fresh in our worship of God.
Sing to the Lord a new song.
Now what the psalmist probably principally means here
is that we should sing to the Lord in praise of the new things that he is doing among us,
of the evidences that we have of his grace and of his power.
This psalm is possibly the least helpful of all the headings of all the psalms in our Bible.
It just says a psalm.
So we don't know anything about the background to it.
The psalmist might have been talking about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt
as he thinks about God's great work of salvation.
He might be thinking of David and his battle with Goliath
and how that freed the Israelites from the tyranny of the Philistines.
Or he might have been writing much later
and be thinking of how God brought his people back from the exile in Babylon,
how he worked in the hearts of the Persian rulers who took over
and allowed the Jews to go back.
We don't know.
But the psalmist is saying,
God has done something wonderful about it.
What are we about us?
What are we going to do?
We're going to sing and we're going to rejoice in him.
I think the lesson for us is that our singing does need to be fresh.
Many of our songs we sing very regularly and they're great songs,
but if we get to the stage where we know the words
and we just sing them almost without thinking,
then they're not new songs.
They're not in any way fresh to us.
I think the principle lesson I would take from singing a new song
is when we sing even old songs,
we should sing them thinking carefully about what they say
and what they teach us about God
and rejoicing in all that he is and all that he has done for us.
It's good to sing new songs as well.
Old songs, old hymns are wonderful and we want to keep singing them.
Let's never lose the great wealth of Christian music
that we have in our heritage,
but good to have new songs as well.
Many new songs are based on old ones.
So the psalm, Psalm 98, there were many, many paraphrases
that I was able to find as I prepared for this morning.
All the psalms and other portions of scripture,
they have been refreshed and revised,
given new tunes to make them relevant
or make them more relevant and more accessible,
perhaps is the right word, to new generations.
And even some of our old hymns,
some of the modern songwriters have been really good
at taking them and at refreshing them.
So for example, Graham Kendrick,
Before the Throne of God Above,
an old hymn which in many ways was almost forgotten
by many people and has now been brought with a new tune
to be really meaningful to many.
Or Chris Tomlin's version of Amazing Grace,
which again brings a freshness to it.
I'm good to have new new songs as well.
We're really privileged in this church.
We've got some great musicians, some Christian songwriters,
and they write really good Christian songs.
Let's rejoice in that and enjoy the new songs
as we would sing them together.
But even if it's old songs we're singing,
even if it's very familiar songs,
don't let them become stale.
We need to keep them fresh.
We need to keep praising God through them
and thinking about what we're singing.
So we are to sing freshly.
Timothy Dudley Smith did a paraphrase of Psalm 19,
and perhaps this can sum up what I've said.
In this section, he writes,
Sing a new song to the Lord.
He to whom wonders belong,
rejoice in his triumph,
and tell of his power.
Oh, sing to the Lord a new song.
Secondly, we're to sing enthusiastically.
Now, I've got a bit of a confession to make here.
When I first typed up in my notes for this,
I wrote exuberantly.
And then I thought,
no, we're conservative evangelicals.
We live in Scotland.
We don't do exuberant very well.
If we were in Africa or Latin America, we might.
But all of us can be enthusiastic
in our praise for God.
And in verses four to six,
that really is what the psalmist is saying.
Be enthusiastic as you come in song to God.
Shout for joy to the Lord all the air.
Shout for joy before the Lord, your King.
And then there is the music that will accompany us,
the music of the harp,
the beauty of the harp's music,
the music of the trumpets and the ram's horn,
great majesty perhaps in them,
enthusiasm, noise as well.
They didn't have guitars and keyboards in that day.
But I'm sure the psalmist would have included them as well
if he had known about them.
But let me say,
and this is no disrespect to our wonderful band
and the way they serve us and the Lord so well,
the most important thing is not the music from the instruments.
It's not even the sound that comes from our mouth,
although that is really, really important.
It's what is in our hearts as we sing.
And as we sing, as we worship God together,
are we doing it with hearts that are bubbling over with love
and with praise for him?
Or do we at times just go through the motions?
John Wesley, the great preacher of a couple of hundred years ago,
said to his followers,
Sing lustily and with a good courage.
Beware of singing as if you were half dead or half asleep.
Beware of singing as if you're half dead or half asleep.
And sometimes perhaps some of our singing
has some of that character to it.
We need to sing out.
We need to sing with joy and with conviction
and not just be going through the motions.
John Wesley's brother, of course,
was Charles Wesley, the great hymn writer.
And Charles Wesley wrote,
Rejoice, the Lord is King, your Lord and King adore.
Mortals give thanks and sing and triumph evermore.
Lift up your heart.
Lift up your voice.
Rejoice.
Again I say, rejoice.
We need to sing enthusiastically.
And then finally, we need to sing inclusively.
And that's in verses seven to nine.
And we have this wonderful picture
that Paul paints for us of creation singing.
It's not just that we sing as individuals
or sing as a church
or even join with all the human beings around the world
in singing God's praises.
The psalmist says,
actually nature itself sings to God.
Creation itself is an evidence of praise to God.
The seas, the fish, they're praising him,
resounding for him.
The rivers, they're clapping their hands,
metaphorically, of course.
The mountains are singing for joy.
Sometimes we can almost hear that.
We're out on the mountains
and we hear the wind blowing through,
perhaps a gentle wind.
There's real musical quality
or the waves lapping on the shore or whatever.
But actually it's also as we look out,
as we see the wonder of God's creation,
does it not at times seem to be singing to us
and put a song in our hearts?
Creation itself teaches us
that we should sing
and that we should praise God.
It was David Crowder who wrote,
the flowers of the field are crying to be heard.
The trees of the forest are singing
and all of the mountains with one voice
are joining the chorus of this world
and I will not be silent.
I will not be quiet anymore.
As we see the beauty,
the wonder of what God has done
in his creation
and how it testifies to his greatness
and to his love for us.
We too shouldn't be silent.
We should be joining in
that great chorus of praise and worship.
So we sing freshly,
we sing enthusiastically
and we sing inclusively,
not with other humans
but with creation itself.
But we don't sing thoughtlessly.
We don't sing for the sake of singing
or because singing just makes us feel good,
feel worshipful.
We sing because of who our God is
and what he has done.
And so as well as the how,
the psalmist talks to us about the why.
And says three things in that.
He says God saves,
God reigns,
and God judges.
God saves.
The psalmist talks a lot about that
in verses one to three.
The Lord has done marvellous things
with his right hand
and his holy arm
have worked salvation for him.
The Lord has made his salvation known
and revealed his righteousness
to the nations.
Let's stop there and pause for a second.
Because in these verses,
there is definitely
two complementary things
the psalmist is talking about.
He's talking about the God
who saves, certainly.
But he's talking about the God
who is holy,
his holy arm.
And he's talking about the God
who is righteous.
He's revealed his righteousness
to the nations.
And we can't talk about the God
who saves
without talking about
why God needs to save.
If our sin,
if our failure,
if all things were wrong in our life,
didn't matter,
and God could just overlook them,
then there would be no need
for his salvation.
If he didn't care about how we live
or what we do,
then he wouldn't have needed
to send his son
to die for us on the cross.
It is because God is holy
and is righteous
that he needs to judge those
who don't meet his standard.
And it was because of that
that the Lord Jesus
had to come into the world
to live as a man among us
to die our death
on the cross at Calvary
so that if we trust in him,
we can be forgiven
and we can come into
a relationship with God.
We're thinking in our earlier service
this morning
of the wonderful relationship
we have with God
as our heavenly father
who cares about everything
in our lives.
That is only possible
because of his salvation.
And his salvation is necessary
because we don't come up
to the standard
that God has set for us.
So God's salvation,
God's great work
through the Lord Jesus
is needed because God is righteous,
because God is holy,
and because we need
to have our sins dealt with
before we can have
a relationship with him.
God's salvation.
And then the last verse
in the first section
talks about how God's salvation
spreads around the world.
He's remembered his love
and his faithfulness
to the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth
have seen the salvation
of our God.
In the Old Testament,
we largely read about
God's dealings
with his people, Israel.
We read about how he chose them
to be his own,
how they time and time again
failed him,
and when they turned back to him,
how he restored them.
to himself.
It was God
with his people, Israel.
In the New Testament,
as foreshadowed in Psalms
like this,
another part of the Old Testament,
we read about how God's salvation
extended from his people, Israel,
to the whole world.
And his faithfulness to Israel,
his love to Israel,
that the psalmist records for us here,
has been seen throughout the world.
And it's not just the Jews
to whom God's message
of salvation comes today.
It's all those
who believe in the Lord Jesus
and choose to follow him.
The love,
the faithfulness of God
is now universal
to all who put their trust
in Christ.
He is the God
who saves.
And as we think about that God,
mustn't we sing about him
and mustn't we talk about him
to others
we were thinking about earlier,
particularly in the children's talk.
Stuart Townsend writes,
you know this one.
So with every breath
that I am given,
I will sing salvation song
and I'll join the chorus of creation
giving praise to Christ alone.
Our God saves
and we should sing
and rejoice about that
and we should go and tell others
that he can be their saviour as well.
Verses four to six now
and they tell us
that God reigns.
Mainly just at the end,
most of that is about the exuberance,
the enthusiasm
of our saying,
but at the end
it tells us
the reason for that,
shout for joy
before the Lord,
the King.
The psalmist says
we rejoice in God
because he saves us.
We rejoice in God
because he is our Lord.
He is our King.
He is the one
who is in control of everything.
He is the one
who ultimately will be seen
to be King of Kings
and Lord of Lords.
And because of that,
we want to shout
and rejoice in him.
What does that mean
for us in practice?
Well, on one hand,
it would talk to us
about the devotion,
the obedience
that we should show
to the one
who is our Lord
and our King
that having been saved by him,
then we would want
to do what he commands us to
and be obedient to him.
But it also talks
and perhaps this is more
what's in the psalmist's mind,
it also talks about the fact
that the Lord cares for his people
and as he oversees the universe,
as he rules over everything.
He is able to be with us
even through these hard times,
these difficult times,
and to give us the assurance
that he is in control
and that with him in control,
his will will be done
for our good.
God reigns.
He reigns in power
and he reigns
to give us that confidence
that we can trust him
for everything.
Our Lord Jesus
is with us
through his spirit
if we know him
and love him
at all times
and his reign
is in our heart,
but we can also see
his reign
around us
in the world,
even as we pray
with the Lord's prayer,
your kingdom come.
Robert Lowry
in one of the great times,
I think more often
sings a solo now
in than collected,
but he says this,
thinking about God's reign,
no storm can shake
my inmost calm
while to that refuge
clinging,
since Christ is Lord
of heaven and earth,
how can I keep
from singing?
How can I keep
from singing
when I have a great
and a wonderful king
who is in control
of all things?
And then finally,
in the closing verses
of the psalm,
the psalmist talks about
how God judges.
So he talks about
the seas
and the rivers
and the mountains
and he says,
let them sing
before the Lord
for he comes
to judge the earth,
he will judge
the people
in righteousness,
the world in righteousness
and the peoples
with equity.
We look around
our world today
and we see
an awful lot
of injustice.
We see that
the world
is not what
it should be,
it is not what
we would want it to be,
it is certainly
what God
would want it to be
and perhaps we ask
why,
what is going on?
Well this psalm
would tell us,
this whole scripture
would tell us
that one day
all that
will change.
One day
the Lord Jesus
will return
and he will return
to rule
and he will return
in righteousness
to judge
the world.
And all of us
will have to face him
whether it is those
who know him
and are called
to account
for the things
we did
in his service
but know that
we have salvation
through him
or those who have
chosen not to follow him,
not to trust him
when they will be
subject to his
ultimate judgment
and to the consequences
of their sin.
But we can look forward
if we know
the Lord Jesus
with confidence
to that time
when he will return
and we know
he will judge
rightly
and with
equity.
Job wasn't
as he said,
will not the Lord
of all the earth
do right?
We know that
the Lord Jesus
is coming back
and that when
he comes back
he will judge
justly
and fairly.
And we need
to make sure
that our lies
before him
that we have
our trust in him
that our sins
are forgiven
because we have
trusted in him
and know that
his death
has been sufficient
for our forgiveness.
If we don't
we will face him
as judge.
The oldest
hymn based on
Psalm 98
that I came across
and perhaps the greatest
of them all
is Isaac Watts
great hymn
Joy to the World
which Watts
took a lot of the Psalms
and applied
Christian thought
to them
and he did it
with this one
and in that
song he says
he rose the world
with truth and grace
and makes the nations
prove
the glories
of his righteousness
the wonders
of his love.
It's these two
together isn't it
that make God
the great judge.
On the one hand
he is righteous
he must maintain
his standards
he must punish
sin.
On the other hand
he has a great love
and he has made provision
for us
if we trust in him
to have our sins
forgiven.
Let's all this morning
make sure that we are
among those who know
and are following
the Lord Jesus
and that our sins
are forgiven
and we can truly
sing this great
psalm
and sing great songs
together
with joy.
God saves
God reigns
God judges.
In a few minutes
we'll have the opportunity
together
to take communion.
When we take communion
we do a number of things
as we think about
the Lord Jesus.
We look back
we look back
to the cross
where he died
and to the fact
that he took
the punishment
for our sins
that he is
our saviour.
He is the God
who saves.
We look up
we look up
and we recognise
that in heaven today
he is crowned
with glory
and honour
and we seek
also to crown him
in our hearts
with glory
and honour
to express
our love for him
and our devotion
to him
because he is
the God
who reigns.
And we look forward
we only take communion
until the Lord Jesus
returns.
And we look forward
to the day
when he will come back
and he will be
the righteous judge
and he will restore
the world
to the condition
that it should be in
and he will judge
the living
and the dead
with righteousness.
As we take communion
this morning
let's rejoice
in what he has done
even as we have
sadness about
what it cost
the Lord
to take our sins
let's rejoice
in him
and let's go into
the week
with a song
on our lips
singing about
the Lord
with freshness
with enthusiasm
and recognising
we're joining
with the whole
of creation
in praising him.
Let's pray together now.
Our Father
we thank you
for this wonderful psalm
we thank you
for what it teaches us
about how we should
be able to praise you
to sing your praises
with real joy
not just words
not just something
that makes us feel good
but something
that brings glory
to your name
and brings joy
to our hearts
and indeed
to your heart
as you see
your people
appreciating
all that you have
done for them.
Help us all
to be able
to praise
in that way.
For any who don't
yet know the Lord
Jesus
help them to come
to put their trust
in him
and be able to sing
that new song.
For those who are
going through hard times
we pray that even
in them
you will give a joy
in the Lord
and a recognition
that ultimately
you are in control
and you know
what is best.
And for all of us
as in a few minutes
we've come to
share communion together
we pray that you
will help us
to be drawn out
in a real appreciation
of the Lord Jesus
and to enjoy
his presence
as we remember
all that he has
done for us.
We give you thanks
and commit ourselves
to you
in the name
of the Lord Jesus.
Amen.