Psalm 111 The Wonderful Works of God

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Mike Biancalana; Psalm 111 The Wonderful Works of God

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You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. Good morning.
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My name is Mike Biancolana, as it says there, and Ben also said it. I'm saying it again. I'm an elder here at Recast, and we are continuing on this morning with our
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Summer in the Psalms. And this is week eight of ten. And I really hope that all of you are getting a lot out of your time in the
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Psalms as we're reading through. And for those of you who have the Scripture journals that are available, they're kind of popular, going quickly.
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I hope that by the end of this series, you don't leave it one -fifteenth filled in and fourteen -fifteenths blank.
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This is a really good opportunity to take notes as we're going through and just what you're you're reading through the
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Psalms. And maybe you've already been doing that, in which case, awesome. That's fantastic.
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And for those of you who didn't get the Scripture journals, I have really good news for you. You don't need to feel left out.
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Ways to take notes are not hard to come by. You can do it too. So this morning, we will be reading and talking about the eleventy
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Psalm. Psalm 111. A psalm of praise delighting in what the
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Lord has done and who He is. And while it's true that this
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Psalm has only ten verses, it really turns the praise up to eleven.
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And I hope that by the end of this really tightly crafted song of praise that you want to get up after this and do something to express gratitude and worship to God.
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So as with some of the other psalms that we've had preached this summer, we don't know who wrote this psalm.
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It's anonymous. We don't know exactly when it was written or for what occasion.
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But that's so much the better for us because as has been mentioned before, we can then apply it a little bit more freely to us personally.
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We don't have to get past the details of some particular event like Doeg the
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Edomite going to Saul. So this Psalm, Psalm 111, talks a bunch about the works of God.
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It's the things that He has done, the things that He is currently doing and that He will keep on doing.
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And in talking about God's works, it assumes something that's really, really big that I don't want you to miss.
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Here it is. God does things. He is still at work.
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He is not hands -off when it comes to His creation. Like many have mistakenly thought that God is just kind of standing back and seeing what's going to happen.
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He's like, set it up, sure, maybe. But He's just kind of like, hanging back. But that's not the case.
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God is in countless ways continuously involved in all of His creation from galaxies down to electrons.
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And the most blindingly obvious instance of this, and perhaps the most startling, is the incarnation.
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When God the Son was born into His own creation, born in the normal way that babies are.
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If that's not interacting with His creation, I don't know what is. This Psalm, Psalm 111, invites us to become students of God's works.
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We should be noticing the things that God is doing, really paying attention and remembering the things that He has done.
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Because all of those things that He's doing and has done, they tell us about who
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God is, what His character is. And as we're reading through the
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Psalm here in a moment, you might notice that it's a little light on specific details on the works that God has done.
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And it's mostly just gesturing towards them, saying, look what God has done. Isn't it amazing?
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But don't worry, we'll get into the details a little bit as we go. But only a little bit, there's so much there.
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And you will definitely be able to find more of God's works on your own if you go looking.
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And those are all reasons to give thanks to God. So if you will turn with me to Psalm 111 in your
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Bibles, Scripture journals, devices, whatever you have that has the
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Bible in it, I will read Psalm 111.
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And please read it with me, see that I'm following God's Word here.
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Psalm 111. He has caused
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His wondrous works to be remembered. The Lord is gracious and merciful. He provides food for those who fear
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Him. He remembers His covenant forever. He has shown His people the power of His works in giving them the inheritance of the nations.
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The works of His hands are faithful and just. All His precepts are trustworthy.
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They are established forever and ever to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness. He sent redemption to His people.
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He has commanded His covenant forever. Holy and awesome is His name. The fear of the
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Lord is the beginning of wisdom. All those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever.
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Amen. Pray with me. Lord, thank You for Your Word, which tells us about Your works.
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And thank You for showing us who
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You are, for being at work in Your creation, for all the things that You have done, not just in making things, but in ordering them, and also the things that You've done for us specifically.
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Pray that You would open our hearts to really hear from Your Word and to just be filled with gratitude to You for all that You've done, and for who
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You are especially. And just pray that we would praise
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You from grateful hearts this morning. Your name. Amen. Thank you,
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Dave, and Dave and the band. Thank you. So, get comfortable as we go from praising
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God in song to praising God some more through hearing from His Word in Psalm 111. If you need more coffee or doughnuts or juice or tea or whatever in the back, it's back there while supplies last.
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If you need the restrooms, they're through the barn doors down the hallway on your left. You can avail yourself of those things at any time.
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So, I don't exactly have an outline for you this morning for this psalm.
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I had to take a slightly different approach. This is a psalm. And in looking at the psalm here, the themes in it are so woven together throughout that all of the points come from nearly all the verses.
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So, instead of an outline where I break things apart, I'll give you the themes and they're going to keep showing up.
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But for those of you who need to have all of the items on your desk lined up and at right angles to one another, you know who you are,
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I will make it up to you by having bulleted lists at the end. Just put a pin in it.
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We'll get back to that. But in the meantime, the themes are, for what
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God does, for who God is, we should praise the
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Lord. Those three themes. For what God does, for who God is, we should praise the
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Lord. And we'll be going through the psalm from start to finish here and pointing out the themes as they occur, as we're going through.
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And I'm going to be bringing in other verses as we're going to kind of flesh some of these points out.
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But you don't need to feel, you don't need to feel you have to flip to those other passages.
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Just, you can stay at Psalm 111 and you can maybe write down the references if you want.
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But there's no real need to jump over to those things as they come. So, the psalm,
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Psalm 111, starts out with an exclamation, praise the Lord. The psalmist encourages us to join him in as he praises
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God. Praise the Lord. And he is overflowing with praise and thankfulness.
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Look at the rest of verse one. I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart in the company of the upright, in the congregation.
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So, from his whole heart, fully, truly, enthusiastically, wholeheartedly, you might say.
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Praise the Lord. This sets the tone of the entire psalm. It's a psalm of praise all the way through.
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And he's giving us an example to follow. He is giving thanks publicly in the gathering of God's people.
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And he's saying, come on, join in. This is what we should do. And God's people ought to be the ones who love hearing about what the
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Lord has done. I mean, he's done so much for us. It's great to hear what he's done.
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And this giving thanks in verse one involves speaking or even singing, since this psalm is likely a song, out loud in the gathering.
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I mean, if it's not out loud, I don't know what the point of the gathering is. You'd be just in your head, and what's the point of getting together at that point?
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So, taking that, just a small point we could take from that is, perhaps we should make it a point when we get together here to talk up God gratefully to each other when we join together here.
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You know, hey, God has done this in my life. I'm really grateful. I want to tell you about it.
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And I want to point out that doing that does not mean that you have to pretend to be happy.
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I think we've gone through the psalms far enough to realize that not all of them are happy and excited.
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Some of them are rather down. And through all of those, it's still good to come to God.
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That's, like, one of the things that the psalms has been showing us. So, you don't need to be chipper to come to church.
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I mean, the A in recast is authenticity. Don't be fake. Just come.
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But it's always a good thing to be grateful to God.
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And if you're feeling a little lackluster in the gratitude department, which happens to all of us, me included occasionally, this psalm is telling you and I that a good thing to do is to think for a bit on God, on what
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He has done. Don't focus inward. Instead, take a long look at God's amazing works.
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Look at verses 2 and 3. Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.
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Full of splendor and majesty is His work, and His righteousness endures forever.
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The things that God has done are great. And great here is in the sense of really big, really large in scope.
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God's works, His doings are a really big deal. They're huge. God's great works, it says in verse 3, are also full of splendor and majesty.
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These descriptors are piling up the same idea. Magnificence, grandeur, the fame of God's works shining out in a way that is just overawing when you see them and your breath comes up a bit short.
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In Job chapters 38 through 41, it's a great section. God showcases some of His works in order to give
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Job some needed perspective. He talks about creating the earth, about making weather do what it does, from rain to snow to hail to lightning.
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All the creatures that are found in the deepest depths of the ocean to the most untamable beasts of the land.
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And not just making these things, but also ordering and directing all of these things.
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And these are some of the majestic works of God. And there's no need to stop there.
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I mean, it's not just confined to this passage in Job. Those are good, but there's so much more.
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There's no shortage of examples of God's works that are full of splendor and majesty.
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For instance, so just take one at random here. Did you know that there is a huge hexagon on the planet
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Saturn? It's a six -sided figure. Pretty regular hexagon too, look at that.
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And it's just a feature of the atmosphere. It's much bigger than the earth and it hangs out there. Clear as day, it's been there.
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And God has put it there and He's been keeping it there and enjoying it there ever since. And we, we struggle to catch even a glimpse of it.
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Like we didn't even know it was there until about 1987. And this is just a small thing in the scheme of all that God has done.
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So more from verse two. Those who delight in God's works, who take pleasure in them, study them.
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And there is plenty to study and delight in. And just thinking of the created works, it's a shame that many, many scientists look at the universe as a random, meaningless, arrangement of matter.
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Like all the things that they study, they are simply incredible. I mean, they're really fascinated by these things for a reason, but they don't know who to thank for it.
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But we do know, even if we don't know all the cool details and technical ins and outs, like how jellyfish reproduce.
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And that's kind of weird stuff. But we know who to thank.
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And there is, there's no actual conflict between faith and science.
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There's only conflict between the God who is there and unbelieving people who refuse to acknowledge
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Him. And as far as science goes, it studies just what
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God has made, what can be measured, observed, you know, those things. And there's a lot more of what
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God's works are than just creation that we can study. We'll see in this psalm, when it gets more specific, that the greatest work
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God has done, and the deepest well of gratitude to draw from, is what
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God has done for His people over the whole course of history. So going from what
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God has done to who God is in the second part of verse 3, His righteousness endures forever.
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God is right and just all the time, in everything that He does and always will be.
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It cannot be any other way. In all the ways He creates and operates
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His creation, in allotting the boundaries of nations, in raising up one people and putting down another,
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God is always doing right. Anything that is truly right or just is only that way, inasmuch as it conforms to God's character.
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He is the ultimate standard of righteousness, and He never changes.
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His righteousness endures forever, never reducing or diminishing.
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So more about His works, moving on to verses 4 and 5.
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He has caused His wondrous works to be remembered. The Lord is gracious and merciful.
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He provides food for those who fear Him. He remembers His covenant forever. There at the beginning of verse 4,
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God's works are wondrous. This is another descriptor pointing to the awe -inspiring, amazing, mind -blowing nature of God's works.
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And I have to say, I'm really struggling not to step away from this psalm of praise for a moment to give a wail of lament on the side for the weakness of our language as it stands.
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These words we see here describing God and His works have been applied to such utterly trivial and unworthy things so often that hearing them in the psalm here doesn't really do much to us.
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I think advertising and sensational attention -grabbing continually misuse these words for their emotional impact, so they've lost their punch.
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And what's more, now everybody can get in on this with by selling their personal brand, which is a mainstay of social media today.
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I mean, you got to get people to give you likes, right? Whatever it takes. So the humiliation of words like great, majesty, wondrous, is a small step away from losing the idea that these words point to.
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We won't have any way to get to those ideas if we lose words for them. But describing
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God's works needs forceful descriptions. We need some way to talk about things that are truly great and not just frosted cornflakes.
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So what is seeing God's works like? It's like taking that first moment you look out over a huge canyon or a gigantic body of water and you can't even take it all in and you extend it that instant over a long time.
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It makes you feel shrunk down to a giddy speck and at the same time like you're grappling with something so much unimaginably bigger than yourself that measuring it in light years seems laughably inadequate.
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It turns your mind a little bit inside out in a way that's not entirely unpleasant and it makes you want to have another go at it every so often.
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Just come back for a little bit more. So think about God's works of creation, of providence, of judgment, of redemption.
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Study them deeply and then see if you can come up with words and put some words to these things.
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People need to hear this and we as a church should get creative. Jump in there.
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We need to be able to describe these things. So the gauntlet has been thrown. We need to get creative.
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Back to verse four. We only got halfway through the first line. God has caused his wondrous works to be remembered.
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How could you forget them, you might ask? I mean, if they're this wonderful, how can you forget them?
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Well, I don't know. Ask an Israelite in the wilderness. I mean, all I can say is that it happens no matter what methods we try for holding on to God's majestic and splendorous works.
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We have a natural tendency to forget these things. So God has given us his word and he has preserved it for thousands of years so that we are reminded.
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He will make sure that we don't totally forget. God wants us to remember.
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He was always telling his people to remember and giving them things that they could do to remember.
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So sticking with works, things God has done. Verse five. He provides food for those who fear him.
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This is something that God does. And just to take a few instances, it was shown in the wilderness when the
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Lord provided manna and quail as well as water. You may have read this recently in Psalm 78. It's a great recap.
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If you want the full story, you can read Exodus and Numbers. It's all there.
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Also, God provided food when, by the word of the Lord, Elisha, the prophet, fed 100 people with 20 loaves of bread and some barley.
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That's in 2 Kings 4, verse 42. Which might put you in mind of another time
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God fed a bunch of people. When Jesus fed 5 ,000 men with 5 loaves and 2 fish.
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And again, when he fed 4 ,000 with 7 loaves and a few small fish. You can find those in Mark 6 and Mark 8.
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Also, in the other Gospels, you can find that. But these are characteristic works of God.
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These are things that, they're just the kinds of things God does. And I've highlighted just a few of these places where God provided food.
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But provision here, it goes beyond that. This verse is really pointing generally to provision of needs.
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God provides for his people. For those who fear him. All that they need. And we can look at the really miraculous ways that God has provided for his people in the past.
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Like the ones that were up here. And know that he is able to provide for us, too.
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We can praise him for that provision. So, in verse 4,
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I believe, it is, he's in causing his works to be remembered. And in providing for his people, the
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Lord shows himself gracious and merciful. He's merciful to our forgetfulness and weakness.
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He gives graciously out of his abundance. He has caused his works to be remembered, even though we would forget them if left alone.
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And he gives food and provides what we need. This is just a tiny bit of how the graciousness and mercy of God are shown.
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This is who God is. Looking at the last part of verse 5, not only does he cause us to remember, but God remembers his covenant forever.
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Some of the covenants the Psalmist knew were made with Abraham and his children in Genesis chapter 12, where God promised to bless
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Abraham and multiply him into a big nation. And out of him, all the nations in the world would be blessed.
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Also, there was a covenant made with the 12 tribes of Israel at Mount Sinai when they came out of Egypt.
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You can find that in Exodus. But we have an even better covenant now, mediated through Jesus Christ and enacted on better promises.
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This came after the Psalmist. And I don't have the time to list all that God has promised us, but just a few things here.
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The Holy Spirit in us, eternal life, new hearts that love and obey God, the resurrection of the body to a glorious new body.
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That's a pretty good start. God remembers. He never forgets his promises.
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And I am so thankful for this. This is also something God does, remembers his covenant.
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And moving on, we see even more that God has done flowing out of remembering his covenant.
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In verse 6, he has shown his people the power of his works in giving them the inheritance of the nations.
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God's works are powerful. And this is not just words, but the power of his works has been shown to his people.
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The people of Israel lived in a land that was given to them. Listen to how
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God reminded his people through Joshua. At the end of the book of Joshua, chapter 24, verses 6 through 13, this is how
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God recaps all of his powerful works, bringing Israel to the land. Then Balak, the son of Zippor, king of Moab, arose and fought against Israel.
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And he sent and invited Balaam, the son of Beor, to curse you. But I would not listen to Balaam. Indeed, he blessed you.
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So I delivered you out of his hand. And you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho. And the leaders of Jericho fought against you.
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And also the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Durgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
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And I gave them into your hand. I sent the hornet before you, which drove them out before you, the two kings of the
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Amorites. It was not by your sword or by your bow. I gave you a land on which you had not labored and cities that you had not built.
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And you dwell in them. You eat the fruit of vineyards and olive orchards that you did not plant.
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You see, God fought for them and showed his power over nations, over nature, and even over curses.
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The Israelites were there doing things, yes, but it was not by their own power that they were standing where they were that day.
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God gave the people of Israel the land he had promised them, and in giving it to them, he showed the people the power of his works.
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In verse 6 of this psalm, it applies to us as well.
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There's a parallel here. Jesus showed the power of God in the miracles and signs that he did, especially in his resurrection, showing the power of an indestructible life.
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Since that time, the gospel of the kingdom of God has gone forth with power, conquering men and women by bringing dead hearts to life.
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That's the sort of conquest that's going on now. So listen to this song recorded for us in Revelation 5 verses 9 and 10.
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We sang a little bit of this not too long ago. And they sang a new song saying, Those whom
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Christ ransomed from every nation reigning on the earth with him sounds to me like giving his people the inheritance of the nations, just the whole earth.
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And the giving of the nations to Israel, you should know, is something that God promised.
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And this points to another thing about who God is. He is faithful. Look at verses 7 and 8.
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The works of his hands are faithful and just. All his precepts are trustworthy.
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They are established forever and ever to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness. God's works are faithful.
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When we talk about a person being faithful, they are proven trustworthy in some capacity. A faithful guide is one who's always guiding the right way to go.
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And you can trust them to get you through when you don't know the way. A faithful friend is one who doesn't desert you even when others do.
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When we say that God's works are faithful, you can always count on them to be a certain way.
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What God does is always true to who God is, to his character.
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His righteousness, mercy, and grace are in all of his works.
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His works are also, in verse 7 there, just.
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He is always rewarding what is good, right and good, and punishing what is wrong and evil. And you can count on his works to be this way.
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So by extension from God's faithfulness, meaning that he is trustworthy, his precepts, which are his commandments, are trustworthy.
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We can trust that when he commands us to do something that doing that thing is just and righteous and loving and merciful and full of grace.
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And we see in verse 8 his commandments are established forever and ever.
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Nothing can remove or change them. God is not laying out rules like we might, where you just try something and see how that goes and maybe change it up a little bit as needed, you know, keep coming back to it.
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God knows the end from the beginning. And his commandments are perfect.
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They never need adjusted or updated. And we, in verse 8 there, are supposed to do what he has commanded with faithfulness and uprightness.
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And this idea, I really like this, is put in this way by Paul when he was writing to Titus.
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Titus chapter 2 verses 11 through 14. Paul wrote this, For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self -controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great
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God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.
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So we are still to be obeying God's precepts from hearts that love
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God and are grateful to him for what he has already done. And that passage from Titus points us in the direction of another thing that God has done.
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And this one is one that tops the charts for us. Look at the beginning of verse 9. We're going to read verses 9 and 10 of our psalm.
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He sent redemption to his people. He has commanded his covenant forever.
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Holy and awesome is his name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
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All those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever.
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God sent redemption. The psalmist is surely thinking of the exodus from Egypt.
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It's such an important event in the history of Israel. It's foundational to who they are as a nation.
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God redeemed his people out of slavery in Egypt. He brought them out through his powerful works when they were powerless to do anything themselves.
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And this was something that is mentioned repeatedly throughout the
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Bible. You go through the Old Testament, you find it everywhere. They're always referring back to this. It was so important.
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We have another foundational event that we look back to. God sent redemption to his people again in the person of his son.
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God remembered his covenant with Abraham. This time, he redeemed his people not from slavery to another nation, but Jesus redeemed us from slavery to sin and from the condemnation we deserved.
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And we were powerless to rescue ourselves. God sent redemption to his people.
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This is the kind of thing that God does. Praise the Lord. I am really grateful to him for this.
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And the repercussions of this powerful work of redemption are still going out through the world as we remember and declare what
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God has done for us. And having redeemed his people in verse 9, it points to the fact that God then brought them into covenant with himself.
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He commands his covenant forever. Israel came out of Egypt and then to Mount Sinai where God commanded his covenant.
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In the same way, in redeeming his people, Jesus established the new covenant in his blood, which as mentioned here, is commanded forever.
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There is nothing that will break God's covenant of redemption. If you are born again to a living hope in Christ Jesus, then you are in God's covenant, which will last eternally.
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And that leads us to the third line of verse 9. Holy and awesome is his name.
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And God's name is his reputation. It's synonymous with his character. He is holy, separated from all sin, dwelling in unapproachable glory.
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And he is awesome. And again, with words being overused, this is not awesome like really neat.
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It's awesome as in causing reverent fear, causing awe. This is a reverence from realizing that we could not ever be close to him without our sins being covered.
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If we are not in Christ, being close in God's holy presence is an unbearable and terrifying prospect because every sin, no matter how small, seeks to make a mockery of God's glory.
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We bear God's image. And so our sin tells lies about who
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God is. And he will silence all of those lies by punishing all sin in his wrath.
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But in Christ, our sins are covered, atoned for, already punished.
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God punished Christ for our sins. And so now we have a restored relationship with the awesome and holy
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God that's available to us. In light of who God is, holy and awesome, and how much we didn't deserve that redemption, we ought to be in awe.
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And so, verse 10, we should have a healthy fear of the Lord, a reverence, which is the beginning of wisdom.
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Any so -called wisdom that is not coming from this starting place is not wisdom at all.
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And who are the ones who have a good understanding? Those who make a practice out of walking reverently, those who keep intentionally doing the things which come from a proper fear of the
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Lord. We should seek wisdom and a good understanding. And a part of that is remembering, studying what
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God has done, which tells us who God is, which should naturally lead to the fear of the
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Lord, which leads to wisdom. It all flows. And now finally, the end of verse 10, his praise endures forever.
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We're ending where we started, with the Lord being praised. But there's so much more behind it now.
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God's praise for what he has done and who he is will keep going forever.
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And we should join in. Praise the Lord. So we've gotten all the way through the psalm.
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And before I show you the bulleted lists that I promised, I have to mention that there's a lot here on one slide, and you probably will not be able to write it all down.
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So I recommend that you either take a picture of it or take a note to email office at recastchurch .com
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and ask for the full list. They will happily send it to you. So for the three themes, these are the points that you can see in the psalm here.
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For what God has done, what has he done? He's done great works, works full of splendor and majesty, wondrous works.
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He has caused his works to be remembered. He provides for his people. He has done powerful works.
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He is in giving the inheritance of the nations to his people. He has done faithful and just works.
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And he has done work in sending redemption to his people, in commanding his covenant forever, in remembering his covenant.
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Those are things that he's done. And for who God is, God is righteous, eternal, gracious, and merciful, faithful, trustworthy, redeeming his people, making covenant.
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He is holy and awesome. For those things, we should praise the
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Lord. How? We should give thanks wholeheartedly, give thanks publicly.
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We should study his works, delight in his works, remember his works, trust in his commandments, obey faithfully, obey uprightly or in uprightness, fear the
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Lord, practice wisdom, join in his eternal praise.
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That's a big slide from a small psalm, but that's all in there. And now as we're coming to communion, we participate in one of the ways that God has given for us to remember his work.
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He sent redemption to his people. I can't get over this. It is that good.
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This is the greatest work that God has done for us. Jesus came for us. And because of his atoning sacrifice, we have been redeemed from slavery to sin.
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We also remember that he has promised he's coming back again. Jesus is coming back for us.
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And if you believe that and trust in the work of Christ for your salvation, come up to one of the tables together.
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There are some in the back here and in the corners and take communion with gratitude along with everybody here in the gathered congregation.
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But if that's not you, then please remain seated.
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If you're thinking, though, that you need that redemption that God has sent, you need it to be yours as well, then ask somebody here when you get a chance, somebody who did go up.
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They would be happy, I'm sure, to share with you who God is, what he has done for them, and what he has also done for you.
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So let's pray. Heavenly Father, it is good to be reminded of who you are through looking at what you have done.
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And all of who you are is shown in your works.
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And there's just so much there. We will never exhaust it. And I will certainly run out of words before we run out of works to praise you for.
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And just thank you for all that you've done and who you are.
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Just, it's amazing the way that you have guided and shepherded your people and been patient.
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And you have redeemed us. Lord, I just pray that you would fill our hearts with gratitude to you and keep them full as we go from here, that we would praise you throughout the week, and just notice and study and delight in the things that you have done.