Sing!

I want to read the Hundredth Psalm. I’ve decided that instead of me roaming around the Bible as we set the context for this conference, that we allow the Scriptures themselves—having sung that we want God to speak to us, then we want it to be the Bible that frames both our understanding of what we do, our ability to do it, and the manner in which we do it. So Psalm 100, “A Psalm for giving thanks”:

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
 Serve the Lord with gladness!
 Come into his presence with singing!

Know that the Lord, he is God!
 It is he who made us, and we are his;
 we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
 and his courts with praise!
 Give thanks to him; bless his name!

For the Lord is good;
 his steadfast love endures forever,
 and his faithfulness to all generations.

Amen.

A brief prayer—an old Anglican prayer:

Father, what we know not, teach us. What we have not, give us. What we are not, make us. For your Son’s sake. Amen.

Well, I don’t apologize at all for turning to one of the best-known and best-loved of all the psalms in the entire book of Psalms. Some of us are familiar with it as the Jubilate Deo because of our Anglican background, as we have sung it routinely as part of the prayer book service. Most of us are familiar with the Hundredth Psalm in its metrical version as composed by William Kethe and sung routinely to the tune of the Old Hundredth. Incidentally, William Kethe was not only a contemporary of John Knox but also a friend of John Knox, and it’s hard for me not to feel some kind of distant pride in letting you know that it was a Scotsman that gave us this metrical version which we’ve come to love so very much. He could have been Irish, but that would have been difficult for him, and so he’s fine.

The psalm is very clear. It invites all the people on earth to worship the Lord with gladness and with thanksgiving, for he alone is God, and he alone is good. That really is it in summary. It’s a psalm that was sung by the Israelites in the temple, subsequently in the synagogue services. And it’s always good for us to remind ourselves of the fact that when we turn to the Psalms, we’re turning to the hymnbook which the Lord Jesus himself used. I don’t think it’s difficult for us to imagine that Jesus knew all of the Psalms, ultimately, off by heart, and not because of some divine and omniscient understanding but because from his infancy and from his earliest days, at the feet of both Mary and Joseph, he was taught the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one. And you will worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and your mind and your strength.”[1] And so here we turn to the songs that Jesus himself—and the disciples, too—would have sung.

It’s akin to Psalm 95. If you leaf back, you will realize that; you’ll remember it. Again, if you’re an Anglican, you know it as the Venite, as the Invitatorium, as the invitatory psalm, with the constant call “Come now, let us sing.” And once the psalmist has said, “Let’s do this, let’s do this, let’s do this,” he then says, “for” or “because,” so that the people of God, both in this psalm and, indeed, in many of these psalms are on the receiving end of the invitation which lies at the very heart of this conference—an invitation to sing. And when we sing, we sing as pilgrims. We sing, in the words of the hymn writer Isaac Watts, “join[ing] our cheerful songs with angels round the throne,”[2] or we remind ourselves, in another hymn, that

[We] on earth [have] union
With God the Three in One
And mystic, sweet communion
With those whose rest is won,[3]

so that the great celebration of praise that takes place on earth mingles with the praise that is going on in heaven. And when we have sung those words, we may not have paid particular attention to them.

We used to sing in the ’60s, some of us, “Heaven came down, and glory filled my soul.”[4] Well, in actual fact, the reality of it is that Jesus himself is the one who stands in the midst of the congregation and says to the Father, “I will sing your praise.” And while it is beyond the realm of our response this afternoon, if you follow this up in the book of Hebrews, you will make the discovery—a staggering discovery—that the Lord Jesus Christ is himself the worship leader. He is the leitourgos. You’ll find that in Hebrews 8:2. And you may not know Greek, but when I tell you leitourgos, it will make you think of English words such as liturgist or liturgy. And what the writer of the Hebrews is saying is this: that Jesus Christ ultimately is the one who leads his people in their praise.

The great celebration of praise that takes place on earth mingles with the praise that is going on in heaven.

Now, some of you are here, and you are very, very good at leading people in worship, and you understand that you have a role in that. But let me just sound a cautionary word to some of you from the pen of our good friend Sinclair Ferguson—this just to reinforce this notion:

Jesus leads every worship service you attend! [Jesus] is the “worship leader.”

You may be the music director in a church, or its organist, or sing in its choir, or play in its worship [team]; you may even be its [pastor]. But the one thing you are not is [its] worship leader.[5]

“Oh,” you say, “well, Sinclair must have been having a bad day, you know. Over there, it gets cold in Scotland and so on. What strange words!”

Oh, I have worse for you than that! We can go from the Presbyterian in the islands of Scotland back to London and to Spurgeon in 1870. And he addresses the people in his day, and he says to those of you who are responsible for helping the congregation,

remember that the song is not for your glory, but for the honour of the Lord …; therefore, select not anthems and tunes in which your skillfulness will be manifest, but such as will aid the people to magnify the Lord with their thanksgivings. The people come together not to see you as a songster, but to praise the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Remember also, that you are not set to sing for yourself only, but to be a leader of others, many of whom know nothing of music; therefore, choose such tunes as can be learned and followed by all, that none in the assembly may be compelled to be silent while the Lord is extolled.[6]

“May [I beg you] in the very gentlest whisper,” he says, “to think very much of God, much of the singing, and extremely little of yourself.”[7] That’s challenging, isn’t it? Now listen to this:

The institution of singers, as a separate order is an evil, a growing evil, and ought to be abated and abolished.

What’s he saying? Listen:

And the instruction of the entire congregation is the readiest, surest, and most scriptural mode of curing it. A band of godless men and women will often instal themselves in a conspicuous part of the [church], and monopolise the singing to the grief of the pastor, the injury of the church, and the scandal of public worship.[8]

Now, Getty’s probably back there going, “I knew I shouldn’t have invited him! He’s only five minutes into it, and he’s alienated two-thirds of the of the conference!” Well, I hope not. You’re sensible people. You can work this out.

Here’s all that we’re saying. When I was a boy growing up, we used to sing this before our Bible study class began. Did you sing this?

Jesus, stand among us
In [your] risen power;
[May] this time of worship
Be a hallowed hour.[9]

That was penned in 1855. When I was twenty, in 1972, in the words that came from Jamie and Carol Owens out of the West Coast in that great charismatic festival that went around the place, we used to sing,

He is here, he is here,
He is moving among us.
He is here, he is here
As we gather in his name.[10]

Do you know what a transformation takes place in a congregation when they understand that Jesus is not simply the shepherd of their souls, but he is the leader of our praise, and he ultimately is the preacher? It is he who preaches when his Word is taught by the Spirit.

Shout!

Now, all of that by way of introduction, because we’re really dealing with this psalm. And you will notice that it begins with this clear call to praise God: “Make a joyful noise.” Three of the seven imperatives that are contained in the psalm are here in verses 1 and 2. “Make a joyful noise,” or “Shout to the Lord! O be joyful!” When Keith and Kristyn rewrote for us a version of the Hundredth Psalm, they took this theme up, didn’t they? “Oh, shout for joy unto the Lord,”[11] and that was the opening salvo. “Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.”[12]

What is this joyful noise? It’s not the special contribution of those who are tone-deaf. Those of us who are tone-deaf are not making a joyful noise. We’re making a dreadful racket, and if our wives can’t help us, then we need to go to somebody else. No, the word that is used here for “shout” is the word of welcome given to a king in taking possession of his throne: “Shout as the king comes.” And this psalm, when you work back the way, comes as the climax of a number of psalms which are announcing again and again the fact that “the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.”[13]

And you will notice that the invitation, the exhortation, is not limited to Israel, because the Lord is the sovereign ruler of the entire earth: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”[14]—hence George Herbert’s poem, which begins, “Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing, My God and King.”[15] That is the call to sing—a call which extends far and beyond the immediacy of the psalmist’s little world. And when Luther dealt with these psalms, he said of the Hundredth Psalm, “It is clearly a prophecy concerning Christ.”[16] For who is the King that we welcome? None other than Jesus.

Psalm 24:

Ye gates, lift up your heads on high;
Ye doors that last for aye,
Be lifted up, that so the King
Of glory enter may.

And then the antiphonal response: “But who is he that is the King?” And then the answer: “The Lord, who’s great in might.” Who is this? Who fulfills this? Jesus! The one who stands beside you as you begin to be responding to the exhortation of those who lead us in our praise: “Come now, let us sing to the Lord.”

Serve!

Also, not only to shout but also to serve. “Serve the Lord with gladness!”—not with reluctance but with gladness.

You remember Joshua urged the people that were gathered around him, the tribes of Israel, to “fear the Lord and serve him [with] sincerity and … faithfulness.”[17] And he then went on to say, “If you’re not going to do that, then choose who you will serve,”[18] because, to quote Bob Dylan—not that Joshua was quoting Bob Dylan—“You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”[19] “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Serve the Lord.

So instead of viewing the gathering for worship as a kind of weekly activity, we understand it in terms of Romans 12:1–2, which is our “reasonable service”[20] of “spiritual worship.”[21]

Sing!

Shout, serve, and sing. Sing. Well, I know the imperative’s “Come,” but this is called Sing! so I thought I should use “sing”—which makes sense to me at least. Shout, serve, sing.

Now, again, this isn’t the province of an elect group or a select group. It is an extended invitation. Alec Motyer, who’s now around the throne of heaven, speaks here of the progressive nearness that we see. He calls us to come into his presence with singing. “Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God; but children of the heav’nly King [must] speak [his praise],” or his love, “abroad.”[22]

Now, let’s just pause and camp on this for a moment. People sing all over the place, don’t they? I mean, if you watch the Premier League (which is football played correctly), you will be aware of a number of things—and I say this with the greatest respect. There is none of that organ playing, whatever that thing is, that happens in these American sporting events—you know, “Diddly-diddly-doo!” and then it goes, “Charge!” and the people all go, “Charge!” and then if he doesn’t “Diddly-doo” anymore, then they just say, “I think I’ll get a hamburger,” and off they go. But if you watch the Premier League, you say to yourself, “Who started that singing? How can fifty thousand people be singing like this? What is wrong with them?” There’s nothing wrong with them. It’s something that is inside of them.

You find the same thing in bars, at least in the United Kingdom—Scottish bars, Irish bars, English bars, Welsh bars: People sing. Interestingly, it doesn’t really happen that much in America. But isn’t it true? I mean, I say it respectfully. The average British fellow who’s converted, if he’s a football fan, is converted as a singer. He’s been used to singing. And when he comes into the church, what happens to him? There’s an exhortation to sing. What changes? The subject matter. The subject matter. “You have put a new song in my heart, a song of praise to God”[23]—so that even if he does go to watch Manchester United on a Saturday, when he comes on a Sunday, he is singing to the Lord his God. He understands that.

That we sing in this way is, first of all, evidence of spiritual life. It’s evidence of spiritual life that we sing. I can actually tell you that this is the case just from watching a congregation over thirty-four years. I could give you chapter and verse for this, but I would embarrass people. But I can tell you that there are men now—I’m not thinking of one in particular (but really I am)—but there are men who used to say to me, “Why do we have to have all this blooming singing? Why do we do this singing, pastor? You know, why don’t we just get on with things?” And when I look out on a Sunday evening and I see this man singing, I said, “Oh, what has happened here?” You see, God has got ahold of his heart. All he used to do was jingle his change. He just stood there. As you go further and further back in the congregation, you find the change jinglers, and then the hummers, and then, eventually, it just fizzles out into nothing the further back you get.

C. S. Lewis, in his Reflections on the Psalms, he says this is the wonder of praise, isn’t it? Because it’s a dreadful thing when you’re reading a book that is fantastic, and you don’t have the opportunity to say to somebody, “Oh this is a fantastic book! Can I read something of it to you?”[24] So, in the same way, across the lines, as it were, within the congregation, from young and old and from a diverse background, the evidence of spiritual life is seen in part in our songs. That we sing is an evidence of spiritual of life.

What we sing is a matter of spiritual importance. What we sing is a matter of spiritual importance—so that it is framed biblically, that it is framed by the truth of Scripture. And if I may say so, turning to the Psalms: We neglect Jesus’ hymnbook to our impoverishment. This generation is probably the first generation that has actually ignored the Psalms almost in their entirety. If you have lived long enough, you know that there may well have been a psalm that was sung within the liturgy of your church. Largely gone. Something’s missing. Because, you see, the truths that God conveys to us in the Psalms, the truths that he gives us to sing back to him, help us to understand that what we sing is a matter of importance.

Also, how we sing affects our congregational praise. How we sing. Plumer, in the nineteenth century, the Presbyterian minister here in America, he says, “If we are to sing, we must learn to sing …. Otherwise we will make discord, and disturb the devotions of our fellow-worshippers.”[25]

The truths that God conveys to us in the Psalms, the truths that he gives us to sing back to him, help us to understand that what we sing is a matter of importance.

Isn’t that interesting? You know, you hear people all the time, they say, “And so how old are you now?”

“I’m sixty-four.”

“What are you doing?”

“Why, I’m learning how to work my iPhone.”

“Oh, really! How’s that going?”

“Well, I go to a class at the local library.”

“Oh, how interesting! You go to a class to learn how to work your iPhone. Well, that’s good. Maybe you can help me.”

Well, what about somebody saying, “You know what I’m doing on Tuesday nights? I’m learning how to sing. I’m taking a class on singing.”

“Why?”

“Well, because I’m a horrible singer, and I want to sing to God’s praise, and I think I’m disturbing the people around me.”

You say, “That’s a ridiculous idea.” No, it’s not a ridiculous idea! We do classes for all kinds of things. No, that we sing is an indication of spiritual life, what we sing is a matter of spiritual importance, and the way in which we sing to one another and alongside one another is absolutely vital.

Let me just pause and quote to you something that I came across just the other day. This is a piece written by a vocal coach. If you’ve ever watched The Voice—the BBC version of The Voice—then this lady, Juliet Russell, is one of the vocal coaches on that. And so she wrote a very nice little piece called “10 Great Reasons to Sing,” and I’ll only give you two of them. Number two is “When you sing your brain releases ‘feel-good’ chemicals including endorphins.” Oh! When you sing, “it’s a natural beauty treatment,” because “you exercise your facial muscles.” When you sing, “it’s eco-friendly,” because “your body already has all of the equipment you need and you don’t require fossil fuels or expensive upgrades.”[26] This is not a joke! This is real! You say, “Well, you’re not including that, are you?” No, I’m not. I don’t know what happens to your facial muscles—but some of us could use a little exercise on our facial muscles. Just maybe turning them up this way a little bit would be a start, right, on the average Sunday morning? What do you think it looks like from up here? You think it’s bad out there? You try up here for a few Sundays! I say it with the greatest respect.

Well, let’s go from Juliet to John Calvin:

And in truth we know by experience that singing has great force and vigor to move and inflame the hearts of men to invoke and praise God with a more vehement and ardent zeal. Care must always be taken that the song be neither light nor frivolous; but that it have weight and majesty …, and also, there is a great difference between music which one makes to entertain men at table and in their houses, and the Psalms which are sung in … Church in the presence of God and his angels.[27]

Or, to come to a contemporary helper in these matters, David Wells: “The purpose of worship is clearly to express the greatness of God and not simply to find inward release or, still less, amusement. Worship is theological rather than psychological.”[28] That’s why the exhortations to sing are then always framed in the awareness of what we know. “’Tis what I know of thee, my Lord and God, that fills my lips with praise and my heart with song.”[29]

So notice that’s exactly what he does. He says in verse 3, “You need to know who God is. You need to know who God is.” Isn’t it fantastic that all these years later, Jim Packer’s book Knowing God has sold again and again to millions of people, with that fantastic introductory sentence, “As [all] clowns yearn to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a treatise on God”?[30] Whoa! When I read that, I said, “Oh, I must read this book.” And then he goes in the very next sentence to say: “However, this is not that treatise. This is just a few random thoughts that I have about knowing God.”[31] Whoa! I wish I had one of those random thoughts once in my life, just before I died. Nobody could shut me up. I’d be stating it all the time everywhere.

But it’s so vitally helpful, isn’t it? Because unless our understanding of things is not only biblical but it is also thoughtful, then we will be prey to all kinds of stuff. The catechisms help us in this, don’t they, answering the question “What is God?”

God is the creator and sustainer of everyone and everything. He is eternal, infinite, and unchangeable in his power and perfection, [his] goodness and glory, [his] wisdom [and] justice, and truth. Nothing happens except through him and by his will.[32]

So you see, it is in our awareness of this.

And when our friends respond to invitations to come and join us, the singing of the people of God, along with the opening up of the Word of God, has a powerful testimony. Because the philosophical environment in which we are living at this point in this nation is increasingly pantheistic—that God is somehow or another contained in nature, that we find God by looking in ourselves—when in actual fact, as people think along these lines, they realize how futile it is. And when they come amongst a congregation of people who are turning their hearts and their minds to God as he has revealed himself, then that praise, that singing, is not theoretical; it is practical, and it is experiential.

You see people will say, “Well, I’m going to Oregon, because I’m going to go and find myself.” I want to tell them, “If you can’t find yourself in Cleveland, you sure won’t find him in Oregon. But do you know that God has come looking for you? And do you know that it is once you know who God is that you will discover who you are? And until you know who God is, you will never know who you are, for he made you for himself.” And that’s what he says here: “Know that the Lord … is God! It[’s] he who made us.” “It[’s] he who made us.”

Remember when Paul has the opportunity with the intelligentsia in Athens, and he goes around Athens, and he’s looking at different things, and he’s taking note, and they come to him, and they say, “You seem to have some strange ideas. Why don’t you give a talk?” You remember how he begins: “I can see you’re a very religious group of people. I saw many of your idols and shrines. I noticed, too, that you have one ‘to the unknown god.’” And he says, “That’s the one I’d like to tell you about.”[33] Then do you remember his opening line? “The God who made the world and everything in it…”[34] “The God who made the world and everything in it…” “In the beginning, God…”[35]

We teach our grandchildren, “Before there was time, before there was anything, there was God. You are not a collection of molecules held in suspension. Your DNA has been fashioned by an eternal, infinite God, and it is this God before whom we bow down and come when we take the exhortation of the psalmist to ourselves. He made us.” But do you think he’s simply talking creation? I wonder if not. I think he may well be talking about the us of the covenant people of God: “He made us. He called Abram out of the Ur of the Chaldees. He brought us over the Red Sea. He brought us all along the journey.” And we sing to this God, now, in light of the coming of the Lord Jesus, and we sing to this God, if you like, within the framework of the gospel, within the awareness of what Paul writes in Ephesians when he says, “Here’s the great mystery: that the gentiles are fellow heirs and members of the same body and partakers of the praise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”[36] “It is he who made us.” He’s the Potter; he fashioned us. He is the Shepherd; he cares for us.

You see, often I’ll come on a Sunday morning to worship—and you’re not supposed to admit this, but you have to drag along. You say, “Well, you’re the pastor of the church. You’re supposed to get up with a spring in your step.” Well, I try my best, but I actually, contrary to public perception, happen to live in the real world as well, and there are things that are disheartening, and sometimes there are things that are overwhelming. And the last thing in the world I want is for somebody to cajole me into singing bright and breezy songs. It doesn’t help.

You see, that, again, is the benefit of psalmody. (You should have a conference on the Psalms.) Because the Psalms allow us to lament. “How long will you forget me, O Lord? Forever? How long must I have sorrow in my heart? All the day?” And you’re only out of your bed. You get to the end of that psalm, four verses later, and the psalmist says, “I will praise God. I will thank God.”[37] “Well,” you say, “what was that?” I’ll tell you what it was. It was volitional: “I will.” It doesn’t say, “I feel like it.” He clearly doesn’t feel like it. But he does, because he brings the feelings of his heart under the jurisdiction of what he knows in his mind to be true of God. “God, this is how I am this morning, but this is who you are. You created me. You called together a people that are your own. You are the Shepherd of your sheep, and you gather the lambs close to your heart, and you gently lead those who have young.”[38]

That’s why Jesus stands, again in Hebrews, and he stands up, and he says, “Here I am, Father, and the children you have given me.”[39] What an amazing picture: that Jesus stands, as it were, in our worship, and he looks to the Father, and he says, “Father, I’m here, and the children that you’ve entrusted to me, and we’re here to praise you. We’re here to sing of your greatness and of your glory. We’re here,” finally, “to thank you.”

Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
 and his courts with praise!
 [And] give thanks to him; [and] bless his name!

If, in verse 2, coming into his presence is a picture of intimacy, then here the scene is a picture of majesty: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving.” The reason the place is significant is because the King is in residence. You’ve been to Buckingham Palace, many of you, and you know that there is all the difference between going there when the royal standard is flying and when the royal standard is not flying, for the royal standard flies to declare that Her Majesty is present in the palace. And what the psalmist is reminding us here is of that fact.

And so the picture is of joy-filled worshippers ascending the temple mount, entering through the gates. And when they’re asked, “What is the password to get in here?”—and boy, did I have a challenge getting in here—“What is the password for getting in here?” they tell the gatekeeper, “The password is thank you.” Isn’t that what the password is? “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, … his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; [and] bless his name.” You see, ingratitude is a mark of men and women distanced from God, and gratitude is an expression of our trust in God.

I was thinking along all kinds of lines, and I thought of all the people I’d be quoting, and then one popped up, jumped up from my past as well: Andraé Crouch. And I used to love that song. He came to Glasgow one time and got all these really stuffy people in Glasgow completely hyped up. I mean, it was a great night! I saw people actually tapping their feet, you know. You’ve never seen anything like it. But I loved it when he used to sing, ’cause I knew he sang it out of his own experience:

And I thank him for the mountains,
And I thank him for the valleys,
And I thank him for the things he’s brought me through,
’Cause if I never had a problem,
I’d never know that God could solve them;
I’d never know what faith in him would do.[40]

Loved ones, this is not theoretical. I look out on my congregation Sunday by Sunday, and many of them are just concealing, actually, all kinds of stuff. And how good it is when we’re able to say, “I trust you,” when we’re able to say, “The Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever.” And why is that true? Well, because of all he’s revealed of himself. In the metrical version by Kethe: “For why? The Lord our God is good; his mercy is forever sure.”[41]

Ingratitude is a mark of men and women distanced from God, and gratitude is an expression of our trust in God.

You know that wonderful hymn, “When all thy mercies, O my God, my rising soul surveys”? It’s terrific, isn’t it? It doesn’t start with me and my need. It starts with God and his mercy. That’s what I need on a Sunday. I think about myself and how I’ve been doing, there’s only despair and disappointment. But when I’m encouraged to look away to God in Christ, then suddenly there is fullness, and there is thankfulness. “When all thy mercies, O my God…” And then that wonderful verse:

Unnumbered comforts to my soul
Thy tender care bestowed,
Before my infant heart conceived
From whom [these] comforts flowed.

And what boy that has not made it through his teenage years can sing,

When in the slippery paths of youth
With heedless steps I ran,
Thine arm unseen conveyed me safe
And led me up to man.[42]

If we were to sit for a moment and say, “I’m going to write at the top of the page, ‘The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever,’” and write down then, underneath it, just the immediate evidences to our own souls—to look around at the people in our congregation: those whom we know have gone through trials and disappointments, those who sing in the morning with tears coursing down their eyes, not because they’ve been caught up in some emotional thing but because the juxtaposition between the reality of their lives and the truth of who God is coalesces. And often the thing that generates that is the wonder of our hymnody and of our song. And how long will his love endure? Well, this is Nashville. So what does God say?

If you wonder how long I’ll be faithful,
Oh, just let me tell you again,
’Cause I’m going to love you forever,
Forever and ever, amen.[43]

That’d be a perfect place to stop, wouldn’t it? Not yet!

The psalm is not only theocentric; it is Christocentric. Christocentric. Remember, the Bible is about Jesus. So, if you like, Jesus is the song leader, and he is the one who leads his church in evangelism, calling on all and any in the whole earth, as it were, to get up out of their seats and to join him in the congregation and to sing to God’s praise. “May God be gracious to us,” he says in 67, “and bless us and make his face to shine upon us.” Why, or for what reason? Answer:

that your way may be known on earth,
 your saving power among all nations.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
 let all the peoples praise you![44]

Now, think about this. Think how long ago the Psalms were written. And what do we know of that time? How many other nations, apparently, responded to the call of the psalmist? Year after year and generation after generation, people grew up, and they took these songs that God had given upon their lips, and they sang them, and they longed for that to be the case. And then, in the course of time, God sent his Son. And who is it that shows up at the stable? Wise men from the east—gentiles.[45] So it took a really long time for the longings of the Psalms to find their fullness in Jesus.

When Jesus sends his disciples out, he sends them into all the world, anticipating a day when “every knee [will] bow, … and every tongue [will] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”[46]—so that when we come to worship on the Lord’s Day, we recognize not only that Jesus leads us in our praise, but ultimately, as Archbishop Temple made perfectly clear in his day, to worship in this way

is the submission of all our nature to God … the quickening of [our] conscience[s] by His holiness; the nourishment of [the] mind with His truth; the purifying of [our] imagination[s] by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; [and] the surrender of [our] will[s] to His purpose[s]—and all … this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.[47]

I enjoyed a kind of Timothy background: a godly granny and a godly mom. I guess I learned to love poems and learned to love songs at the knees of my parents. Not everyone has that benefit. Most of my memorization of the Bible took place haphazardly. The compendium of hymnody that I have inside me I never sat down to learn. But if we hadn’t sung so much in the car, if we hadn’t sung in church together, if my parents had bailed out on me when I got fidgety and said, “You go in another room where the other people go, where the other fidgeting people go,” I would never have remembered what it was to hold the Bible with my father and to wonder, “Why is it that it shakes as it does?”

And Psalm 100 for me is precious. It’s the theme of Truth For Life, and people wonder, “Why pick the Old Hundredth as your theme?” Well, I’ll tell you—and you can’t tell everybody, but it’s true—that my mother never, ever wrote me verses. She wasn’t a verse lady. She read her Bible, but she didn’t give me verses all the time. So one evening, when I was a theological student, as I picked up my mail and I read a letter from home, at the end of the letter, which was a routine letter—like, “Your father bought a new suit, and your sisters are doing fine, and I look forward to you coming home for half-term”—then she put at the bottom, “Psalm 100:4–5.” She didn’t know, and I didn’t know, that she would die of a massive heart attack within two days of writing the letter. So her legacy to me is what? What’s the last thing she said to me? The last thing I’m going to say to you:

Enter his gates with thanksgiving
 and his courts with praise!
 And give thanks to him, and bless his name.

For the Lord is good;
 his mercy is everlasting,
 and his truth endures to all generations.

[1] Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (paraphrased).

[2] Isaac Watts, “Come, Let Us Join Our Cheerful Songs” (1707).

[3] Samuel John Stone, “The Church’s One Foundation” (1866).

[4] John W. Peterson, “Heaven Came Down” (1961).

[5] Alistair Begg and Sinclair B. Ferguson, Name Above All Names (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 66.

[6] C. H. Spurgeon, “How Shall We Sing?,” The Sword and the Trowel, June 1, 1870, 277.

[7] Spurgeon, “How Shall We Sing?,” 278.

[8] Spurgeon, “How Shall We Sing?,” 278.

[9] William Pennefather, “Jesus, Stand among Us” (ca. 1855).

[10] Jimmy Owens, “He Is Here” (1972).

[11] Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, and Fionan de Barra, “Oh, Shout for Joy (The New Hundredth)” (2012).

[12] Psalm 100:1 (NIV).

[13] Psalm 95:3 (ESV).

[14] Psalm 24:1 (ESV).

[15] George Herbert, “Antiphon (I)” (1633).

[16] Martin Luther, A Manual of the Book of Psalms, trans. Henry Cole (London: 1837), 216. Paraphrased.

[17] Joshua 24:14 (ESV).

[18] Joshua 24:15 (paraphrased).

[19] Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979).

[20] Romans 12:1 (KJV).

[21] Romans 12:1 (ESV).

[22] Isaac Watts, “Come, We That Love the Lord” (1707).

[23] Psalm 40:3 (paraphrased).

[24] C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (1958), chap. 9.

[25] William S. Plumer, Studies in the Book of Psalms: Being a Critical and Expository Commentary, with Doctrinal and Practical Remarks on the Entire Psalter (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), 896–97.

[26] Juliet Russell, “10 Great Reasons to Sing!,” mindbodygreen, January 7, 2013, https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-7308/10-great-reasons-to-sing.html.

[27] John Calvin, “Preface to the Psalter” (1543).

[28] David F. Wells,Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 40.

[29] Horatius Bonar, “Not What I Am, O Lord, but What Thou Art” (1861). Lyrics lightly altered.

[30] J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973), 5.

[31] Packer, Knowing God, 5. Paraphrased

[32] The New City Catechism, Q. 2.

[33] Acts 17:19–20, 22–23 (paraphrased).

[34] Acts 17:24 (ESV).

[35] Genesis 1:1 (ESV).

[36] Ephesians 3:6 (paraphrased).

[37] Psalm 13:1–2, 5–6 (paraphrased).

[38] See Isaiah 40:11.

[39] Hebrews 2:13 (paraphrased).

[40] Andraé Crouch, “Through It All” (1971). Lyrics lightly altered.

[41] William Kethe, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” (1561).

[42] Joseph Addison, “When All Thy Mercies, O My God” (1712).

[43] Don Schlitz and Paul Overstreet, “Forever and Ever, Amen” (1987). Lyrics lightly altered.

[44] Psalm 67:1–3 (ESV).

[45] See Matthew 2:1–11.

[46] Philippians 2:10–11 (ESV).

[47] William Temple, Readings in St John’s Gospel: First and Second Series (Wilton, CT: Morehouse Barlow, 1985), 67.