Alfred Street Baptist Church Virtual Bible Study: 04/21/2025

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:04]Hi everybody. It's Dr. Judy here with you again in our next session of Bible study as we continue in our series I'm a survivor survival stories in the Bible.

[00:00:16]Last week we talked about the Psalms of lament and how the act of lament, the act of engagement and conversation with God over our griefs, over our trauma and over our struggle is a mechanism for survival. It helped the ancient Israelites to survive exile and Babylon.

[00:00:35]It helped our ances ancestors survive the inhumanities and indignity of slavery in this country. and it can help us today in whatever circumstances we face. Today we want to return to the Psalms, but now look at Psalms of praise. If you think about all the psalms in this altar, all 150 of them, you could make the argument that they fall into two major broad categories, praise and lament. We started with lament. Today, we want to spend some time looking at praise. Before we do, let's review a few of the points that we looked at last week.

[00:01:17]Remember the name of this collection is Tahhelm, which means praises, and it's a collection of 150 pieces. And we would describe the psalms as poetry and prayer and song.

[00:01:34]We talked a little bit about the different genres, the different kinds of psalms. And if we look at these two large categories of praise and lament, that means that under the lament category, we have individual and community laments. And sometimes those laments include that subcategory we describe as impregatory psalms. Those are the ones where we're getting our real feelings out and saying, "God, get them and get them in this way specifically."

[00:02:04]On the other side, we see praise. praise psalms, hymns, thanksgiving, lurggical psalms, royal psalms, and even wisdom and creation psalms. Now, that's not an exhaustive list of categories. You will find that there are even more categories of psalms. And in addition to all those many categories, there's something called a mixed form, which means sometimes a psalm starts off one way and ends up another way.

[00:02:34]One example of that would be Psalm 19.

[00:02:38]Psalm 19 in the first six verses sounds like a creation psalm. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament, God's handiwork. Then the second half of the psalm is talking about following God's teaching and law.

[00:02:53]And that's more like a wisdom psalm. So then scholars have to decide, are these two different kinds of hymns together or does it kind of make sense that creation and wisdom go together? I think it makes sense that they go together.

[00:03:10]Speaking of going together, I want to talk about a feature of Hebrew poetry that makes it unique.

[00:03:18]When we talk about genre, we are saying that God's word, the truth of God's word gets expressed in different forms.

[00:03:27]Sometimes the Bible expresses itself in narrative form. Sometimes it gives us a message through folktale. Sometimes we get a prophetic word. And within the Psalms, um, the way that we distinguish what the Psalms are from all the other genres is something called parallelism.

[00:03:49]That's parallelism. So, we're thinking about two things that run alongside each other. And in Hebrew poetry, parallelism would be described as the correspondence of one line to another, which means that the poetry comes to usually in what we call doulets, in sets of two, but every now and then it comes to us in a set of three.

[00:04:16]So I want to show you some examples of parallelism today before we look at the Psalms of praise.

[00:04:23]So the first slide you see is going to show us two sets of parallel lines. The example comes from Psalm 36:10 and it reads, "Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you and your salvation to the upright of heart."

[00:04:45]Continue your steadfast love to those who know you and your salvation to the upright of heart. These are parallel lines. One is asking that God extend God's steadfast love to the people that know God. And the next line is saying, "And extend your salvation to the upright of heart."

[00:05:06]So there's a kind of um congruity between those two. Steadfast love and salvation are good things we get from God. and those who know you in the upright of heart are considered the same category of people.

[00:05:22]Another example comes from Psalm 131:1 which reads, "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." So when you hear that, you kind of get the sense that the second line is saying the same thing as the first is my heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high. So both of these lines are talking about some kind of lifting up that implies a kind of pride.

[00:05:50]That kind of parallelism is what we call synonymous parallelism. Synonymous, two different ways of saying the same thing.

[00:05:59]Now let's look at the next slide. Here we have type two.

[00:06:05]Psalm 16 reads, "For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish." Hear that, "The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish." This time, the two lines seem to be going in opposite directions.

[00:06:24]One path, one course of action for the righteous, and not so good for the wicked. Right? The psalm is set up so it gives you two choices and you say I'll take righteous for 200 Alex. I don't want to perish in the way of the wicked.

[00:06:39]So we would describe that parallelism as antithetical. Right? One line set up in opposition to the other.

[00:06:48]Now let's look at the third slide.

[00:06:51]How can young people keep their way pure? By guarding it according to your word. That's Psalm 119:9.

[00:06:59]How can young people keep their way pure? By guarding it according to your word. Let's look at another example from that same psalm. Psalm 119:62.

[00:07:12]At midnight I rise to praise you because of your righteous ordinances.

[00:07:20]In that third example, we don't have synonymous parallelism. They're not saying the same thing. We don't have antithetical parallelism. They're not opposites. Here it's almost like the second line is the answer to the question raised in the first or it's the reason behind. And this third category is called synthetic.

[00:07:41]Of these three categories, we see a lot of psalm poetry that goes in synonymous and a good amount that goes in antithetical. Most of the antithetical material comes to us from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

[00:07:55]But this third category, the synthetic category, is huge. And so it caused one scholar to go back and look at the three categories and notice something no one had seen before. That in parallelism, whether it's type one or type two or type three, that the second line brings something that the first line did not, the second line has a little extra to it. And so he coined a phrase A and what's more B. The second line always has something the first line didn't. So if you think about um that first example in type one where it says, "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high." And think about how they mean the same thing, but the second line brings something the first one doesn't. My heart is not lifted up is an attitude that is internal. I can't see your heart. But my eyes are not raised too high is how you present and walk into a room. In fact, if your eyes are raised too high and you're hotty, that second line betrays what's going on in the first line. What's going on in your heart? So, we want to think about the second line bringing something the first doesn't. Now this is important because when we look at the Psalms that means that there's a way in which the Psalms are always increasing, always growing, always getting bigger. And when it comes to praise, that reflects the dynamic of what happens when we engage in praising God.

[00:09:38]Now before we look at some Psalms of praise, I want to say a few more things.

[00:09:44]Remember last week when we talked about psalms of lament and we talked about psalms of lament as um this movement from disorientation to reorientation that we start in orientation.

[00:09:59]Orientation is the part of our world that makes sense or the way we think the world should be. Disorientation is when that stuff all falls apart. That gives rise to the lament. And then the act of lament leads us to reorientation, to a new engagement with God, a new understanding of the world. I mentioned then that we never go back to orientation. So we we'll spend the rest of our lives between disorientation and reorientation, but deep down inside we're always longing to go back to that state of orientation.

[00:10:37]Think of um think of orientation as Eden. Think of orientation as the womb, that place where you go where everything's just right and you will never get back there ever again. But the best we can do is have this place of reorientation where we live in an imperfect world, but we are in relationship with a perfect God.

[00:10:58]If we understand that, that means that when we're moving from lament to praise, we're always in some kind of movement in our lives. We are moving from lament to praise, from praise to lament, and from lament to praise back again. And that is the rhythm of our lives that we are moving from one place to the other.

[00:11:24]One of my favorite books about the Psalms comes from the late Walter Bugamman and it's entitled The Psalms of Life and Faith. I love this book because of his understanding of how the Psalms work in relationship to people who are um followers of Jesus Christ. And in this book, he has a chapter on praise and all the the ways in which praise functions. In fact, he has 11 points on what praise is and what praise does. And I'm not going to give you all 11. If you want all 11, you got to read the book.

[00:11:58]But I'm going to give you four. He says praise is pmical. In other words, praise is going to force you to go to an extreme. He says that praise is political. There's no way to praise this God and not be political. So when you encounter another Christian who says, "I don't want to be political." Um, tell them that's not an option. When we talk about the God of Israel, praise is pmical. It's going to make you make a choice for who you serve. Praise is political.

[00:12:29]And one of my favorites, praise is subversive.

[00:12:33]Praise disrupts orders and principalities and empire. And finally he says praise is an act of trust.

[00:12:43]In this way he is saying that when we enter into praise we are saying that we not only acknowledge that there is a god who rules over all but that we trust that god. The pmic is that no matter what's happening in this world and no matter how many other gods there are this is the god I stand by. The political piece says they are kingdoms but they are not the thing that I am going to worship.

[00:13:13]In ancient Israel, the temple would have been right next to the king's palace. Think about that imagery. Here is the physical embodiment of human rule and authority. And here is the physical embodiment of God's kingdom. When I enter into praise, I'm saying I choose God's kingdom. Every time when we praise, we are making a choice to be with God. And it is political. Whenever the world is not in alignment with the will of God and we enter into praise, we are being politically defiant. We are being pmical and say, "I want to be with this God."

[00:13:57]And we're being subversive because we are now orienting ourselves in a way that says, I choose to follow this authority and I trust this authority, this God that I worship. So with that as background, let's look at one of our favorite psalms, Psalm 100. All right, I know you all know it. Um, but let's just go through the exercise. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness and come before God's presence with thanksgiving.

[00:14:31]Know this that the Lord is God. It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves.

[00:14:37]We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. So enter his gates with thanksgiving and come into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name for the Lord is good. His mercy is everlasting and his truth endures for all generations. Let the church say amen. This psalm is a great call to worship because it is literally a call to worship. It is giving us commands. It is imperative in form. Do this. Make a joyful noise to the Lord.

[00:15:19]And who's included in that? All the earth. all ye lands. So the first verse is telling us what to do. Make a joyful noise. And then verses 2 through four are telling us how how do we do this?

[00:15:34]Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with thanksgiving. Know that the Lord is God. It is he that has made us and we are his. And then enter his gates with thanksgiving and come into his courts with praise. So, it's interesting when I hear this psalm, I think about certain there's a certain type of worship leader. You know that worship leader who's like telling you what to do? I call it the drill sergeant worship leader. Stand up. Do this. Turn around. You know, you've got all these things they have you doing and you can't even remember all of them. The person behind Psalm 100 may have been that kind of worship leader. Look at all these commands. Serve. Come into his presence.

[00:16:13]No. Enter his gates with thanksgiving.

[00:16:15]is these are the things you are doing to show that you understand who God is. And then finally, the last verse tells us why we are doing it and what we are doing.

[00:16:29]Because the Lord is good. God's mercy is everlasting and his truth endures to all generations.

[00:16:38]So here's what I love about the end.

[00:16:41]Whenever we see in the psalm that the Lord is good, good is a specific term that is almost always in contrast to God's greatness. So we talk about God.

[00:16:53]God is talk about God's greatness is God is the creator of the earth. God is the one who sets the stars in the sky. God is the one who sets the limits to the sea. That's God's greatness. But God's goodness is how God takes care of us.

[00:17:07]Right? The beauty of God is that God can do all these things and knows the number of hairs on our head and cares about us.

[00:17:15]And then we get my favorite words. His steadfast love, his hessid endures forever. God's tender mercies for us never go away. And God's faithfulness, God's loving kindness to us is not just for us, but to all generations. If you read verse five, it's going to make you want to go back and do verses 2 through 4. If you remember who God is and the faithfulness of God, you want to do all the things that the drill the drill sergeant is telling you to do because in this moment, you recognize that God is worthy of our praise.

[00:17:52]That's how we begin with a psalm that was probably used for procession.

[00:17:59]The other thing that I want to note about Psalm 100 is that the procession and the behavior described would have usually been what you would do for a king. So again, it's setting it up to remind us that this king is not an earthly king. This is the king of kings.

[00:18:19]One of the things I love about the Psalms is that the Psalms recognize that there are other gods, there are other rulers. It's almost like that line um when you get on a plane and they say, "We recognize there are other airlines you could get on." The Psalms recognize there are other people you can worship, but this God is the God of gods. This God is the King of Kings. And so, we get that beautiful message in Psalm 100.

[00:18:49]I want to go to another old favorite psalm. This is one of my favorite psalms of old all time. It's Psalm 27. And what I want to do is read first verses 1-6 and then talk about the second half of the psalm because Psalm 27 is one of those psalms that people say might be a mixed form. It's got two very different kinds of things in it. All right. Psalm 27. This is another really good call to worship. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid. When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh, my adversaries and foes, they stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart will not fear. Though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident. One thing I've asked of the Lord. This I seek. To live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. To behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. For he will hide me in his shelter. In the King James it says, "For in the day of trouble he shall hide me. He will conceal me under the cover of his tent and set me under a rock. Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me. And I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy. I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

[00:20:27]Now that verse I just read, now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me.

[00:20:34]Think back to last week when we looked at Psalm 13 and the psalmist was saying, "My enemies are going to have the upper hand." And I want you to recognize the fluidity in the psalter from the moment when we are afraid our enemies are going to overtake us and destroy us and the moment where we get to celebrate God's protection, that God took care of us, that God lifted us up out of that situation. So when we move from lament to praise or from praise back to lament and then back to praise, we begin to get a picture of what the story of our lives is like.

[00:21:11]In the old days in Bible study, before Bible study began, there was that testimony time. Someone would come up and raise a song and someone would come up and give a testimony. And there are two types of testimonies. There's the one that talks about what someone's going through and soliciting prayers and the one where somebody tells the story about how God fixed their situation.

[00:21:35]That's the embodiment of praise and lament. But when the community holds it together, it reassures us that no matter what we're going through, the God who answered Sister So and So's prayer is my God, too. And I am in line for that. So Psalm 27 holds all of this together that God is our light and our salvation. We don't have to be afraid. God is our strength. Look at the power of those metaphors, right? In the face of darkness, God is our light. When we don't have it in us, God is our strength. When our enemies come, God will take care of us. And then in verses four and five, it moves to this concept of coming into a place of worship. I want to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and inquire in his temple. So we get this image of security and safety in God and we get that sense of a location for that security and safety in the temple. This is a great psalm if we stop at verse six.

[00:22:45]Now when we get to seven, the whole thing changes. All right. We go from being confident and knowing that we have everything we need. And in verse seven, we say, "Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud.

[00:22:57]Be gracious to me and answer me. Come, my heart says, seek his face. Your face, Lord, do I seek. Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger. You who have been my help. Do not cast me off. Do not forsake me, oh God, of my salvation. If my mother and father forsake me, the Lord will take me up.

[00:23:21]Then in verse 11, teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies. Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries.

[00:23:33]For false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence.

[00:23:38]And finally, I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord. Be strong and let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord.

[00:23:54]So Psalm 27 is a beautiful psalm that is of two minds. Um on one hand we begin with this sense of confidence and security that seems to be located in the temple alongside imagery of God's fortress. And then in verse seven, it's like none of that happened and we're back in it again and we're in trouble and we're asking God to to to to not to hide God's face from us, to not turn away from us in anger, to not cast us off, to not forsake us, even if we are forsaken by our parents, this call that God would protect us. So, we move from confidence and we're back into another situation.

[00:24:40]And then after expressing our need, I love the fact that the next verse says, "Teach me your way."

[00:24:48]I I wonder if what's happening in this psalm is that it is giving us a picture into what our experience on this earth is like. That we can have the joy of having been delivered, but something can happen that can knock us off our feet all over again. And in that moment, we have lost all of the assuredness that we had in that earlier moment. And then the next movement says, "Teach me your way."

[00:25:18]And this is what I love about it is that I almost feel like the psalm is moving towards a request to ask God, "Help me to learn from my own experiences.

[00:25:27]Help me to remember in the crazy times that just last Sunday I was in here talking about how good you were and how faithful you were. help me to get it into my own spirit and in my own heart that the thing I'm going through is temporary. That the movement of the life of faith is going to bring me to a psalm of thanksgiving. And after that moment of thanksgiving, the odds are good there's going to be some other obstacle and then I'm going to go through that obstacle. But at some point, we've got to learn when we're in the time of trouble that God is going to do what God did last time and the time before and the time before that we need to not just hear the testimony, but be the living testimony, right? So that we begin to move through the world like we actually know what a lament is going to do or that we lament and we're actually tuning up to praise. I love the fact that it asks God to teach us God's ways and then says,"I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."

[00:26:31]It's like this this movement towards trying to truly trust and embrace the goodness of God.

[00:26:40]You know, I think that um one of the things we observe in the life of Israel that is true for us as well is that sometimes we go through something and we get a nagging fear that God is done with us, that God did all the other things, but this is the last time. It just it's not going to happen again. And I feel like Israel in the wilderness had this over and over again, like, okay, um, how many times are we going to mess up before God says, you know what, I can find another people and start all over again. But what we fail to understand about the goodness of God is that it's larger than our capacity to imagine. It is greater than what we can experience or count or know.

[00:27:24]Which is why when we hear that last verse, we need to take it to heart. Wait for the Lord. The Lord will certainly answer. The Lord will most certainly come because of God's loving kindness and God's tender mercies. Those things we were praising about in Psalm 100, they're either real or they're not. And if they're real, then we can wait with confidence in the goodness of the Lord.

[00:27:51]Remember this idea of praise being pmical. Either God is going to do it or God will not. There's no middle ground.

[00:28:00]So figure out where you're going to place yourself. And this psalm invites us to trust God.

[00:28:08]If in the beginning of the psalm it's talking about the temple as a shelter, I suspect that the psalm itself creates a different kind of shelter that the psalm itself becomes a sanctuary.

[00:28:22]Say with me here because I think this is why praise and worship is so important.

[00:28:29]When we are having a difficult time, when we are dealing with chronic illness or grieving the loss of a loved one or simply feel lost and confused or feel like the things we desire most are never going to be ours, when we begin to praise, we open ourselves up to the possibility that that alternate universe exists for us, that we access a reality that is greater than our own and it gives us room to breathe. It gives us enough space to keep going. It reminds us that as long as we have breath in our bodies that God will um make a way for us and we can say with confidence, I I not only I want to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, but I believe I will.

[00:29:23]Psalm 27 is a great psalm.

[00:29:26]All right, we got two more to go through.

[00:29:29]So, um, the next one is a super duper long psalm. It is Psalm 136. Psalm 136 is 26 verses long.

[00:29:44]And when we talked about parallelism in this psalm, the second line is the same throughout. All right? The second line is the same 26 times. All right. For his steadfast love endures forever key leam hastto because to forever is his mercy.

[00:30:06]And that um that word for forever olam it can mean temporally and spatially. So God's goodness is for the end of time but it also knows no limits. There's nowhere we can be where God's faithfulness and tender mercies do not exist. And we need to say that to ourselves when we are worried about what's happening in our country or in our world or in our families or even in our own bodies.

[00:30:39]There is no time or no space where God's faithfulness cannot get in. And I believe when we praise this way, we're actually opening ourselves up to the agency of God. That's why worship matters. We always think about worship as something we're giving to God. When we worship, we are opening ourselves up to giving God room to do what God will do in us. So, let's look at the first part of Psalm 136. Oh, give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. Oh, give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures forever. Oh, give thanks to the Lord of lords, for his steadfast love endures forever. So, if you're a musician, the first thing you want to say is this is call and response. So, you have a leader saying, "Oh, give thanks to the Lord for he is good." And the congregation gets the same line over and over again, for his steadfast love endures forever. Imagine hearing that with the force of the congregation coming back with everything about what God does. Each line is a testimony to God's steadfast love that endures forever.

[00:31:50]Imagine musically that as the congregation responds that it is building and getting louder and louder and louder.

[00:31:59]That first line says the Lord is good.

[00:32:01]So remember we said that's in contrast to God's greatness. This is God's care about us. But the next line is about God's greatness. So um think about um the little um blessing you used to learn. God is great. God is good. It's very theologically profound, right? God is great. God is over all these things and God is good. Psalm 136 mixes it up.

[00:32:26]God is good. God is great. And then it's going to go back to God is good. God is good. God is great because God is the God of gods and God is the Lord of Lords. Again, not claiming there's only one, but this is the God you want to be with. All right. And then it says, "Who alone does great wonders, greatness. Who by understanding made the heavens, greatness. Who spread out the earth on the waters, greatness, made the great lights, greatness. The sun to rule over the day, greatness. The moon and stars to rule by night." Verses 4-9 are talking about creation, right? God made the earth and the heavens.

[00:33:04]And then we get to verse 10. Who struck Egypt with their firstborn and brought Israel out from among them with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Um who divided the sea in two and made Israel pass through its midst, but overthrew Pharaoh and his army.

[00:33:24]So imagine a choir director where you've got this call and response with the leader saying the first line and the congregation saying the next line, but as the song progresses, it's growing.

[00:33:35]It's getting louder. You can imagine the energy multiplying and the way in which the parts are interweaving because in the ability to repeat, we get to do things musically every time they're slightly different. Okay. So after setting up the goodness and the greatness of God in verses 1 through3 verses 4-9 are going to revisit this concept of God's greatness who alone does great wonders who by understanding made the heavens who spread out the earth on the waters who made the great lights the sun to rule over the day the moon and the stars to rule over the night. So each one of these lines is recounting the creation story in Genesis 1 that God spread out the earth on the waters, pulled the waters back so that the dry land could appear. That God established the lights, the sun, the moon, and the stars. So we're again talking about God's greatness. And then in verses 10- 22, we shift to tell another story. And in this story, we hear this is the God who struck Egypt through their firstborn and brought Israel out from among them with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Who divided the Red Sea in two and made Israel pass through the midst of it, but overthrew Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea. Who led his people through the wilderness. Who made water flow from a rock. who struck down great kings and killed famous kings. Sion, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashion, and gave their land as a heritage, a heritage to his servant Israel. So, this is an abridged or a reader digest version of the Exodus and the wilderness tradition into the promised land. Right?

[00:35:26]This covers Exodus and it gets us up to Joshua and Judges. But what's interesting is that it remembers specific key moments that God struck Egypt, that God brought the people through the sea of reeds, that God defeated their enemy, took them through the wilderness. It remembers the moment where water came out of a rock, and it remembers that God defeated their enemies. So the examples they raise then are talking about God's power over the creation. Water comes out of a rock.

[00:35:57]God's creation over humanity. God defeats their enemies. So, the way we remember our story has everything to do with what gets included and what doesn't. Think about that for a moment.

[00:36:11]When you think about your relationship with God, what are the key moments that are foundational to your understanding of how God works in your life? work on your testimony in this way so that you you can begin to tell the story about how God's steadfast love has shown up in your own life again and again and again.

[00:36:33]So, Israel starts by talking about the greatness and goodness of God in verses 1 through3 and then in 4-9 moves to talk about God's work in creation. the greatness of God. Verses 10- 22 is a combination. The greatness of God in overthrowing Israel's oppressors and the goodness of God in that God remembers to give them water to drink. I always think about this time in the wilderness is how crazy it must have been for these people to see these big works of God, but then ask, "Are we going to have enough to eat?" Right? But that's kind of what happens. Like we we can we can sometimes understand God doing big things, but it's hard for us to always get our head around God taking care of our little messes, our small needs. And that's where the Psalms are beautiful in moving through this. God is great. God is good.

[00:37:30]You don't have to choose. God brings both of those. So then the psalm closes 23, 24, 25, 26. It is he who remembered us in our low estate, for his mercy endures forever. And rescued us from our foes, for his steadfast love endures forever. Who gives food to all flesh, for his steadfast love endures forever.

[00:37:56]Think about those three examples. Our low estate, rescues us from our foes, and feeds us. It's coming back to the smallalness, and then in the end gets really big again. Oh, give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever.

[00:38:15]Think about how you might give a testimony that reflects both God's greatness and God's goodness. What God does in your own life and what God does for you by the way in which God moves other people around.

[00:38:31]One more thing about Psalm 136. Psalm 136 is a pair. It comes behind Psalm 135 which is another historical psalm. The difference between 135 and 136 is that Psalm 136 is inviting the community to remember with the psalmist. Remember with me the goodness of God. Um I just love a good testimony because it reminds us that what God is going to do for others, God is going to do for us.

[00:39:03]Okay. one more psalm. Um, and the last the last psalm should be the last psalm.

[00:39:10]Um, so what we're going to do is look at Psalm 150. Psalm 150 is what we call a hallelujah psalm. And the last five psalms in the psalter are hallelujah psalms. So let's have a little lesson about the word hallelujah.

[00:39:27]We love to say hallelujah black church.

[00:39:29]Hallelujah. Hallelujah. We love saying that word, right? Hallelujah is actually a command. It is saying you people praise. Hallelu, you praise. And then Yah is like this short uh nickname, a shortened form of God's name. You people praise God. All right? And in the Hallelujah um Psalms, it gets repeated over and over and over again. So what I love about Psalm 150 is that when I was a little girl, there was this song we used to sing. Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah. And then the other side was praise the Lord. Well, that didn't sound so good. Praise ye the Lord. Right? So we would do hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah, praise ye the Lord. But we were saying the same thing, right?

[00:40:17]Hallelujah is praise ye the Lord. And so Psalm 150 is hallelu, hallelujah, hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah.

[00:40:28]It gets that beautiful repetition. So let's hear what it tells us. It's only six verses. Praise the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in his mighty firmament. Firmament is the sky.

[00:40:43]So we think about God in his sanctuary.

[00:40:46]That could be the physical space of the sanctuary or it could be saying God's space, God's sanctuary is the sky. All right? Praise him for his mighty deeds.

[00:40:57]Praise him according to his surpassing greatness. In the King James, it says for his excellent greatness. Praise him with trumpet sound. Praise him with loot and harp. Praise him with tambourine and dance. Praise him with strings and pipe.

[00:41:12]Praise him with clanging symbols. Praise him with loud clashing symbols. Let everything that breathes, let everything that has breath praise the Lord. And then finally, praise the Lord.

[00:41:25]Hallelujah. So, let's just break this down a little bit. Verse one, who are we praising? The Lord. Praise the Lord.

[00:41:34]Verse two, why?

[00:41:36]Praise him for his mighty deeds. Praise him according to his excellent greatness. So if we say mighty deeds and excellent greatness, we might even see that as a God is great. God is good for what he's done, his mighty deeds, and who he is. Right? We don't just praise God because of what God has done. We praise God because you look at God and you say, "Okay, you get it. You are worthy of the praise." All right? So we want to give God praise because God deserves it. And then in verses 3-5, it's how how are we going to do it? With trumpet, with loot and harp, with tambourine and dance, with strings and pipe, and then look at this beautiful parallel line, clanging symbols, loud clashing symbols. You see again how the the parallelism is building. So in the last five psalms, you get these hallelujah psalms that are building in force. It is growing. We're getting to this this great crescendo. And then after all of these things, it says, "Let everything that has breath." Who is doing the praising? Everything that has breath. Which means that if you have breath, that you are to be praising God.

[00:42:55]Which means that if you are alive, your purpose is to praise. You're here created for the purpose of praising God.

[00:43:06]In the um Westminster Catechism um a way in which people were trained to prepare to come into the church the first question was what is the chief end of man which is a fancy way of saying what is our purpose right and it is to mag to glorify God and enjoy him forever to glorify God and enjoy him forever what's your job to glorify God and enjoy him forever what is your purpose to praise God. And if we take Psalm 150 seriously, it means that our actions, our behavior, our words all need to be oriented towards praising God. And I don't think that means being super holy. I think it means living a life that simply acknowledges that God is God. We can do that in our weakness. We can do it when we're lamenting. We can do it when we're in between praise and lament. The movement here is for us to understand every time we breathe, we have an opportunity to give God praise. So as we conclude this part, I want you to remember that our ancestors and their ancestors and before them the Israelites praised God when they felt like it and when they didn't. When they were lamenting and in difficulty, they would offer what we call a preemptive praise.

[00:44:37]When God came through for them, they would give God praise because they understood that no matter where I am, God is worthy of praise. And when I engage in this act, I am doing something that is political, palemical, and subversive. It's going to change the atmosphere. and I'm doing it because I trust this God. If you find yourself in a situation where you don't know what to do, might I recommend you just try praising God and see what happens. Read Psalm 150 and see what happens.

[00:45:19]This is how we can survive.

[00:45:24]Thanks for being with us for this time and we'll see you one more time before the year's out to complete this series of I'm a survivor.