Psalm 29: The Knowledge Of God That Fuels Hope and Ignites Our Praise

The antidote of despair is hope. The fuel that ignites that hope within us is knowing

God. And the result of hope is praise. That is a phrase, or at least those three concepts, are something that we're going to repeat over and over and over again in this sermon.

Because those three are necessary elements. Knowledge of God, hope, and praise are necessary elements in the

Christian life. Like a campfire is the culmination of wood, fire, and smoke.

Our lives are fueled by the knowledge of God, fueled by hope, and ignited into praise.

That is essential. Now, quite simply, to know God is going to fuel our hope, it's going to kill the despair that we often live with, and it's going to result in praise.

And that is what we need right now. And frankly, that is what the world needs right now. They need hope, and the only way that they're going to see it is in us.

So what I want us to do today is I want us to look at Psalm 29, and I want us to learn who our

God is. And from that, I want us to cling to him and be filled with hope in him and filled with praise so that we can take that knowledge of God out into the world as a beacon of hope to the nations.

So let's pray, and let's read the text together.

Lord God, I pray that you would bless the reading and the preaching of your word. Lord, I pray that you would open up our eyes and our hearts and our minds to be able to see who you are.

And in knowing you, in gaining knowledge about who you are, Lord, that it would fuel our hope and ignite our praise.

In Jesus' name, amen. So now let's read Psalm 29 together.

Ascribe to the Lord, sons of the mighty. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the

Lord the glory that is due his name. Worship the Lord in holy attire. The voice of the

Lord is on the waters. The God of glory thunders. The Lord is over many waters.

The voice of the Lord is powerful, and the voice of the Lord is majestic. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars.

Yes, the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon in pieces. He makes

Lebanon skip like a calf and Sirion like a young wild ox. The voice of the Lord divides flame afire.

The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forest bare. And in his temple, everything says glory.

The Lord sat as king of the flood. Yes, he sits as king forever. The Lord will give strength to his people, and the

Lord will bless his people with peace. Now, let's begin where the text begins.

It says ascribe to the Lord. Now, ascribe means to give back to the

Lord what is rightfully his. I want you to think about it this way. We live in a world, and we wake up every single morning breathing this substance called oxygen, which is great and necessary for our survival.

When we ascribe to the Lord, we use what we have been given, and we give it back to him.

So in this sense, think about it this way. We use our minds to consider how wonderful of a blessing it is that God would create us with lungs to be able to breathe in the oxygen and to be able to survive.

So we can think about that, and we can ascribe our thoughts back to God. When we ascribe to the

Lord our emotions, we allow the weight of not having oxygen to impact our emotions, or we allow the thankfulness to swell our hearts towards gratitude.

So we ascribe to the Lord our emotions based off of the gift of oxygen, something basic to human life.

When we allow that to fuel our hearts to thankfulness, we ascribe to the Lord with our voices.

Quite literally, using the oxygen that we've breathed in, we ascribe to the Lord with our words as we sing praises back to God.

In fact, we can use all of our bodies to ascribe to the Lord, not just with oxygen, but with everything that we've been given.

We can meditate on the attributes of God, the works of God, the promises of God, the plans of God, all with our minds.

We can feel love for God, experience intimacy with God, and give love back to God with our hearts and our emotions.

We can use our lips to praise him, our voices to magnify him, our bodies to serve him, our possessions to glorify him.

We can use all of us to ascribe back to God the things that are due him.

If it is a part of you, or if it is under your care, you can use it to ascribe to him, to give back to him glory and honor that is due him.

And that is the point of the psalm. Everything belongs to God. So that if we have it, then he's the one who first gave it.

We own nothing. So in everything we do, mind, heart, body, soul, health, wealth, everything, we are to live a life that is giving everything back to God.

That's the purpose of our existence. That's why the angels in heaven, without a breath, ceasing, never ceasing, giving praise back to God, because they can see with clarity what we yawn at and forget.

Nothing is ours. All of it is his. So our life must be about giving everything back to him.

This means our decisions. This means our time. This even means our our money, all of it's his.

And as we grow in the ability to trust God, we also grow in the ability to to give towards his kingdom.

And not just that, we also grow in wisdom on how we invest and spend our money. We don't go out and get a thousand credit cards and run up a bunch of debt because our money is his.

And he's entrusted us to use it wisely. So it's not just investing in church, it's investing with wisdom.

It's having all of our life be about him. Everything we have is his.

Everything we save is his. Everything we build is his. Everything we earn is his. Thus to ascribe to the

Lord is to give the sum total of our lives back to him. To ascribe to the

Lord is to be willing to identify the rebel parts that are still inside of us.

Those parts that like to hide from God and and hold back from God. To identify those parts and then even give those parts back to him as well.

That is what ascribing to the Lord means in the most general sense.

Now, this passage is also going to describe ascribing to the

Lord through his power and his glory and his dominion, his authority, his rule. Which means that we are to humbly acknowledge that God is powerful, that he is in control, and that his kingdom is reigning.

This passage is about ascribing to the Lord, not just in a general sense, but in a specific sense, power.

Giving power, giving authority, giving glory back to God. Now, when

I say that, I'm not saying that we give power back to God to make him more powerful.

Absolutely not. We are acknowledging, ascribing the power of God back to him is acknowledging how powerful he is.

It's acknowledging how powerful he is with our mind, our heart, our body, our soul, and our strength.

And allowing that knowledge that we talked about earlier to kill the despair inside of us because the

Lord is powerful. To fuel our hope because he is powerful, which will ignite our praise.

And according to this text, when you begin to recognize how powerful God really is, it will kill despair, it will fuel hope, and it will ignite praise.

That's what the text is about. So now, let's work through it. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of how this works in the text, and we'll explore those together.

The first part of verse 1 says, Ascribe to the Lord sons of the mighty. Which means everyone is commanded to do this.

From the smallest and weakest to the sons of the mighty. The sons of the mighty are the rulers in the world.

So if God is commanding the rulers of the world to ascribe to him and to acknowledge his power, this means everyone is to ascribe to the

Lord. Not just the powerful. From the paupers to the potentates, from the destitute to the dictators, the weak and the wealthy.

All of us, all of the world is under the command of ascribing to the Lord because he is all powerful.

And this is actually a really practical point for us to consider as Christians, especially in 2021.

Where I see so many believers on one side of the aisle disappointed that Donald Trump lost the election.

And I was disappointed too. I wanted Donald Trump to win. I think that the policies that he was promoting are better than the policies of the

Democratic Party. I'm not ashamed to admit that. I'm not a Republican in the sense that I think

Republicans are perfect. They're not. I'm very passionate about abortion and the

Democratic Party loves abortion it seems. That's like they're sort of,

I don't know the word. But I was disappointed, but we can't let that disappointment allow us to go into despair.

I see another group of Christians, mostly online, boasting that Mr. Biden won the election and how the whole world is going to be made better and perfect now because of this particular person.

I see almost an entire culture of Christians though, putting their hopes in humanity.

Putting their hopes in the powerful, in the ruling class of humans instead of seeing that all of us are on equal ground.

For the next three days, Donald Trump is the most powerful human being in the world. He's the President of the United States.

And even he is what this psalm is talking about. Sons of the mighty, ascribe power to the

Lord. From the very top of the political echelons to the very bottom, to the most weakest people, we are all under the command of God to ascribe power to the

Lord, which means that we're all on equal footing. We must not look to human beings in order to have power and to give us things that we want.

We must look to God. We don't worship people.

We don't lose hope when the wrong party wins. We hope in God. We trust in him.

We give him the glory that is due him and let God worry about the rulers and about the direction of the country and about the elites and about the sons of the mighty and about everything else.

We must not spend our waking hours fantasizing about what could have been or what should have been or what might be.

I think we're supposed to ascribe to the Lord. Give him honor. Give him praise.

Let him fill our thoughts. If we're going to be obsessed about something, let's be obsessed about him.

All the world's most powerful people live in a world that belongs to God. They have no power. Even the power that they have has been loaned to them, and they will be responsible for how they use it.

And if they refuse to worship him and turn to him and follow him and obey him, their finite power is nothing.

We all stand in our sin equally condemned before the throne of God as sinners, and we all must be redeemed through only one way, and that's through Jesus Christ.

There is no other way. So no one, not even the sons of the mighty, is exempt from this command because the

Lord is infinitely powerful. He alone is worthy to be praised, which means that. I think that as Christians, we must get over this election season and move on to worshiping

God. When Joe Biden is inaugurated on the 20th, we have to acknowledge that the sovereignty of God allowed that and that God is good in that and that we praise

God. No matter what happens, he alone is worthy to be praised.

He alone is worthy to to captivate our hearts and and take over our thoughts.

He alone is worthy. For that, not the things that happen.

On this little spinning rock, the text continues. Ascribe to the

Lord glory and strength. That means stop looking for glory, honor, renown, recognition in our lives, and instead give those things back to God.

Give him glory. Give him honor. Don't trust in our strength. Whether that be the strength of our minds, our emotions, our wills, our finances, our positions at our companies or anything else, we are supposed to trust in God and his power and his might and his strength and give it all back to him.

It's OK, actually, to be weak so long as you know that he is strong. Think about how hopeless life would be if you did not have

God, because then you would be trying to convince yourself that you are strong, that you're in control, that you matter, that you can figure things out.

And at the end of your life, every single one of us dies because we're all weak. You see, true strength comes from knowing that we're not strong at all, that God is the only one who's strong and because he is strong, we give glory and honor back to him.

The text continues. It says ascribe to the Lord the glory that is due his name, which simply means that ascribing to the

Lord for the believer is not a voluntary act. It's a mandatory act because the glory is due him.

Think about it this way. We're not gathering together today just because we want to or because we had to or because there was nothing better for us to do.

We're not ultimately gathering because we have some sort of religious obligation or because it's our tradition or even because we're

Christians. Not ultimately. We gather and we worship because it is due him.

It is owed to him. We come to offer him praise because it is due him.

That means when we skip the gathering because maybe we don't feel like going that week.

Or because we have, you know, other things to do. When we skip the gathering on one very important level, we are robbing

God of the praise and honor that is owed to him because of who he is, because of how infinitely powerful he is.

And again, because our God is infinite, we don't just praise him on Sundays. Paul says in First Corinthians, whether we eat or whether we drink or whatever we do, we give glory and honor to God.

And even that's not enough. There's no praise that we could ever offer him that would settle the account because he's so inestimably powerful, glorious and good.

We could never praise him enough to pay our debt to praise. Even if at a few moments like this in my life, even in the most dynamic and beautiful, intimate, raw moments where I'm like almost in tears and I can feel the power of God, I can feel the presence of God.

It's like God is is is with me, like in the nearest possible sense, even in those moments, those most dynamic moments of praise.

I was going further in debt because what

I was able to give God was not enough on what God was actually worth.

What is owed to God is better than what we could ever give to God. That is the truth. So God, even in our praise, must offer us grace so that we can worship him.

He must accept less than what is due him because we cannot pay what is owed him.

Now, that doesn't mean that we can just willfully give him shallow, half -hearted, disinterested worship.

Not at all. That's not what that means. I just want to let us understand here that we must give him the very best worship that we can, offering him our undivided attention, our loudest and most authentic praise.

We must give him our hearts, our minds, our souls, everything. Love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, right?

Knowing with humility that even our best is still far too low for what he is due. That's how the point of it is not to is not to pick on you and I about how pitiful our praise is.

The point is to acknowledge just how infinitely valuable he is that we could never praise him enough.

That's the point. And knowing that, that he has to offer us grace in order to worship him, that knowing that knowledge would cause us to praise him all the more.

Because how valuable and beautiful and worthy he is. I think this is why verse 2 concludes the way that it does.

Worship the Lord in holy attire, which does not mean come to church with holes in your clothing, by the way.

Actually, I preached one of my very first sermons with holes in my jeans and that was my joke for why

I wore them. That the Lord said that we're supposed to worship him in holy attire. But that's not what that means. I also don't believe that holy attire means that we worship the

Lord in a particular style of clothing. Like men are supposed to wear their very best suits and women are supposed to wear their very best dresses.

Because that can't be what it means. Because if that's the case, then there's some people who can't worship.

Because there's some people who cannot afford to buy a suit. Or a dress. And then they wouldn't be able to worship.

So it's not talking about clothing. This passage is not meaning that we need to dress in a sort of sacred clothes.

It means that we need to be instead clothed in holiness. It means that worship the

Lord as a person who has been set apart. That's what holiness means.

Someone who is different from the world. Someone who's approaching God in purity. This text is saying that we're supposed to ascribe to the

Lord glory, power, honor, strength, and holiness. Clothed in righteousness.

So when we worship, we're clothed in holiness. We're taking serious the command to be different from the world.

Pure, unstained, undefiled. Coming to God in a way that honors

Him. In a way that He is owed. We're taking serious the command to use our entire existence to ascribe to the

Lord. To give Him what He is owed. We don't come to God like the world does in selfishness or self -preservation, perverted by idols, or looking for what

God can give us. We come to God looking for what, in the purity of the gospel, we can ascribe back to Him.

Now, of course, I don't want to misspeak here. We do receive. We do come to worship.

And we do get and receive from the Lord. We are blessed. But we must also understand that we're not consumers who show up at a restaurant and all we do is consume and then we leave.

We are coming to worship, to bring something to our God that He has commanded, which is ascribing

Him glory and honor, power, strength. We come to give to Him.

And to do it worshipfully and joyfully when we gather. So, let's summarize for a moment, just verses 1 and 2.

Ascribing to the Lord means acknowledging His power, rule, authority, dominion, and giving all praise, respect, and honor back to Him.

And when we do that, we begin to find our hope in Him, our trust in Him, not in this world, which kills our tendencies towards despair and it fuels and ignites us into praise.

Now, let's look at some other examples because this text is chocked full of them and it's beautiful.

For instance, God is the one who rules in power. He's the one who sets

His throne above the floodwaters, which no one can contain. Armies cannot contain the floods.

Nations cannot contain the floods. From the dawn of man until today, floodwaters sweep across this earth and do untold amounts of damage.

Every year, there are floods all across this earth that bring colossal amounts of damage.

There was once a global flood that no one could have stopped. No human being could have held back the wrath of those waters, but not so with God.

God is the one who sets His throne over the waters because He's powerful. That's what the text is saying, showing that even the mighty torrential waters bow to Him.

Verse 3 says, the voice of the Lord is upon the waters. The God of glory thunders and the

Lord is over the many waters. This is an allusion back to creation. If you remember in creation,

God is the one who hovers over the waters. He's not dominated by the great depths. He has dominion over the waters.

Just like the spirit in the original creation story is hovering over the chaotic, formless, void waters of creation, so God is ruling there.

This God is the one who rules over the waters and makes them obey His will. Now, I think the reason that David says this in the psalm is because water was one of the most terrifying things of all things that you could imagine in the ancient world.

Water was equated with chaos. To go out onto the waters was to take your own life in your hands, especially in these regions.

You could go out on the Sea of Galilee, for instance, and in a moment's notice, a storm could overtake you and throw your entire boat upside down, and then you're drowning out in the middle of the ocean.

To go out onto the water was to take your own life into your own hands. People were afraid of the water.

People had a reverential fear for the water and for God to say that His throne is over the waters.

What He's saying here is that the most terrifying thing that you could ever imagine in your life is under His authority and control.

The thing that you cannot bring form to, He forms. The thing that would destroy you if it were set loose,

He controls and He rules over and He is sovereign over because He's powerful. Because He's mighty, because He's God.

So, knowing that should cause us to trust Him. This is also an allusion, again, to the great flood of Noah.

Notice that the text says many waters. That's a Hebrew way of describing waters that have gathered together in multiplied fashion.

When it says many waters or great waters, it's saying waters that have accumulated together and are now overflowing and spilling out.

Powerful waters flowing in unison against everything in their path. In fact, the phrase great waters really is an idiomatic way of saying the flood.

And all but God will fall at that. Only God can oppose those waters.

In fact, He rules over them. And this is even more clear in verse 10 where the psalmist says it more directly.

He says, the Lord sat as king at the flood. Yes, the

Lord sits as king forever. So, what you're hearing here is ruling language, reigning dominion language.

We are supposed to read these examples and acknowledge that our God is infinitely powerful.

And that He's ruling even over the most powerful, deadly floodwaters that you can imagine.

He is in control and He is ruling. Which means that instead of being given over to despair, we can trust

Him with the things that we are afraid of. We can believe that He is in control in the moments of our life that look chaotic and confusing.

We can hope in God when it doesn't seem like hope is in strong supply.

And when we understand who He is, that He is the God who sets

His throne above even the most powerful circumstances that look like they're going to harm us.

When we realize that God is reigning even there, even in that place, we'll have hope.

And we will praise. That's why martyrs all throughout church history went to their deaths singing praises to God.

We have records of this during the Reformation when people were set on fire in the public square for their faith in God.

The last thing that people heard was not the crackling of the fire.

It was the songs of praise that they were singing. Why? They had every reason to be afraid and in despair.

They were dying. But yet God had become so real to them, His power so present to them, that it killed their despair, it fueled their hope, and it ignited their praise.

So that's the contention that I'm making is that when we really understand who God is, we cannot live in despair.

We cannot live in fear. We have to live in hope. We have to live in praise. Let's look at another example, verse 5.

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. Yes, the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.

Now, to an Israelite, there was no bigger tree in the world than the cedars in the valley of Lebanon. They were the largest logs that you could imagine.

They were the towering redwood giants of their day. And they were in the

Syrian forest that were just north of Israel. In a way, they had this sort of kingly stature and yet God breaks them like toothpicks.

That's kind of what David's saying. Something that would take many men many days, especially with the tools that they had back then.

They didn't have the chainsaws with the huge blades. Something that would take many men many days in order to chop down a single tree

God can do in a single instant. Not just a one tree, but wiping away entire forests with the breath of His mouth.

Why not trust a God like that? When we know that He's that powerful, so powerful that He can wipe out forests and hold back waters of a flood.

When we know that, there's no reason for despair. Because that same God loves us and we now know, because we're a couple thousand years after the psalmist, we know that this

God loves us in Christ. That we've been made His child. That we've been made a part of His family.

Why would we not trust a God like that? Who loves us and cares for us and even sacrificed

His only son to purchase us. We're part of His family now. So that same God of power is protecting us.

I would say, instead of us having fear over our circumstances, because this life is just a breath, it's just a vapor, it's going to be gone soon.

Instead of us being afraid of our circumstances, we ought legitimately be afraid for our enemies.

The enemies of God who provoke His wrath. Because what's going to save them?

What's going to protect them from being thrown into the fires of hell? Nothing. We have Jesus Christ standing in the gap, protecting us from the wrath of God, dying for our sins.

They have none of that. Which should fuel us towards evangelism, fuel us towards sharing the gospel.

We might face trials in this life, that's for real. We're going to face tribulations, we might even face persecutions in this country, we don't know that.

But it's not because our God is not powerful. Or not because He's unable to save us,

He is. That's what this whole passage is alluding to, His power and His might. And the fact that we can trust

Him. We face the things that we face in this life because His infinite wisdom and knowledge has allowed those things to happen.

And He has a good plan that He is advancing for eternity. So knowing that, knowing that God is powerful, that He is wise, and that He is able, and that He has a plan, and that He's sovereign, knowing all of those things, kills our tendencies toward despair, it fuels our hope, and ignites our praise.

Take another example. It says that He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.

These are the names of two mountains that are just north of Israel. Today we actually have a country called

Lebanon, but in those days that was a big mountain. That was just across the borders in the country of Syria.

Here God is saying that He makes the mountains skip like a stone skipping across the waters.

God's saying that He can upend mountains and make them skip across the oceans. That's what

He's saying. And even that is a small thing for a God who created the universe. It's a poetic way of God saying that He is infinitely powerful.

And He's not saying these things because He wants to bring havoc upon the world, far from it. He created a world that was good and had order and beauty.

What He's telling us is that He wants us to be convinced that He is powerful. So much so, down into the depths of our soul where nothing can shake us, nothing can break us.

Nothing can upend us. God can upend mountains so that we will never be upended, so that our faith and our trust is rooted in Him.

He's trying to help us get a picture of who He is so that we will rely on Him and trust

Him. Which again, kills our despair, fuels our hope, ignites our praise.

Notice that God says, the God of glory thunders. The voice of the Lord is powerful.

The voice of the Lord is majestic. The voice of the Lord hues out the flames of fire and the voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness.

Here again, we are seeing Him communicating His power. This time, against the backdrop of idolatry.

Because at that time, Syria didn't just have large trees, they had this idol called

Baal. It was a false demonic God of the Syrian people. And it was a

God whose prophets claimed that He could bring fire from His mouth, that He could shake the wilderness, that He could bring peals of lightning and thunder in the sky, which is extravagant claims.

Here, the Lord is saying that that lame mute statue can do nothing. God is saying, do not believe that you can find power in nature like forests, trees, and floods, but also don't believe that you can find power in pagan idolatry.

Because He is King. He is the one who we must worship.

These gods have no power over our life except the power to bring us into despair.

Ascribe to the Lord. Worship Him. And when you do that, you cannot be in despair.

You can only have hope and you will necessarily praise. This God is worthy of our faith, our trust, and our worship.

That is what this psalm is getting at over and over and over again. Now, I want us to notice how it ends.

After it is just announced the infinite power of God with several different examples, and I didn't even mention them all, it says that the deer gives birth, meaning

God is sovereign over the birth that happens, which is a wonderful allusion to a day like today when we're talking about the sanctity of human life.

God is sovereign over and powerful over the development of the child within the womb. As we've been talking about natural, supernatural, we've been talking about individual, we've been talking about nations, we've been talking about God is powerful over all of these things.

Now look at the way that the psalm ends. It says the Lord will give strength to His people.

The Lord! We've just been celebrating that He's infinitely powerful and now He's saying

He's going to give strength to His people. And the Lord will bless

His people with peace. This all -powerful God who could crush us in a moment, who could pull back the oxygen from our lungs, is the same

God who in Jesus Christ is going to give us His strength and share His strength with us, which means that we must not live as defeated victims in this world.

If we're Christians, we must show the world what the power of God is by living in the power of God, by living in the strength of God, by resting in the strength of God, by walking in the power of God.

And we do that by resting in the cross. The last line tells us that the

Lord will bless His people with peace. At the cross,

He did that. At the cross, the power of God and the wrath of God were poured out onto the

Son of God so that you and I could have the peace of God, so that we could rest in His strength, so that we could live without despair and with hope and with praise.

That can only be found in Jesus Christ. That is where we see the true power of God on display most beautifully and most powerfully, not just in the holding back of floodwaters, not in ripping up trees out of a forest.

We see the power of God most perfectly and most beautifully displayed at the cross of Christ because God on that moment poured out

His wrath that you and I deserve onto His one and only Son so that He could give us the blessing and the peace of God.

And for all who are in Christ today, we must not let a

God who's done that for us, we must not let idolatry, we must not let natural disasters, we must not let kings and presidents and governments and rulers or anything else cause us to despair.

We must look to Christ. We must look to the hope that Psalm 29 is trying to get us to see and acknowledge who

God is and remember what He has done for us in Jesus Christ to stand firm in that truth.

If for some reason, today you're coming to this gathering, this all -night gathering with despair or with frustration or with bitterness or with disappointment, if for some reason, your faith has been shaken, your heart is troubled, you feel like that the world is crumbling around us,

I want to remind you that our God is powerful, infinitely powerful and He is sovereign over the circumstances that are afflicting you and that's not to dismiss them.

I know they hurt. I know they're causing you pain but God is bigger and better than what you're going through.

Knowing Him, clinging to Him is the antidote for despair because when you know how powerful

He is, then you will begin to see how small the things that afflict you are and that will kill your despair, that will fuel your hope and it will ignite your praise and that is my prayer for each and every one of us is that we would be the most joy -filled people on the planet because we know the most powerful, infinitely holy, wonderful, awesome, majestic God.

Let's pray. Lord God, I pray that in this season, in this year, when so much has gone wrong and there's been so many opportunities for us to complain and be frustrated and be bitter and be upset and be broken,

Lord, I pray that your church would have a resilience. Lord, I pray that your church would have a sort of hope that the world can't even understand.

Lord, I pray that we would not be given over to despair, that we would not be given over to anger and angst and frustration, that Lord, we would be rooted to and anchored to the fact that you are who you are and that knowing you heals us.

There's not a single situation in the world that we can go through that we cannot have hope and praise because we know you.

Lord, please keep our eyes focused on that. Lord, let our situations not become big and let us never think that you are small.

Lord, give us true vision, just like we sang about earlier. Give us true vision of who you are.