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 I'll read it out loud first, Psalm 113.

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 Praise the Lord.

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 Praise, O servants of the Lord.

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 Praise the name of the Lord.

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 Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.

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 From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised.

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 The Lord is high above all nations, and His glory above the heavens.

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 Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?

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 He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap,

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 to make them sit with princes, with the princes of His people.

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 He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.

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 Praise the Lord.

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 It's a very simple psalm.

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 Really the main point is that we should praise the Lord on high, who looks upon the lowly.

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 And in verses 1 to 3, we see the command to praise God.

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 And then in verse 49, we're given the reasons to praise God.

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 And the exhortation to praise the Lord is repeated three times, just in verse 1.

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 And what makes us wonder, what does it mean to praise Him?

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 What's the kind of praise that befits His glory?

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 And verses 2 to 3 give us the answer.

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 It says,

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 Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore,

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 from the rising of the sun to its setting.

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 The name of the Lord is to be praised.

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 The Lord is so worthy of our praise that His praise should extend from today to forever.

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 That's what it's saying.

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 And it should last from the rising of the sun to its setting all day long,

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 all day long and every day unto eternity.

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 And I've heard a lot of Christians wonder, you know,

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 like, would it be kind of boring if we go to heaven and we're just praising God, you know, all eternity, you know.

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 But people kind of don't wonder the same thing about getting married, you know.

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 They're like, I'm going to be with the same person for the rest of my life, you know.

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 Like, they don't wonder if that's going to be boring, right.

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 Because relationships are really, it deepens.

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 You get to know the person.

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 And, I mean, even after decades of marriage, I hear from older folks that you still learn

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 and you still get to know and appreciate and grow in love for the person.

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 And I think it's the same.

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 If that's the case and if for a finite and sinful human being,

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 a lifetime of marriage is not long enough to get to know a person's life,

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 then eternity is not long enough for knowing and loving the eternal God.

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 And so that's why the only prayer that befits him is to praise forever, all day long.

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 And then we're given the reasons to praise God in verses 49.

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 The first reason is that our God is highly exalted.

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 He sits on high.

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 Verses 4 to 6.

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 The Lord is high above the mountains, I mean above all nations, sorry,

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 and his glory above the heavens,

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 who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high,

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 who looks far down on the heavens and the earth.

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 It's frequently said, right, that God's dwelling place is in heaven

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 and he looks down on earth from heaven.

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 And that's true in a figurative sense,

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 but technically God dwells far above the heavens, right?

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 He's, as 2 Chronicles 2, verse 6 says,

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 heaven, even highest heaven cannot contain him.

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 And so that's why verse 6 says that God looks far down,

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 not merely on the earth,

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 but he looks far down on the heavens itself, heavens and the earth.

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 There's a distance between God and man that we can never hope to cross.

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 But, of course, being above something isn't referring merely to a spatial category

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 of where he is.

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 It's really not.

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 That's just a figurative language.

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 But it's a statement of God's authority and glory, right?

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 That he's above all nations means he exercises sovereign rule above all the nations of earth,

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 all the kingdoms of earth.

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 And he's sovereign not only over the people of earth,

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 but he's also sovereign over the spirits of heaven.

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 He reigns above the heavens.

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 And we are often fascinated in our lives by people who are extraordinarily gifted

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 or have accomplished extraordinary feats on earth.

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 But all human glory is dwarfed by God, whose glory is above the heavens.

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 And for that reason, God Most High deserves our praise more than any other being in the universe.

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 And what's amazing is that this Most High God is our God, it says in verse 5.

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 That's why we should praise him.

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 He's our God.

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 He's the Most High God.

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 But that's hard to get our minds around.

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 The second reason is even more baffling.

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 The second reason given is in verses 7 to 9.

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 He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap

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 to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people.

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 He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.

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 Praise the Lord.

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 And this second reason is surprising because of the first reason.

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 The first reason is that God sits on high.

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 High above all nations, his glory above the heavens.

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 Yet instead of dwelling detachedly on some lofty mountain somewhere

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 like those gods of Greek mythology dwelling on Mount Olympus,

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 far from the people, aloof and uninterested in the affairs of lowly men.

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 Instead, verse 6 says that he looks far down on the heavens and the earth.

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 God cares about his creation.

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 He cares about the details of our lives.

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 He looks upon the lowly.

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 And verses 7 to 9 are actually taken from Hannah's prayer in 1 Samuel 2, verses 1 to 10.

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 And verse 8 is a direct quotation of 1 Samuel 2, verse 8.

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 He raises up the poor from the dust.

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 He lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.

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 You guys know the story, right?

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 Hannah was a barren woman and her rival, Penina.

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 The other wife of her husband, Elkanah, provoked her grievously to irritate her, it says in 1 Samuel 1, 6.

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 And our society frequently views motherhood with disesteem and even contempt.

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 But throughout Scripture, bringing up children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord is seen as a crowning achievement of a woman's life, joy and achievement of a mother.

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 And as a result, barrenness throughout Scripture comes with great shame.

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 It's not until Christ fulfills what marriage points to in the New Testament that singleness becomes something of a lofty ideal to aspire to.

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 But so in this Old Testament context, God saw Hannah's grief and he gave her a child.

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 And this child grew up to become Samuel, a great prophet of the Lord, right?

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 So that's the background of this prayer when it says he raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.

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 And the song of Hannah really was the basis for Psalm 113, also is the basis for the song of Mary later in Luke 1.

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 And where Mary praises God after hearing the announcement of the angel that she will give birth to Jesus, she says in Luke 1, 52 to 55,

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 He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate.

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 He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.

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 He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.

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 So the pattern again and again we see throughout Scripture is that God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.

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 And the ultimate example of that is seen in what he does through Jesus, his life, death and resurrection and ascension.

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 That through Jesus, God chooses to save not a proud people or a self-righteous people or a moral people,

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 but those who are humble and contrite in heart, those who acknowledge their sinfulness, repent of it,

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 and cling to God with their desperate need for his gracious redemption.

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 And that's why Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, right,

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 God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.

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 God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

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 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.

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 So that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

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 I hope this is an encouragement to all of you guys, because when you feel unworthy of God's presence,

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 when you feel unworthy because of how high he is and how low you are,

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 when you feel your sinfulness keenly because of how holy God is,

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 when you feel small and unimportant in the scheme of life,

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 and you maybe think to yourself, well, God doesn't care about these details of my life.

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 You can be sure that God, who is the cosmic ruler of the universe,

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 is looking down on you, not looking down on you, looking on you with care,

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 looking on you with love, with affection, with tenderness,

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 because he's the one who raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash sheep,

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 to make them sit with princes.

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 And we will sit with Christ on high.

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 That's our destiny as God's people.

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 And we can find comfort in that when we're in the low places in life.

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 And I'll see you next time.

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 Red