by Tony Loseto
Church Planting Pastor, Gateway Church Old Brooklyn
Psalm 95:6-8
“ 6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! 7 For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you hear His voice, 8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,”
The Psalms serve us both as a picture and a pointer. They are a picture for us of the faith of those who delight in God’s Word. They teach us how to stand on the promises of God and how to pray to Him in the midst of every circumstance and emotion we may feel. Indeed, the Psalms could almost be called the scrapbook of faith, a collection of believers’ expressions of faith in the living God.
But very importantly, the Psalms also point us to the one in whom all our faith is placed, the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Anointed One of Psalm 2, the Son of God who reigns over all the earth, and the One who blesses all who take refuge in Him. The Psalms lead us to the blessing of faith in Jesus, and Psalm 95 in particular gives us the invitation to worship our living God.
In these verses we are invited by God to feel the weight of His glory. He is our Maker and our Savior. How vital it is for us to feel the worth of God. How essential it is for us to remember that He is our God, and that all we desire and think and feel is to be brought under the reality of Who He is. We are also invited to trust in His care for us as sheep He has purchased with the blood of His Son. How counter-cultural it is to daily consider how our hope lies not in what we possess, but rather in the One who has taken possession of us through Jesus Christ. We are invited to remember continually whose we are in the gospel.
And, crucially, this invitation involves not only the lifting of our hands in praise and the remembering of the care God gives but our bowing down before Him and listening to His voice. He is the God not only to whom we speak, but the God who takes the initiative to speak to us. Our worship of God must lead to our willingness to bow before Him and to hear His Word, the Scriptures. Listening to His voice may not always lead us to hear what we want to hear, but it will always lead us to what we need to hear from God.
If we will worship God, by seeing His worth, trusting in His care, and listening to His voice, we will be able to see the expression of our lives becoming like the pages of the Psalms. Today, as we hear God's voice in the Scriptures, will we see His Worth? Will we trust his care? Will we listen to His voice?
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What a blessing that God has given us a written pathway to deeper intimacy with Him & greater impact in the world! Many thanks to Tony for this encouraging word! Want to be a guest contributor to Hope Notes? Submissions welcome! Email me your ideas at davery@clevelandhope.com
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