Elder Pradeep Tilak Sermon

Why Psalm 145 Calls Us to Praise God

Whom do you and I praise the most often? Whom do you and I praise the most often? All right, we're all in church, so let's leave the answer we should give aside, and I'll give you a few other options.

We have a lot of babies at BBC. How about when your child takes the first walk on those knobbly knees? Great job! How wonderful it is to see a little one learn to do something that it has never, ever done before, right?

That fills us with a lot of excitement and with a lot of joy when we see something like that. We live in the New England area. We are filled with sports teams all around us. Pick your favorite. You can get excited with just the name of your team being called out, and of course, when they win big trophies and do all kinds of marvelous things that none of, well, I can't quite aspire to, we get excited for it, and we give them praise for what they accomplish, and some of you may be, well, music aficionados.

I think I said that right. There are some great singers out there, you know, Christian singers, non-Christian singers. I heard there's someone called Taylor Swift that people get really excited about.

I don't know why they actually go to another country to hear the concert as well, but what is it about these examples that I mentioned that evokes praise from us? Each of these have accomplished or done something remarkable.

You know, for that little child, it was that discovery of something that it has never ever done before by trying something new. Yeah, sure, you and I and a lot of other people can walk, but that was a remarkable thing for that kid, but there are things that some humans do that are just way above, heads, shoulders, and a few ladders above everybody else.

You know, they just do these amazing things, and they just evoke praise in us because we see something that is mighty and accomplished by these people, and they have certain talents and skills that they have honed and worked hard to get good at, and then they excel in those things, and we see them, and we rightly ascribe praise to them.

The Greatness of God in Psalm 145

This morning, I'm gonna take us through a tour of Psalm 145. It's a long psalm. It has a lot of things that describe who our great God is and what he has accomplished, and as we look at these things, our hearts also ought to evoke praise, ought to lift him up, and my goal this morning is that as you walk through this psalm, we can't truly do justice to every little detail here.

We're just gonna do a walkthrough. I hope that your hearts are lifted up as you see God for who he truly is, and your heart bursts forth in praise. The title for today is Praise Bifids Are King. Praise Bifids Are King, and you will see why from this text.

So if you are in Psalm 145, let's see what David does with this text. Oh, before I actually say that, this is considered the last psalm of David. So you can be thinking of what are the thoughts that are going through David's mind as he pens this letter.

As I mentioned earlier, it's an acrostic hymn. It goes from Aleph, Beth, Gimel. It goes through all the Hebrew alphabet. It is written with skill, but it takes certain truths about God and lifts them up, and you can play back a little bit, go back 3 ,000 years and consider what was the events in David's life, his encounters with God, his life experiences as he saw God work through and for him as he pens these terms.

As we begin verses one and two, as I mentioned, this is a praise hymn. David says, I will extol you, my God and king, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever.

Right here in these two verses, you see the words extol, bless, bless, praise, and if you scan through the rest of the books, you see in verse four, commend, declare. You see in verse five, meditate. Verse six, I will declare.

Again, verse seven, sing aloud. As you go through the psalm, you'll see that David almost exhausts all of the terms that he can use to talk about how can I lift up this God who is so great and mighty in my midst, and I want to challenge each and every one of us here this morning.

We kind of know how to praise the Celtic steams. What are some ways in which you and I can praise our mighty God together today as we walk out of these doors, and why does our God deserve such praise?

So let's unpack this as we look at verses one and two first. David first praises this God because he is his God. Look at verse one. I will extol you, my God and king. Yeah, in the rest of the psalm, you get to see all these greatness of God that David observes, but this is not a God who is far away, a God who is abstract.

This is a personal God who is intimate and familiar with David, and that's what brings him this joy because this God is well-known to him, and I hope to you and I as well. Look again in verses, end of verse one and verse two.

He says, I will bless your name and praise your name forever and ever. So there is something about the name of God, and in case you haven't seen the, been here for Sunday school, I would highly recommend you listen to the message that Dave gave this morning about name and how Abraham became Abraham, how Jacob became Israel, and there is something to the term name that is used in the Bible.

Name denotes who this person is. What is it that designates them? David here is saying, I cannot know who my God is. His character is to every day, I will bless you, and I will praise your name forever and ever.

There is a conscious choice that David makes. He could be thinking of a lot of things. Remember, David is king as he writes this. He's got plenty on his mind, right? But there is one thing that will be foremost on his mind, and that is the God who is close to him and the great God whom he worships, and every single day, he is going to remember this God and praise him, and this is not just gonna be every day till he dies.

This is something that is gonna go on forever and ever. You see, when we think of the people that we praise, Celtics might lose someday. Brady might retire. I don't know these guys retire, retire. I don't know when they'd really do, but our God never, he is maximally excellent.

He never diminishes in his glory. He is always good. He is always worthy of our praise, and you and I can echo with David that every day, I will bless you because you, our God, are worthy always of praise.

So my first section in verses one through seven is talking about the greatness of our God. I have four sections that I'm gonna walk us through. These are kind of somewhat loose, not necessarily very tight, but let's look at the greatness of our God in verses one through seven.

In verses one and two, we looked at the praise that David gives. Let's look now at verse three. Each of these teams we praise, there is something special about them that we praise them for. What is it about God that David praises?

What attributes are transfixing David as he looks to God? Verse three, great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

Would you just memorize that? Because I so often forget who my God is. Very often when I stand before an athlete who is seven feet tall, I feel dwarfed by them. When I stand before a mighty building, I think, okay, I can't quite see it.

I need a binocular. I need a telescope to look at the planet that is afar off. But when I think about my God and his greatness, he is not even bounded by physical limits. He is not bounded by space. He is not bounded by time.

He is infinite, and that's a concept that my mind can't quite grasp. My eyes can't quite see. His greatness is such that in every attribute of his, he is maximally excellent, and so much so that David says his greatness, how far superior he is, is unsearchable.

There is no binocular, no telescope, nothing that can kind of reach the limits of God because God is limitless. The theologians call this the incomprehensibility of God. You and I can know about God only because God has revealed himself to us through the word, and this is part of what we are seeing, God's revelation of himself through the pen of David.

But when you try to understand everything about God, you can't quite get your arms around God because he is incomprehensible, and such is the greatness of the God whom we worship. And sometimes I think that I need to kind of know all the statistics about my great basketball player, and I think I know this person, and maybe I can know about humans and their abilities, but the thing that really draws me to my God is because he is unsearchable.

I continue to learn about my God as I open my eyes and see him through the pages of scriptures and as he works in the world around me, but more so that one day in heaven, for all eternity, I will be gazing in his glory and be filled with the knowledge of who God is.

Let me just remind you of what happened when David encountered Job. Job thought that God's wisdom was not quite what he would like it to be. God had kind of missed something out. So when God reaches out to Job and speaks to him of who he is in Job 38 to 42, you get to see something that God does to Job.

He brings Job to a realization that Job, in his finitude, can't quite understand natural world for its complexity and the way things are built together, and he gives example upon example to say, you know, here's all the greatness of the world and the universe that you live in, but you know nothing about this, and how much less do you know the God of the universe, the infinite God who fills, who created, and who sustains this entire universe.

Great is the Lord. Greatly do we praise. His greatness is unsearchable. Verse four. One generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts. One generation commends your work to the next generation, and they shall declare, speak of your mighty acts.

I was thinking, what could David be thinking of? There's many things that came to my mind. He could be thinking of David and Solomon, how he instructed Solomon of what God has done, but I was thinking the greatest example in my mind would be the Israelites coming out of Egypt.

You know, here is one generation coming out. The Red Sea is parted, the 10 plagues, all these mighty acts, and they are like saying, this is what my God has done, and they are telling their children as the children are then growing through the desert, and then the next generation gets to see the River Jordan opened up and the Promised Land conquered as they see the hand of God continuing to work in their midst, and I was thinking, you know, parents, children, you parents have experienced the work of God in your midst, as God has saved you, as he has worked in your life, as he has showcased his power.

Do you commend the work of God to the next generation? Children, as you hear the stories that your parents have recounted to you of God's faithfulness, his goodness, and his love, as you submit to God, do you see God as your God, as he works in your midst?

Once again, in Sunday school, there was this conversation about Jacob, the God of Abraham and Isaac, to my God, who I worship. Verse five, on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.

There's many things to be unpacked here. Glory, I'm gonna talk about a little bit later, but just focus a little bit on the word majesty. What pictures come into your mind? A majesty is like a king who's sitting on a throne, who's high and lifted up.

The parallel scriptures that come to my mind are Isaiah 6. As you think of Isaiah standing in the presence of God with a train of his robe filling the temple, and there is smoke everywhere, and Isaiah can't help but just fall flat on his face and say, woe is me, I am undone because I have seen the God in his glory.

Or you may be thinking of Revelation four and five, where you have the father on the throne, and you get to see the son, and you get to see the elders, and all the beauty and the splendor of heaven itself.

The David says, on that, I will meditate. Very often, my meditations are on much lesser things than the grandeur and the glory of God. Verse six, they shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness.

They shall pour forth the fame of your abundant goodness and shall speak aloud of your righteousness. Now, when, right there in verse five, he's talking about the wondrous works of God, and then he continues to describe them as awesome deeds of the greatness of God, the abundant goodness of God, and of his righteousness.

So all of these attributes are kind of put together and expressed as awesome things that God has done because of who he is, this great God. Now, once again, from the life of David, what might David be thinking of as he's writing these things?

He doesn't say, this particular event, you were awesome, God. He's just describing God in his splendor. There are just a lot of adjectives. So if you don't know anything about the Bible, you'd be like, I don't know how to fill this out.

What might David be thinking of? David, as an older man, think through his life. Could he be thinking of Goliath? How God was powerful in vindicating his name through a little shepherd boy when all the soldiers were quaking?

Could he be thinking of how the mighty victory that he afforded the Israelites against the Philistines time and time again? How David, with a few men, was able to rout the armies because of the power of God that was behind him?

Would he be thinking of Saul and the redemption that David had from Saul when he had all the armies after him? There could be a lot of things that David could be thinking of. God in his righteousness, protecting his people in his goodness, affording this salvation and the redemption that he had given to David.

So we get to see David, once again, look at the terms he uses. I will declare, I will sing aloud. Here is the Psalmist David as he pens these hymns of praise as he remembers the God who is mighty and who is great.

He's the one who then sings them and dances before the assembly. That is how David praises God for his greatness. David had recounted that God is unsearchable. His praise is enduring forever and ever.

He is majestic in splendor and his deeds are indeed mighty. Now David had seen the mighty awesome acts of God and his ascribing praise to him. The son of David, Jesus, performed the greatest, most powerful act ever on earth.

We get to see how God the son takes on humanity as how he would die on the cross on my behalf in order to save you and me and everyone else who would believe by the power of God that there was no other solution for it.

You and I could never have found redemption except for this mighty act of God on that cross. Now you and I have witnessed many acts of God in our lives. We have seen salvation through Jesus Christ and we have seen his faithfulness in our daily living.

Would we be faithful in praising God in our hearts and with our lips? Praise be to our great God, verses one through seven. Now let's look at praise to our gracious God in verses eight through 10. Do we praise God's graciousness just as we praise him for his greatness?

The Graciousness of God in Exodus 34

How exactly is God gracious? Let's look at verse eight. In verse eight we read, the Lord Yahweh is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. All right, what verse does this remind you of?

Exodus 34 as Moses comes before God. This is how God describes himself as his glory passes by Moses who is hidden in the cleft of the rock so that he does not perish before the face of God. Such is the nature of God that this term is just repeated throughout the scriptures.

Gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. And who is this? This is Yahweh, the covenant keeping God. He binds himself to his people and he never fails his promises to them. This is the eternal God.

What he has said he will accomplish to the very end. Now there are a few terms that it may be helpful for us to think of. Grace, mercy, and I'm gonna use patience for the slow to anger. Grace, grace is God's goodness to the undeserving.

We normally speak of it as unmerited favor or at BBC we call it demerited favor. This is God's goodness that comes to us when we don't deserve it. We haven't done anything to get it, but God is just so bountiful that he gives it to us in his, he is gracious.

Mercy, mercy is God's goodness to the needy. I have a need. I am in a desperate situation even right now. And my God, because he is merciful, extends the help that I need in my time of need. Patience, patience is God's goodness to the one who is not yet repented of his sin.

How many times God could have just wiped me out when I just persisted in my sin? He is slow to anger and he is patient. Verse nine, the Lord is good to all. His mercy is over all that he has made. I wanna just reflect on Matthew 5, 45.

God sends rains on the just and the unjust. He is bountiful in his goodness. I find that hard to do when someone is acting evil toward me, but God is good to all. Reflect on your salvation. Many of us here are Gentiles.

You know, God's goodness spilled over from the Jews to the Gentiles, to all peoples. And there was a text that Pastor Steve read this morning, and I'm just gonna quickly read that again as you think of verses eight and nine.

Just scan through eight and nine as I read Titus chapter three, verses four through seven, and just see these attributes come out again, but this time through the lens of who Jesus Christ is. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God, our Savior, appeared, he saved us, not because of the works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior, so that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

You get to see David speaking some of the things that the Spirit of God has inspired him to write, and a thousand years later, we have Jesus Christ come and show them in colors. So today when we look at these terms of the attributes of God, we get to see them in its brilliance because we see how God has accomplished all of this on our behalf.

Verse 10, all your work shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. Now think about David once again. David has experienced the tender mercies of God. He has seen God's grace in full color.

You just have to look at Psalm 23 or Psalm 51 just to think of those circumstances in his life where he has seen the goodness of God to him in abundance. Psalm 51, his bones were weary. They were broken under the sin, and God gives him this forgiveness that an adulterer and a murderer receives.

Psalm 23, you get to see how God's rod and his staff are the ones that protect him, leads him down the paths of greenery and still waters. And when we think of the son of David, when we think of Jesus, he and he alone made God's mercy possible for every single one of us.

We have no access to God except through the finished work of Jesus Christ. The love of Jesus extends to each of us, extended to you, extended to me, when we were undeserving, when we were running away, when we didn't even care for him.

And today, you and I can look to Jesus as the author and the perfecter of our faith, as we have received grace in our lives, as you have received that grace and countless mercies besides. Would you praise your God who has granted you out of his bounties?

And there may be someone here who has not received God's grace. If so, today is the day of salvation, the Bible says. The Bible declares God to be great. And I want you to know this God who is great because God is a God who reaches out and opens the eyes of people who do not see him, people who do not see the danger that they are in.

The Bible says that every single one of us have sinned. None of us are able on our own merit to reach heaven. We have fallen short of God's holiness and his perfection. Jesus alone lived that perfect life.

It takes perfection to enter heaven. And when Jesus died on that cross, he freely gives that perfection to everyone who would believe. When you trust in Jesus, what you mean is that you take the perfection that Jesus offers freely.

You repent of your sin, which is recognizing that my life is sinful. It has fallen short of what God requires. And I am incapable of living that perfect life. And I surrender my life to him in order that he may save me and bring me to the destination.

Jesus was raised from the dead in order to vindicate that a substitutionary sacrifice was acceptable to the father. And that's all it takes. Repent and believe. And God's free gift of salvation is yours to enjoy.

Both now as your heart is changed from loving yourself and the things of the world to seeing God and worshiping him and have living life that is a pleasing to him and one day being with him forever without sin.

The Glory and Kingdom of God

We've seen praise to our great God. We've seen praise to our gracious God. In verses 11 and 13, we're gonna see praise to our glorious God. Do we understand glory? We see sports stars exalted and paraded.

You have these Boston streets all packed. We see politicians, it took me a few moments to say that word out, basking in adulation when they win or when they are doing their thing, campaigning. We see pop stars shine in the glitter in like huge stadiums with like thousands and thousands of people all around them.

Now, is that glory? When we look at God, all of that is tinsel. It is just a piece of shiny paper cut up to reflect light in contrast to the glory of God, the true glory and splendor of God on high. Glory, well, properly defined is weight, it's heavy.

It is not this light paper, it is the real gold. It is the splendor that is effulgent, that comes out from God himself out to others. It is not something that you cover up and make look pretty. This is something that when God enters the tabernacle, everything is a fire, a flame, because this is God himself who is glorious and brings out his splendor in his presence.

Verse 10, all your work shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power to make known to the children of man your mighty deeds and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.

You wanna be thinking a little bit about David here. Who was David when he's writing this? He's the king. He is actually ruling over this human physical boundaries of people and has the authority and dominion over it.

In fact, verse 13 says, your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and your dominion endures throughout all generations. And David can quite clearly see how his kingdom has been established by the power of God and he ascribes the glory to God, but there is a kingdom that is coming that is eternal and that kingdom will last through all generations.

You see, David saw the temporal glory while he was awaiting the one to come who will rule eternally. Eternally. Jesus, when he came here on earth, in John 1 we read, we have seen his glory. The disciples have seen Jesus and have seen the glory of God in human form.

We can think of the transfiguration where the splendor of God breaks through and Peter, James, and John get to have a vision of that splendor of Jesus Christ. But Jesus is coming back again one day and when he comes back, he will establish his kingdom, his dominion, his authority, not just over national Israel, but about the entire universe.

Everything will be under his control, which would be a glorious kingdom. And I think we were praying earlier, there is a lot of hope in what we wanna see happen here on earth and we pray to God that God would save the leaders, that God would bring righteous leaders, but there is going to be no leader who is perfect, no leader who is full of splendor unless the Lord Jesus Christ returns.

And when he comes, he will be the one in splendor. David knew this for himself. While he was king, he was an adulterer and a murderer. He committed a sin that brought a plague and killed thousands of people.

Well, so much for that. You and I, through faith, we get to see the glory of God in Jesus Christ today and one day we will see him in the heavens, ruling with perfect justice. Praise our great God, praise our gracious God, praise our glorious God, and that brings us to the last section, verses 14 through 21.

The Goodness of God and the Call to Trust Him

Praise our good God. Now, all of us know good pretty intuitively, right? A great sportsman is not necessarily a good human being. I wish they all were so, but not necessarily. And many a time, a good and a kind neighbor is much nicer to have a wealthy and a glorious one next door.

Now, how sweet is God's goodness to us? We actually have the word cry coming up. In a good way, in a good way. The Bible says God is our benefactor par excellence. He is the source of everything that is good in our lives.

In fact, God is our standard for goodness. What does that mean? Apart from God, I wouldn't even know what is good. I don't know my left hand from my right hand. You know, that was the Ninevites when God spoke to Jonah.

You wouldn't know up from down, good from evil. We live in a world that is very self-evident. People do not know what is good. It is God who actually showcases for us what goodness is. And his kindness to us is manifest in far superior ways, and I want you to listen very carefully, far superior ways than any good family, friend, or neighbor you can ever have.

Just want you to just think about that for a minute as we walk down these texts. God's goodness towards us is manifest in far superior ways than anyone else. Now, let's look at this text. The Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works.

God is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works. This particular text, your Bible will have a little manuscript note. Some manuscripts have it and others don't. But the text here, talking about God's goodness, God's goodness is revealed to us in his words, and those words are eternally true.

And they are also manifest to us in the works that he does on our behalf. The words of God and the works of God, God is faithful and kind. Now, when we think of God being faithful and true, he is good in his dealings with us.

He doesn't say something and then renege on it. We always receive the bounty of his goodness in his words and the works that he does. And we as the recipients respond with praise. Now, verse 14, and here we're gonna kind of slow down a little bit.

The Lord upholds all who are falling down and raises up all who are bowed down. This is part of God's goodness to us. He upholds all who are falling down and raises up those who are bowed down. There are times in our life when we no longer have the strength to stand on our own two feet.

We no longer have the support system around us that has carried us through in the past. And there is no other alternative, it seems like, when I am falling. The floor has given away and all I have is that sinking feeling of this is not going to end.

The second part of the verse talks about how he raises up those who are bowed down. There are times when the trials of life have become too heavy. When we think of the Hebrews under the Egyptian slave masters who were given these heavy loads to carry, you think of some things that come up in your life that just you don't have the strength to bear up and stand, you are bowed down under.

And here, the Bible says something about God and I want you to take a moment to remember this is God's scripture. It is talking about who this God is and what he does. And David is writing this because he has experienced this in his life.

Remember there was a time when David had to act like he was a madman, the very king of Israel. There were times when David has experienced what that looks like. In fact, I think he might have been thinking of Absalom when he wrote this text down where he was chased out of Jerusalem by his own son and his life was on the line.

That was those were circumstances that David has gone through but each of you can look back and see those times when you were out of strength. And here, the Lord upholds, the Lord raises up. I want you to remember how those events ended in David's life.

It wasn't easy. He was exiled, he had to fight a war and his son was killed, the son whom he loved and God restored David back on the throne. Each of you can walk through those trials in the past and see how God was faithful when you thought God was nowhere to be around.

He was the one who prevented you from crashing through the bottom and he's the one who lifted you up when you thought it was impossible to rise up again. And the Bible says that he is always faithful to do that.

He will be with you because he is good. Verse 15, the eyes of all look to you and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand and you satisfy the desire of every living thing. I love the imagery.

This is poetry in the Psalms. Just reflect a little bit on the imagery of eyes and hand here. I mean, we don't have a pet dog but I've seen enough pet dogs and you should be able to picture this in your mind.

You're in the dining table and you have that little puppy at the bottom and it's just looking up and it's like, I wanna have what you have. And the eyes of all look to you. There is a sense in which we always ought to be looking up to God and what does the Bible say about God in verse 16?

You open your hand. God is not tight-fisted in his bounties that he gives to his children. He is open-handed and he's bountiful in giving to the children who are in need. I mean, you can think of many examples here.

I mean, the simplest one I can think of is manna in the desert, water from a rock, quail that comes in the thousands. God can provide in ways that we just can't quite see. It doesn't always have to be spectacular.

It can be those quiet things that you just like, how did this happen? Along came the help because my God is Jehovah Jireh, my provider, and his grace is sufficient for me. Verse 17, the Lord is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works.

In God, truth and love are in perfect harmony. Truth and love are in perfect harmony. In fact, I think one of the biggest challenges I face is very often I can elevate one at the expense of the other and may I tell you, every time I do that, I lose both.

If I think I'm loving someone at the expense of truth, I no longer love them because love without truth is not love at all. It does not have the well-being of the other person in its completeness. In fact, it causes the destruction of the person I love when I divorce truth from it.

And if I were to think truth is all that matters and I don't care what it does to the other person around me, I lose truth as well. The truth that I'm holding onto is gonna be a very selfish kind of truth that has nothing to do with a God of truth.

But here in God, you have both righteousness and kindness tied together. All his ways are truthful. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. God is truth. His ways are righteous. He is just to everyone.

At the same time, he is love. First John just speaks of this in the Gospel of John. God is love. His works are kind. He is benevolent to everyone that calls upon him. And we see that in verse 18, the Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.