Psalm 96

Mark Smith preaching from Psalm 96

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SPEAKER_01 0:18

So Psalm ninety-six is this morning's reading. 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. For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods, for all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendour and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. 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 to his courts. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness, tremble before him all the earth. Say among the nations, The Lord reigns, yes, the world is established, it should never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice, let the sea soar 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, for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the people in his faithfulness. So reads God's word.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

Now we desire to praise you with our hearts as we receive your word, as we lift them to you, as you speak to us through your most holy word. Come be with us now. Give us your help by the power of your Holy Spirit to make much of Jesus and to learn from him and love him. For it's in his precious name that we ask. Amen. My name's Mark. I'm one of the leaders here at City Church, and you're very welcome, especially if you're new or visiting with us this morning. We are in Psalm 96. We do Psalms in the summer. We have done uh for the last eight or nine years or so. We started Psalm 1 and have just been making our way through in that kind of eight or uh so weeks uh of summertime before the new academic year begins. And today we find ourselves in in Psalm 96, and so it'd be good to have that open in front of you. Maybe you have uh one of these old school things uh called Bibles. If you don't, you can have it on your phone uh and follow along with us. If English is not your first language uh or you're struggling with my Northern Irish accent, you can scan the QR code up in the top corner for a live translation of everything that's going to be uh said now uh this morning. Uh if I was to uh try and motivate you to do something, uh, how would I go about doing it? If you uh needed to uh to get up and uh and get healthy, head off to get a head off to the gym or uh start that project that you've been uh thinking about for a long time, how would I motivate you to do it? Uh what would finally get you moving? Uh there are lots of bad motivations uh for uh for doing things, lots of bad motivators uh that drive us uh to achieve those goals. Let me give you some of them. Uh lots of people are motivated by shame uh or or guilt. You think, well, uh, I need to change uh this behavior, I need to achieve this goal, because if I don't, uh then I'm just gonna continue to feel ashamed of myself. I'm gonna continue to feel guilty, or somebody who I love is going to be ashamed of me. I'm gonna let my uh my family down. And so you're gonna feel more guilt. So what you do is, particularly if it's an area of growth in the Christian life, so you want to try and kill a sin and you're using shame and guilt to kill it. Uh well, what you do is you'll start making bargains with God. God, I promise you that this is the last time that I'll have done this thing, uh, and please help me. Uh, and you'll start to enter into that transaction. Shame, guilt uh can uh be a motivator. Here's another bad motivator fear. The threat of pain, of punishment, of loss, the fear of failure. That can drive you on, can't it? I have to succeed, I have to get through. That's another motivator that can get us moving towards those objectives or those goals. Here's another one: duty, a sense of obligation, that it's just my job. I have to do it, I have no other choice, there's no real heart behind it. I don't really want to do it. Uh it's the function that I have to perform. Shame, fear, duty. Let me ask you, which one of those tends to motivate your following of Jesus? Do you think that he's ashamed of you? And so you try to do better? Are you scared of his judgment or the loss of the thing that you really love, that maybe he'll take it away as punishment of you? And so you're trying to play God on side. You want to try and keep him in your in your good books, or maybe, and I think this is one for a lot of us, it's actually just duty, that you haven't felt it, whatever it is, for a long time. But what else would you do? You go through the actions, you go through the motions, because what alternative is there? The problem with each of these motivators, shame, fear, and duty, is that none of them have the power to sustain the Christian life. To say nothing of the fact that none of them are emotionally satisfying, and none of them will ever fuel any mission to share the good news of Jesus with others, that neither guilt nor fear nor duty will drive us to make Jesus known, and as a church, to start more churches, they will never be able to sustain that level of effort. Eventually, guilt will give way to exhaustion, fear will paralyze us, and Judy. Well, you know what Judy does? That leaves you cynical, that leaves you resentful. Psalm 96 takes a different approach. Psalm 96 wants to motivate you towards sharing more of what Jesus has done in your life, wants to drive you out in mission. But the way it motivates you to do that is very different than those three. It doesn't begin with, look how lost the nations are. It begins, oh, sing to the Lord a new song. And then it says, For the Lord, for great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. The psalmist in Psalm 96 wants the world reached, but the first thing that he does is not lay on a burden on us, not lay on more fear of judgment or sense of duty and obligation. No, the first thing that he does is he enlarges our vision of who God is. This may be the great missionary insight of Psalm 96. That mission is not fueled by guilt or shame or fear or duty, but the mission is fueled by seeing the glory of God. Because when we see him, something happens. We begin to think, well, shouldn't everybody know this incomparably great, incomparably beautiful, unassailably majestic God. The worship of God's people here in Psalm ninety-six spills over seamlessly into witness, sing, becomes tell, becomes declare, becomes say to the nations. And then finally the psalm ends with the whole created order, the entire cosmos joining together to declare the glory of God in this song. That is far better fuel for your life as you seek to be a follower of Jesus, for our mission as a church as we seek to make him known and by his grace plant more churches. It is much better to not be driven by thinking, well, I better speak about Jesus, or else God's going to be disappointed with me. Or I better do my bit because Christians are supposed to evangelize. No, this psalmist says to us, look how glorious the Lord is, look how unassailable his reign is. And look, he's coming back to restore all things. This is what Psalm 96 gives us. A vision of a God great enough to fuel the mission that he has given us. And so the question for this Psalm is what do we need to see about God if we're going to be a people that gladly share him, that gladly go out from here on mission. Well, we need to see three things. We need to see his glory, we need to see his rain, and we need to see that he's coming again. And so let's take those in turn. First, mission is fueled by a vision of God's glory. One of the things that I enjoy about uh summertime is that often we get visitors from overseas, often we get people uh in from America, they're visiting Ireland for the uh for the first time, and uh I really enjoy giving recommendations. You may or may not be able to tell this of me, but I like food. I like to eat. Uh uh there are certain two types of people in the world. There are uh food as fuel people, and there are food as pleasure people. The food as fuel people are weird. Um, I'm food as pleasure. Uh and so when people come through, I'm like, what do you like to eat? Because I have a you know, I have a whole Rolodex inside my brain of, oh, you like pizza, go to pie. You like burgers, go to Bunts, you go here. Because I love to tell people about the things that I have enjoyed. And people do that all the time, don't they? Uh they come, you come back from holiday and somebody says, Oh, how was it? Oh, you have to go. Why? Well, because you've seen it, you've savored it, you understand how amazing it is, and you're like, I want you to enjoy that thing that I have been so thrilled and captivated by. In fact, C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narny and various other works, he says that the enjoyment of a thing is not really even complete until it's expressed, until you do the oh, you have to go sort of moment, right? And so if you're that person, you're in good company with me and and C.S. Lewis and and everyone else who's just slightly strange, maybe. This is why this Psalm gives way so seamlessly from singing to declaring. People who have seen and who have savored the glory of the Lord go and tell others about him. It's as though our hearts are like little cups that when they're poured into with the glory and majesty and beauty of who God is, that they reach a certain level where they overflow and they spill out and they declare, and you can see that desire to tell others. The overflow of the Lord filling our hearts with everything that He is and has done his mission. Look how easily worship becomes evangelism. Singing to the Lord becomes telling of his salvation. In the psalmist mind, those are not two distinct acts. There's no clunking gear shift between worship and evangelism. They're one and the same. And so don't think that worship is what we're doing here, and then evangelism and mission is what you do when you go outside. Nor is it just that uh evangelism and mission is only what happens out there, and worship is only what happens in here. No, as we sing and as we lead away through the service of being called by God into his presence, of singing to him, of becoming aware of our sin, of confessing our sins to God, and of and then hearing his voice as the scriptures are read, responding to him in prayer and song and receiving of the Lord's Supper, that all of those things that we do this morning aren't just worship, they have evangelistic force. They're communicating to you here, and maybe you're here and you wouldn't describe yourself as a follower of Jesus. And what we'd say to you is this is how we approach our God. This is the kind of God that we worship. That everything that we do here this morning has a kind of evangelistic thrust and force to it as well. In the same way that when you go out and you speak to your uh your friend or your colleague or your classmate, and you and you cross over that pain threshold, you risk the social awkwardness of talking about what you did this week at Kinfar or what you did at church, uh, and sharing of the hope that you have, that that is both evangelism and worship. You're worshiping the Lord because what you're saying is, you, my friend, the Lord Jesus is worthy of your worship too. And I want you to see what he has done in my heart and to sense something of the overflow there. When God's glory fills the human heart, God's glory inevitably comes out of the human mouth. But what is it? What do we mean when we talk about glory? What is it that we're declaring to the nations when the psalmist says that we're to declare his glory? We can tend to think about glory as uh the glory of God. Well, God's just the He's the CEO, He's the most important, uh, or it's uh that He's the He's the brightest. The Hebrew idea, uh the Hebrew word for glory is kavud, which almost drops down because it means weight, right? It means weightiness, heaviness, significance, substance, ultimate reality. So the opposite of glory isn't ugliness, it's nothingness. And what the psalmist is saying is that God has ultimate weightiness. Think about somebody whose opinion carries weight. Why? Well, because there's substance to them, to their character. And Psalm 96 is saying that God has infinite weight. He goes on to talk about his acts in creation, everything else derives its existence from him, everything depends upon him, nothing supports him, he upholds everything. And what the psalmist is saying here is that compared to his wit, to his glory, everything else is just fluff. Verse five, for all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, literally nothingnesses. They're empty. But the Lord made the heavens, the splendor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. The idols of the people are weightless, nothing. And in contrast, there is the stunning weightiness of the God of the universe. You imagine for a second that you're uh that you're climbing a mountain and you're you're hooking into various parts of the rock face to to hold your weight. And as you're you're climbing up, you see a beautiful rock flower. And you think, do you know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna hook on to that. You tie your rope onto it, and you let go. What happens? Well, the flower comes flying out and bad things ensue. It matters what you attach your rope to. You need to attach your rope to something that has the weight that can hold you. The question when you're climbing the mountain, I presume, is not is this thing an attractive handhold or support for me, but will it hold my weight? Every one of us our hearts have ropes that attach themselves to things. To our career, to our marriage or our relationship, to money, to health, to our reputation, to our ministry, to our education. And the question isn't, well, are those things bad? Because lots of those things are good gifts, aren't they? So the real question is, can they hold your soul? Are those things made to bear the weight that this human soul needs? The Psalm says, uh no. Clipping your ropes to those things is like attaching them to a cloud. Eventually those things will go and you will fall. But in contrast, he says that the Lord made the heavens and the earth. He isn't part of creation, he is the creator. Everything hangs on him, and therefore he is the one only who can bear the weight of your life, the significance and meaning and value, identity that you're longing through that will sustain you through every season of your life, whatever comes your way. But notice the psalmist doesn't ask us just to stare at our idols and wag our fingers at them until we stop loving them. Noah instead, what the psalmist is doing, he says, you know, rather than just staring at the idols, stare at the incomparable greatness and beauty and majesty of the Lord, and see then, in light of that, how insignificant these things look. The idols then lose their shine. Splendor and majesty, the psalmist says in verse 6, are before him. Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. If idols are a candle, then the Psalm, this Psalm opens the sunroof on your world and lets the blazing glory of the sun shine down upon you. And so you look at the clan and go, ah, actually, I don't need that anymore. And this is why the glory of the Lord fuels mission, because people are in darkness. People are in darkness and they have these petty, flickering candles of money, sex, power, comfort, control, all good things in and of themselves, but they were never made to light your way or to warm your soul. Missions is opening the sunroof on someone's life. It's pulling back the curtain so that someone can finally see the soul-satisfying, life-giving glory and beauty of God. And this means, therefore, that we don't, as a church, just need more evangelistic programs as helpful as they may be. What we need are a people who are captivated by the glory of God themselves. As Glenn said at the end of the video, what's the first step at evangelism? The first step at evangelism is not you going out and sharing the gospel with others, it's you believing it yourself. Is it you believing that God alone is glorious, that he really is the blazing sun in which the petty little idols that we're all still changing? They look utterly insignificant. It's opening up the sunroof to see his splendor and to allow his glory to shine forth into all of the dark crevices of our hearts. And so in our preaching and in our singing, in our prayers, and in our community groups and in our conversations, the overflow and spill of the glory of the Lord that has so filled our hearts is evident. You know, a Christian who is bored of Jesus, and there are plenty of them, will never speak of him. But the Christian who is captivated by his glory cannot stay quiet. And so mission begins with wonder. Why should we worship? Well, because the Lord alone is glorious. But perhaps we still hesitate. Perhaps we still feel nervous. The forces in our world, in our culture, they seem so strong. The opposition seems so prevalent. The gospel often looks so weak, and the church in Ireland looks so fragile at times. Our voices can feel very small. So what confidence does the psalmist then give us? He gives us confidence in the reign of God. That's the second thing that fuels mission. Mission is fueled by a confidence in God's reign. We all lose sight of this, don't we? The world feels chaotic. Our life goes into a season where things begin to feel out of control, and you wonder if there is a God in heaven who is really in charge. And it's easy to forget when you go out of here. You go back to your workplace, when you go back to even those family dynamics that are strained and awkward because you've become a follower of Jesus and everybody now thinks that you're a little bit cracked. People have little interest in speaking about Jesus. You could walk around all day long with a with a tract in your back pocket, just waiting for somebody to ask you, and it would just never happen. All the systems around us seem so immovable. But look at what Psalm 96 does for us. Verse 7: Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the people, 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. Say among the nations, the Lord reigns. Yes, the world is established, it shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity. How does the psalmist give us confidence this morning? He says, Remember, the Lord reigns. Go to those places where Jesus isn't acknowledged and declare his lordship, not as a possibility to endorse him, but as a reality to be announced. Mission isn't saying to someone, would you like Jesus to become the king? No, it's saying Jesus is the king. Would you like to follow him? He already reins. Mission is not an election campaign to try and get Jesus into office. It is a royal announcement that the king has risen from the dead and that he is enthroned in heaven and that he will return again one day, and that his name is Jesus Christ. The first point ended with declaring glory among the nations. That is, that we need to believe this and have confidence in this. And now the nations themselves are addressed, ascribed to the Lord, bring an offering, come into his courts. And you think about it, these are Israel's enemies in the time of the writing of the Psalm. And so it's a remarkable invitation. It's not just that the nations are told, you guys are wrong, and God's coming to judge you. No, it's an invitation. It's saying to the nations, when you come home to the God who made you, come into his courts. Come into a new relationship with the God of the universe. This is the missionary heart of our God. The king doesn't merely demand surrender. He welcomes worshipers. He invites nations to find belonging in his courts. The king invites rebels to become family. Is that you? You need to hear that invitation. Actually, I have been shutting God out of my life for such a long time. Your fear and guilt and shame and duty, they won't bring you back. Here's what will bring you back. There's a king in heaven who's paid for your sin. He has risen from the dead. He is ruling and reigning, and he loves you. And he says, Come into my courts, come into relationship with me by faith, trust me. And our confidence to invite those people into that relationship, to invite the nations into that relationship. It never comes from our eloquence or our impressiveness. Have you noticed that? How many arguments about Jesus have you actually lost? Lots. Nor does it come from our optimism about the future of Christianity in Ireland or across the world. No, it comes from a confidence in the present reign of Jesus over all peoples. Sometimes we can carry ourselves as though Jesus is desperately hoping that people will vote for him. He's reigning. Verse 10 continues: the world is established, it shall never be moved. That underneath all of the systems of our world, all of the systems of our governments, underneath your life, and everything that is going on in it, there is an unshakable throne. Kingdoms rise and fall, ideas come and go, seasons in your life will change and pass. History is not drifting aimlessly, it is being governed towards a particular and glorious end. And if that doesn't give us confidence when we step out to declare his reign, then verse 10 finishes by saying, He will judge the peoples with equity. It's not just that his reign, that he reigns, it's that his reign is good. The reign of Jesus is a just one. It is moving towards the restoration of all things, it is moving towards the undoing of all that was broken, the coming untrue of all that was sad. If you stood at the foot of the cross at Calvary on Good Friday, everything would suggest the opposite of Psalm 96. The king is mocked and stripped and murdered. It doesn't look as though the Lord reigns. Perhaps Rome does. Perhaps evil does. Certainly it looks as though death does. But three days later, everything gets turned upside down, doesn't it? God raises Jesus from the dead, vindicating him as his son and declaring him to be the true king over all times and all peoples and on all places. Forty days later, he ascends to his father's right hand, where he is enthroned forever, the ruler above every authority and every power. It's the resurrection of Jesus, God's Son. It is God's public declaration that he is Lord of all. Which means that when we stand in Dublin in 2026 and say Jesus is Lord, we're not expressing a personal preference or offering one spiritual option among many. We are announcing the central fact of history, the fundamental reality of the cosmos, that the crucified Jesus has become the risen and reigning king. You know, the Great Commission doesn't begin with the word go. Do you remember? How does it begin? All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me. It begins with a declaration of kingship. Admission flows from that. The disciples are not sent out because they are strong, they're sent out because Jesus reigns. This will not only fuel our mission, but it will transform the way that we evangelize. Do you know? If Jesus really reigns, and he does, we don't need to be defensive. We certainly don't need to be manipulative. We don't need to panic. We don't need to win every argument. Because if Jesus reigns, he can take our faltering, stuttering, semi-heretical defenses of him and use them to blow the doors off a human heart. We simply bear witness to him. But if Christ reigns, and if he is reigning now, why doesn't the world look more like his kingdom? Psalm 96, in a sense, almost knows that we will ask that question. And the answer is not that the reign of Christ is failing or has failed, it's that his reign is continuing to unfold. It's expanding outwards. You should read Psalm 96 along with Psalm 95. Psalm 95 is a call to uh to God's people to praise him. And then from there, Psalm 96 is written, and it's as though these ripple effects move out from uh from the nations eventually to the entire cosmos. There's an unfolding to his kingly reign. Because the king who reigns today is also the king who one day will come again. And so the final thing that fuels our mission is not just looking up at the reign of Christ, but looking forward to the return of Christ. Because where his glory gives us wonder and his reign gives us confidence, his return gives us hope. And so the third and final thing, mission is fueled by hope in Christ's return. The psalmist concludes in verses 11 to 13 by calling all of creation to rejoice and to be glad, for the seas to roar, for the fields to shout. Why? Because the Lord is coming again. See that twice he comes, he comes. He is returning. Right now the world around us does not fully reflect his reign. There's still war, there's still sickness, there's still injustice. Our lives don't fully reflect his reign. There's still tears, there's still broken relationships, there's still death, there's still grief, there's still people rejecting him. The kingdom has come, but it has not yet come in its fullness. And the psalmist is saying, it will. One day it will. The psalmist wants us to have hope as he pulls the camera back. One day all of the nations will be glad, and then all of creation will join in. The psalm begins with one congregation, and it ends with the universe celebrating what God has done. And what is this returning king coming to do? Well, we read in these verses, he's coming to judge the earth. Now, if you're anything like me, the word judge doesn't immediately sound like hope-inspiring good news. We tend to think of punishment, of anger. But look at how creation is responding. It's glad, it's rejoicing, it's exulting, it's not mourning, the trees aren't trembling, the earth isn't hiding, everything singing. Why? Because the returning of Jesus to judge the earth is more than punishment, it is the means by which the king puts everything right. Setting every crooked thing straight, every sad thing becoming untrue. Every injustice answered, every tear wiped away, every disease ended, every act of evil judged, every grave emptied, and every promise fulfilled. This is the day that creation longs for. Paul picks up that language, doesn't he, in the middle part of Romans 8, where he says, the creation is is groaning. Can't wait to burst out in song. Right now it's it's it's longing for the return of Jesus and the revelation of the sons and daughters of God. Psalm 96 gives us a glimpse of the future. And this, dear brother, dear sister, is the hope that fuels our mission. This is the hope that fuels our speaking of Jesus and living for him and fighting against sin in our own lives and continuing to uh to follow him and to uh and to plod that long obedience in the same direction. It's not simply that Jesus can forgive sins today, though he can and he does. It is not simply that Jesus reigns today, though he does, but that one day he will return and he will renew all things. This changes the way that we think about mission, doesn't it? Because it's not simply inviting people into some private decision, some private personal spiritual experience of the divine. It's inviting them into the future that God has promised and that He has begun from the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, into the kingdom that is coming in all its fullness, into the world as it was meant to be. That's our invitation. That's our invitation to you this morning. And so this means that every gospel conversation is bigger than we can imagine. Every invitation to church, every Bible opened with a friend, every conversation over coffee, every church planted, every missionary sent, every child taught the gospel. All of it is an invitation to become part of the unfolding future that Jesus one day will bring to pass. Mission is inviting people to live now in the reality that will one day fill the whole earth. And that gives us extraordinary hope, doesn't it? When life feels hard. Because it means that no labor done to this end is ever in vain. No euro spent to this end is ever wasted. We are not building a kingdom from scratch. We are participating in the kingdom that Christ has already begun and one day will complete. This is the hope that fuels our mission. Not because we believe that the church will always be successful, but because we know how the story ends. Mission exists because not everybody is singing yet. But one day they will. One day the nations will join in our song. The trees will clap their hands, the seas will roar, the heavens will rejoice. Every rival king will fall, every idol will be thrown to die, and every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. And until that day, we keep singing, we keep declaring, we keep inviting, we keep sharing, we keep planting because Jesus is worthy of worshipers, he is worthy of worshipers in Dublin, He is worthy of worshippers in Ireland, He is worthy of worshippers to the ends of the earth. Let's pray. Father, by your Spirit, would you fuel our hearts as we seek to live for you and to take Jesus wherever we go? Fill us with a renewed vision of your glory. Give us confidence in your reign over all times and places, and renew our hope in the one day returning King Jesus and the renewal of all things. We ask it for his sake. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

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