Psalm 29 To God Be ALL Glory

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. Thank you,

Dave. Yeah, so good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. So glad to see your bright, smiling faces here today.

My name is Ben Wainwright, and I am the Associate Pastor of Youth Ministries. And thanks to God for this gathering together here this morning, and just those of you currently tuned in online as well.

It's such an immense blessing to be standing before you here today, entrusted with the privilege of leading the body of Christ that God has formed together here at Recast in the study of His holy and precious word.

I consider that an immense honor. This is my second time being asked to preach in front of the entire congregation, and I am so tremendously grateful to the

Lord for giving me this opportunity. Yes, as you can see up here, I hope that those of you who have been following along in your daily

Bible reading plan of the Puss Hummer and the Puss Holmes plan, that you, if you've not gotten a digital copy yet or a physical copy, we have physical copies at the welcome table there that you can just get a piece of paper and follow along with that.

If you like to have one on your phone there, we've got digital copies on the app or on the website that you can follow along with as well.

Another thing that you can use, this is what I prefer to use, is Facebook. Facebook sends out a daily update of what the readings are for that day.

Typically, it's anywhere between one to three psalms that you'll be reading each day, six days a week,

Monday through Saturday. Or you could also follow on Instagram. We have an Instagram page that'll send those updates as well.

If you've fallen behind on the plan, no worries. Or maybe you haven't even started yet, and you're like, I don't want to start a plan that's already a couple weeks underway.

Each day's reading is only about five to ten minutes anyways, and so if you haven't started or have fallen behind, you should be able to catch up this week in probably about 15 to 20 minutes a day.

Maybe you even do one of last week's in the morning, and then the current day's one at the nighttime is just a suggestion.

But what better way to start, what better time to begin a new plan or to catch up than the first full week of June as we start here?

Speaking of the first full week of June, I know that for many of you who are still in school or have kids still in school, we've got

Paw Paw, Matawan, Lawton, Portage, Goebbels. We've got a lot of different school districts here at this church, and I know they all end this week, some on Wednesday, some on Thursday, and then final ones on Friday.

So by the end of this week, summer break. Woo -woo! Excited for that. Seriously though,

I encourage all of you to make this reading plan a part of your family's daily routine throughout the summer.

For those of you who desire consistency but maybe you tend to struggle with keeping up with Bible reading plans, that can often be me.

I encourage you to do something that I've done. That's to start a group chat or group text with some people here at the body of Christ that is formed at the

Friends family. Just as a source of encouragement, I know I have a few, like three or four young adults who any one of us will text in the morning that we read the passage, and that'll just be a good reminder or encouragement for the rest of us to do so.

And we kind of also share like a favorite verse that stood out to us from the day's readings, which is very helpful. So that's my encouragement to you to do that as well.

Or honestly, just chat with me or one of the elders afterwards, and we could kind of provide you a reminder or encouragement throughout the week.

That'd be even a great opportunity for us to maybe meet with you or pray, and that'd be great.

Well, this past week of Summer in the Psalms, I'm going to say it both ways, summer and then summer.

I know there's debate on that, but I'll just stay neutral. The last week of this plan, we read 13 psalms, and deciding on which psalm

I would study closely and then preach on took me some time. We started the week by reading

Psalm 18, where David talks about God being our rock, our fortress, and our deliverer.

I almost chose that one, to be honest with you, but I ultimately decided to pass because if you know anything about Psalm 18, there are 50 verses in it.

And if I were to preach on 50 verses, we'd probably be here until youth group starts around 630, and I don't think many of you would like that.

So my next thought was, okay, I'll just choose Psalm 23, right?

It seemed kind of obvious. Everyone loves hearing David proclaim the words, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

What an incredible passage and chapter of Scripture. But after talking with Don in one of our weekly meetings, he encouraged me to pick a less popular psalm that likely gets overlooked quite often by many of us.

So I spent some more time reading through the psalms for this week, and with that in mind,

I narrowed it down to Psalm 29 or 30, which also just so happened to be the psalms from our reading plan for yesterday.

And after much prayer and thoughtful reflection on both passages, God led me to Psalm 29.

Psalm 29 is a psalm of David that is a hymn of praise to God for his majestic power.

Throughout this psalm, two attributes of God stand out rather clearly. First one is the omnipotence of God, and the second one is the sovereignty of God.

The word omnipotence means all -powerful, and throughout this psalm we'll read about many examples of the almighty power of the voice of the

Lord. Psalm 29 also explains events that directly point to God being the sovereign king over the entire universe.

This means that the Lord has total and complete control and authority over all of his creation.

Church, everything that happens in our lives is always in accordance with God's good and perfect will.

So now I'm going to ask that you please take out your Bible or your device and that you locate

Psalm 29. In order to find that, if you have a physical copy of your Bible, it's going to be roughly about in the middle, a little bit.

And then if you're using an app or device, it's the click right after the book of Job and right before the book of Proverbs.

I'm going to read all 11 verses of chapter 29 for us. And as I read,

I want you to take note of how many times God is referred to as the

Lord in this passage. So you're going to see the Lord used to reference

God several times, many times throughout this passage. Recast, this is the sacred word of God.

I consider it a great honor to stand in front of you and read these powerful truths about the Lord that come directly from God's word given to us.

So please follow along as I start by reading verse 1. The God of glory thunders, the

Lord over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the

Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. The Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.

He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf and Syrian like a young wild ox.

The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness.

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

Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forests bare. And in his temple all cry glory.

The Lord sits enthroned over the flood. The Lord sits enthroned as king forever. May the

Lord give strength to his people. May the Lord bless his people with peace. Please bow with me as I lead us in prayer.

Dear God, thank you so much for this morning and for bringing us all together here.

Lord, you are mighty. You are full of majesty. You are, your power goes beyond all compare,

Lord. We can't, none of us can fully comprehend it. We see it all around us, all throughout nature and we read about it here in scripture.

Lord, I just, we love you. We thank you for this chance now that we can take and lift your name high, worship you with words of praise,

Lord. And I pray that as we sing now, Lord, that we will let our voices shout out to you because of how great you are.

And Lord, I just ask that you will receive these words from us as words of glory,

Lord, that we can glorify your holy and your precious name. We love you so much and we thank you for these things.

I ask this in your name, Lord, amen. Thanks to Dave and the worship team for leading us in praise to God.

What a wonderful time that was of lifting his name high and exalting him. Every week,

Dave, he gets a manuscript of the sermon and he will look over, read that through and pray over some songs that he feel enhance the text and really just magnify

God's name. And he also took a couple suggestions as well from me this week too and I appreciate that,

Dave. So just the lyrics of those songs, I just think they go so well with our text from today.

But I'm gonna ask if you just get comfortable, open up your Bibles or devices back to Psalm 29.

If you want more coffee or donuts, feel free to get up at any time during the sermon and get some of those while supplies last.

If you need to use the restroom, you can just go out the barn doors there and they're out the doorbell doors. On your left -hand side down the hallway there is where the restrooms are at.

But before I read Psalm 29 out loud for us, this was a few songs and chatting with people ago, so you're gonna have to really test your memory here.

I asked you to count how many times David uses the Lord to refer to God. So can anyone shout out the number of times?

18, 18, good memory. A little bit stronger in the first service but that's all right, that's all right,

I get it, I get it. No, 18, you're exactly right, yes. 18 times we see

God referred to as the Lord. In Hebrew, Yahweh is the self -revealed name of God in the

Old Testament, also sometimes referred to as Jehovah. Jehovah and Yahweh in English are translated as Lord.

In Exodus 6 -2, God speaks directly to Moses and says this, I am the

Lord. It's about as straightforward as it gets right there, right? In the Old Testament book of Isaiah, we read

God's words to the Israelites in chapter 42 where he says in verse six, once again,

I am the Lord. And then if there's, I guess, any doubt or needing further clarification, two verses later in verse eight he says again,

I am the Lord. This time he's straight up, he says, that is my name, right? That's God speaking, I am the

Lord, that is my name. So as we read the Lord a whopping 18 times in our passage today, chapter 29, we can be confident that David is talking about God.

That's who he's referring to. My ESV Bible has given Psalm 29 the heading of Ascribe to the

Lord Glory. I decided to title our message for this week To God Be All Glory.

There are a couple of reasons for this choice. First and probably most obvious reason is that it aligns quite closely with the

ESV heading in scripture. The second reason why I landed on this title is because of a song that I jam out to Yes, I'm a millennial, so I get to use the word jam for rocking out to songs.

It's called God Be the Glory by my favorite Christian band, We Are Messengers. If you haven't heard it,

I suggest you look that up this afternoon. It's a great song. We Are Messengers, God Be the Glory. My favorite line in that song comes towards the end when lead singer

Darren Mulligan says this, And whatever comes my way,

I will always praise your name. I will put my hope in you.

When I run into your courts, I will fall into your arms. I will sing a song of praise.

Such beautiful words and a powerful truth. These words are seen all throughout scripture, the message of them, the meaning of them.

No matter what difficulties come our way in life, God is always worthy of our praise.

Well, the outline of our text for today is divided up into three points. You should see them up on the screen there.

First point is the call to worship. That's verses one through two, the call to worship. Point number two is the transcendent power of God.

That's from verses three through nine, the transcendent power of God. And then point number three is the sovereign king on his throne, and that is from verses 10 through 11, the sovereign king on his throne.

So point one of our outline for today, it includes the first two verses of this chapter.

So I'm going to ask that you look with me at verse one of our passage. So look in your Bible. Look at your scripture.

Here David is telling the heavenly beings or the angels to ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

To ascribe is just another way of saying to give credit to or to assign. So why is it that God should be acknowledged or admired for glory and strength?

Well, look at verse two. David says, because the glory is due his name.

Well, if we wonder why God is due our glory, right? Why does he deserve our glory?

We simply need to just do one quick exercise and we can all find the answer to that rather quickly.

So I'm going to ask that we actually do this together. You just need to stay in your seat. Nobody needs to get up. All that we're going to do is we're going to do, we're going to take a deep breath together.

We're going to go in through our nose and then out through our mouth. On the count of three, are you ready? We're going to do it.

One, two, three. All right, well, that oxygen that we just inhaled is necessary for all of our survival as humans.

And who is it that gave us air that is safe to breathe? God. To God be the glory, right?

What about, you go one step further and think about the lungs that were formed inside our mother's wombs.

Who gave us those lungs, church? God. To God be the glory, right?

And then you can even go and take it another step further and think about who is it that perfectly crafted our extremely intricate brains, right?

And allowed us to participate in that exercise together, right? Send the, transmit the signals to our brain to activate the lungs to inhale that.

God crafted that brain perfectly. To Him be the glory, right? It is a mind -blowing yet incredibly true fact that God created the entire universe all by Himself without lifting a single finger.

How about that for strength? In Isaiah 45, 12, God says this, I made the earth and created man on it.

It was my hands that stretched out the heavens and I commanded all their hosts.

God's power is truly beyond all comprehension. I mean, for real though,

I encourage you, go home today and read the account of the 10 plagues of Egypt in the book of Exodus chapter 7 through 12.

You'll read and you'll see that God turned the Nile River into blood.

He caused painful boils to break out only on the Egyptians and not the Israelites. And He also caused complete darkness for an entire day.

Church, we serve a mighty God who is beyond comparison. Well, David concludes verse 2 by saying, worship the

Lord in the splendor of holiness. Another way of understanding this verse is to say that we should worship

God for the splendor of His holiness. In Leviticus 19, 2,

God announced His own holiness when He said to Moses this, speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, you shall be holy for I, the

Lord your God, am holy. Later on, in the

Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, verse 2 of chapter 2 includes a woman named Hannah praying this. She says, there is none holy like the

Lord for there is none beside you. There is no rock like our God.

Living a holy life is to live a life that is set apart for God through the power of the

Holy Spirit within us. Worshiping God is an intentional act of responding to God's faithfulness to us through praise.

And let me be clear, church, worshiping is not just singing songs of praise together on Sunday mornings.

While that is an amazing thing, and I look forward to it every week, despite the fact that I don't have that great of a voice,

I'm grateful to Dave and the band, but just lifting our voices high to Him together is an amazing thing.

But that's not the only way that we can glorify Him. We can also do that, we can exalt

Him by thanking Him for His many blessings that He's given to us, offering

Him up prayers of praise, also by sharing testimonies of answered prayers with others, and by telling people the good news of the gospel that's declared to Christians in Matthew that we should go make disciples of all nations.

And even by standing in awe at the wonderful works of His creation, like many of us did several weeks ago during the

Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights. Well, as we move on to verses three through nine, we get into our second point of today's sermon, the transcendent power of God.

Throughout these next seven verses, David mentions the voice of the

Lord seven times. In verse four, we read him say, the voice of the

Lord is powerful. When we think of someone as being powerful, we typically think of power from an earthly perspective.

So we might think of someone who has just an absurd amount of money, like Jeff Bezos.

Yeah, the dude gets regular money from my wife. I love her. And she's not here.

I won't say much. I said a little bit in the first service, but it seems like it's like, what do we have now? What's today? I don't know.

We'll see what happens. That's how it goes. I mean, some of you could probably relate. You know how it goes. That prime two -day shipping just gets you.

Or we might think of maybe someone who has a ridiculous amount of fame, like Taylor Swift.

I don't see. There was someone I was gonna call out here. He's not here this morning. He's a Swifty, but it's not me, not me.

But someone who has a crazy amount of muscles. I thought about flexing, but I also haven't been to the gym in longer than I'd like to admit.

So I'm not gonna do that. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? I mean, that might be somebody that we think of when we think of somebody powerful, right?

In fact, I read online, because I was kind of curious. I was like, the dude was, slash still is, just ripped, just absolutely cut.

So I was like, what did it take to get there? What did it take to do that? So online it said that in his prime, like when he was doing competitions and stuff like that, he was consistently, every day, pumping iron in the gym for five hours a day.

That's crazy. Like I said, I'd be lucky to work out five hours in a week. And get this, though.

At 76 years old, the dude is still showing me up. He's still working out just about every day for about an hour and a half at a time, which is,

I mean, that's a great workout for me. That's a good one. But he's like, man, 76, I got this. But, oh yeah, and then how could

I forget? That's right, yeah, we can't forget about, next slide, who we got next? Yeah, Chuck Norris. I mean, the dude's got all three of those, right?

He's got the money, he's got the fame, and he's got the muscles. So he takes all three of those people and then just kind of wraps it up into one package.

But anyways, for real, though, despite all the wealth and popularity of the people just mentioned here, no one in the entire universe except for God can create something simply by speaking, by uttering words.

In the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis chapter one, we see everything come into existence through the powerful voice of the

Lord. And that's in verse three. I'll read this for you now. It says, and God said, let there be light, and there was light.

That's it. And God said, simply spoke, and light entered into existence.

It came into being. All of creation was formed by the transcendent power of God's voice.

How amazing that is. Well, looking back with me at verse three, we see David say, the voice of the Lord is over the waters.

Nearly three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water. In fact, I Googled it, and Google is always right, isn't it?

Google told me that the exact number, the exact percentage of the

Earth is covered. 71 % of the Earth's surface right now is covered with water. And water can be quite destructive when it's part of a storm.

Many biblical scholars believe that the setting of Psalm 29 being in a thunderstorm is a deliberate choice to show the superiority of God over the storm god of the time,

Baal, who was widely worshipped in Syria -Palestine during the time of the writing of this chapter.

While significant weather events on this planet can be quite scary and particularly dangerous,

Psalm 29 .3 assures us that God's power is above all of nature. A fantastic New Testament example of the power of the voice of the

Lord over nature comes from Luke 8, when we read Jesus calms a storm with his words.

I'm gonna read one verse for you, and it says this. This is Luke 8 .24. And they went and woke him, saying,

Master, Master, we are perishing. They're freaking out. They're worried. And he awoke, and he rebuked the wind and the raging waves, and they ceased, and there was calm.

Just like that. Isn't that something? Just a simple rebuke from Jesus, and the wind and the raging waves came to a complete stop, and there was peace.

A simple yet incomparably powerful rebuke from Jesus caused nature, like that, to come to a stop.

Church gods' powerful words demand our respect. Let's now take a look at the end of verse 4 in Psalm 29.

David says, The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The word majesty is defined as full of dignity or beauty.

If I think back on the first time that I ever laid eyes on my now one -and -a -half -year -old daughter,

Sloane, I remember being brought to tears at the beauty of God's miraculous creation.

God's majesty is on display everywhere you look. My wife and I, we went on a trip to Breckenridge, Colorado, one week before I accepted my position here at Recast.

At the time, it was youth pastor intern. That was back in August of 2021. Spent a week in Colorado.

Let me tell you, we were totally blown away at the stunning magnitude of the Rocky Mountains.

In fact, this morning I received a text and really appreciated it from one of our elders here, Dan Skolten. Him and his wife are over there right now and he sent me a picture of him at Rocky Mountain National Park.

And again, just the splendor of the mountains there. And he encouraged me. He said he was praying for me in my sermon.

And just to see that picture too, it's like, and that's what this is. I don't think I mentioned that in the first sermon, but these are not, this is,

I think, iPhone 12 or something of my wife and I seeing this.

How incredible. God's natural creation is. It's just amazing. In verses five through nine of Psalm 29,

David uses these first five verses to talk about the awesome effects of the voice of the

Lord. Verse five says, the voice of the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.

Which that, upon initial reading, might not mean a whole lot to us, but cedar trees in the Middle Eastern country of Lebanon were extremely strong and massive trees that could grow up to 120 feet tall.

So for perspective, that's about the height of a 12 -story building, which is crazy for a tree.

The cedars of Lebanon are mentioned a total of 103 different times in the Bible. So significant feature in the

Bible. The mighty cedars of Lebanon were a gift from God as a great source of wealth and building materials.

And they served as a symbol of mighty strength. Well, in 2

Samuel chapter five, we even read that King David used cedar trees to build his large palace.

And in 2 Chronicles chapter two, we see that King Solomon also used cedar trees to build the temple of the

Lord. Back in biblical times, I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but they didn't have chainsaws and heavy machinery.

We are very, very blessed to have those things and to just make a tree just look like paper in the split second, and it's down, right?

We fell the tree in a matter of seconds, if not minutes at the latest, right, even for the big ones.

But I want you to think about this. Since they didn't have those things, they had to do it by hand.

So it would take often many, many hours, if not even days, to chop down just one of the mighty cedar trees.

But in verse five of our texts, church, we see the transcendent power of God on full display as the voice of the

Lord demolishes the grand cedars of Lebanon in less than seconds.

Well, almost exactly a month ago, on Tuesday, May 7th, an EF2 tornado touched down in Portage.

Wind speeds were clocked at 135 miles an hour. It's crazy. But by God's grace, zero lives were lost.

Praise him, not a single life was lost on that day. That's incredible. I'm not sure if you've seen any of the pictures of Celery Flats or driven by there.

I'm not actually driven by, but I've seen many pictures online. Dozens of trees were snapped off as if they were just mere teeny tiny toothpicks, right?

God's power in nature is unmatched. So far,

David has given some vivid imagery of hurricanes and tornadoes. Now, in verse six, he moves on to earthquakes.

Here, he says that God makes Lebanon to skip like a calf and Sirion like a young wild ox.

What an interesting analogy he gives here. Sirion was an enormous mountain range in Lebanon that was actually also called

Mount Hermon. This Lebanon mountain range was considered by the Canaanites to be the dwelling place of their gods, and it stood high.

It was a sprawling, spanning mountain range, and as mighty as it was and as much as they looked up to it, it could not withstand the powerful earthquakes sent by God.

In verses seven through eight, David mentions the final force of nature brought on by the voice of the Lord, and that is fire.

Wildfires can be a positive thing when contained, but when they rage out of control, they can cause mass destruction.

Thankfully, though, as people who live in Michigan, we don't usually have to fear life -threatening wildfires as long as we take heed of Smokey the

Bear's current fire danger level. Just listen to that guy, and we should be good. Don't burn on the days when it's high.

We should be all right. Well, in the Old Testament, one example of God displaying His mighty power over nature through fire comes from Genesis 19, verse 24.

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven.

God literally overthrew cities by raining down fire from the sky. That's incredible.

Two books of the Bible later, in Leviticus chapter 10, verses one and two, we read about God consuming

Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, in fire. They disgraced the

Lord by directly going against His commands, and the Lord engulfed them in flames.

The matchless power of God is not to be trifled with, church. In the final verse of our second section,

David says this. He says, When I read this,

I was like, hmm, interesting. Kind of seems a little random. Like, what's this?

So I dug deeper into some commentaries, and as I was studying this, I kind of landed on that it makes sense to me that the context of this verse is referring to the calamity of God striking so much fear into animals that some even go into premature labor.

After seven straight verses describing how powerful the voice of the Lord is, verse nine ends by saying,

And in His temple all cry, Glory! As the storm

David describes caused great fear and destruction, the faithful who are worshiping

God in the temple of Jerusalem, they look on in reverence, and they ascribe glory to the

Lord as was originally commanded to them in verses one and two. While the past few verses can seem a little intimidating due to the destructive nature of the forces brought on by the voice of the

Lord, the final two verses of chapter 29 give us a wonderful sense of peace by telling us that the sovereign king is on his throne.

The beginning of verse 10 says, And I saw in the footnote of my

ESV Bible that the use of the word flood here points back to Genesis 6 and 7 when

God flooded the entire earth and preserved Noah and his family. This shows that God's power makes distinctions between faithful and the unfaithful, just like in the plagues of Egypt that I mentioned earlier from the book of Exodus.

Amidst the indescribable power of God, David tells us at the end of verse 10,

The Lord sits enthroned as king forever. The last word is just, brings so much peace, forever.

There have been dictators and tyrants over the course of history that people couldn't wait until they either died or were forced out of their position of power because they were abusing it, right?

Thank goodness that we have absolutely no need to fear because we have a good king, full of grace, watching over each and every one of us every day of our lives.

Well, David closes Psalm 29 on a positive note by declaring this. He says,

Well, I'm an energetic guy and I often put enthusiasm into my reading regardless of punctuation.

I just, if you can ask some of my friends, I'm throwing exclamation points in there a lot. They're probably like, that's enough, dude.

Back her down. But that's just me. I'm excited. I'm excitable. But verse 11, it pumps me up because the

Bible translators, they do use exclamation points at the end of both of those statements. I'm also excited about this verse because both statements have been true in my life.

I've had many trials and tribulations, as I'm sure many of you have had as well, but I've had many experiences where I can honestly say that I would not have made it through those tough times without the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.

The opening lyrics of the song that I mentioned earlier in the service, the one that's called

God Be the Glory by We Are Messengers, the opening lines, they say this, right, the first few verses,

God, you're still good to me. When my hope is all but gone and I'm barely hanging on,

God, you're still good to me. Amen. Before we share in the

Lord's Supper together, before we move on to communion here, I want to leave everyone with three application points that all tie together.

The first application point for today is this, praise God for His omnipotence.

Church, be thankful that we are blessed to serve a loving King who is all -powerful and in control of everything.

It could be so encouraging just to sing the lyrics from a throwback Sunday school song, our

God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing our

God cannot do. Yeah, sorry my voice isn't very good, but you know, it's an incredible line, some wonderfully true lyrics that we see all throughout creation.

Our second application point for today is this, praise God for His sovereignty.

As Christians, we can rest in the truth of the comforting words from the

Apostle Paul. One of my favorite Bible verses in all of Scripture comes from the great eight,

Romans chapter eight, verse 28. It says this, and we know that for those who love

God, all things work together for good, all things, for those who are called according to His purpose.

Here's the rub though, His good is quite often, very frequently in fact, not the same as our understanding of good, right?

We think we know what is good, He definitively knows what is good for us, right?

His good, despite being different than ours many times, it is according to His perfect will, and He always knows what is best for us.

Some hardships that we face in our lives, they might seem as big as a mighty cedar of Lebanon, but we know that God is more than able to break even the most giant of cedars in our lives.

Our third and final application point for today is this, praise God for His strength and peace through Christ.

The amazing truth of the gospel is that while we were still sinners,

Christ died for us. It comes from Romans 5 .8. Because of what

Jesus has done for us at Calvary, Christians need not worry about any adversity that comes our way.

Instead, we can affirm the incredible lyrics from one of the songs that we sang, we can rejoice in this truth,

Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. I hope that we all go from here praising

God daily for sending His one and only Son to die on the cross for our sins. As we prepare our hearts now for communion,

I pray that we will glorify God during this time by expressing our gratitude to Him for His life -changing gift of salvation.

We close every week together with a time of reflecting on the perfect sacrifice that Jesus made for sinners like you and me.

It is my hope that this weekly reminder of the cross further deepens your love for Jesus and strengthens your personal relationship with Him.

I'm so appreciative of what Jesus Christ endured for each and every one of us so that we can be saved from our sins.

So I ask that you please take this time to remember His body that was beaten and bruised for you as well as His blood which was spilled out in order to pay for your sins.

Receive His forgiveness that He freely offers you and repent or turn from your sins to follow

Him. If you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and are at peace with everyone here, so far as it depends on you, then please get up, walk to one of the tables, take the cracker and juice back to your seat.

And after spending some time in prayer, you may eat the cracker and drink the juice while acknowledging how

Jesus gave up His life to rescue you from your sins. And if you have yet to take that step of committing and dedicating your life to Him, putting your faith in His incredible work,

I encourage you to talk to myself or one of the elders on duty and we would love to chat with you about more about what that looks like.

I'd be willing to meet with you this week over coffee or something as well. It's one of my favorite things about this job, in fact, is the opportunity to be able to connect outside of our

Sunday times as well. So I encourage you to do that. But as we leave here today and we go into the rest of our week, let's praise

God for who He is and what He has done for you, for all of us.

To God be all glory. Let's bow and let's pray together, church. Dear God, thank

You for giving us Your word here in Psalm 29. You are just so far beyond anything that we could imagine in regards of power,

Lord. You are mightier than anyone or anything. Lord, You've created each and every one of us.

Lord, I think of yesterday morning as I was able to sit down and have a nice, calm, and peaceful breakfast.

And You just, as I had Alexa playing random songs,

Christian music, a throwback came up. It was indescribable, Lord, one that I remember from high school about 15 years ago.

And I think of the lyrics of that song and how true, it was just cool that I was praying over the sermon. And You played this, and the words, indescribable, uncontainable.

You place the stars in the sky and You know them by name. You are amazing,

God. That is so true. You really are. And we thank You for not only being all powerful, but Lord, that You are also all loving.

Thank You that each and every day of our lives You pour out new mercies and grace upon each and every one of us,

Lord. I just ask that as we go here throughout the rest of our week, that the words that we say and do will point others to You, Lord.

Let our words and actions bring You honor and glory.