A Word in Season: Serving with Gladness (Psalm 100:2)

The Joyful Call to Serve the Lord

The 100th Psalm is one of those exuberant declarations of delight in God. It is entitled the Psalm of Thanksgiving, and it begins, Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands, serve the Lord with gladness.

There is this bursting forth of delight and joy in the God of salvation. We are able to come to him. We are able to draw near to him. We belong to him. We enter into his very courts. We come into his residence, into his presence, and we find a God who is good, whose mercy is everlasting, and whose truth endures to all generations.

Is it any wonder then that we make a joyful shout to the Lord, and we serve him with gladness? Is that our experience? Is that what we know of our service to God? We should serve him. It's right that we should.

Serving God with Gladness Rather Than Resentment

There is a duty involved in our response to the God of our salvation, but there ought to be a joy in the carrying out of that duty. It's easy for us to serve resentfully with sullenness or carelessness, to feel burdened by it all, for it to be a joyless, loveless, cheerless experience.

But that is not what it ought to be. To be sure, there are times when there is a burden to be borne. There are times when we may struggle and strive, but our desire ought to be that the Lord's service would be easy.

Our expectation should be that his yoke is light. There is a pleasure in doing the will of God that nothing else supplies. There is that pleasure and that sweetness of communion with him in the work that we do for him.

The God We Serve and the Grace That Makes Us His People

The psalmist sets before us who we serve, this God who is good, whose mercy is everlasting, and whose truth is to all generations. We're reminded why we're able to serve. It's because we are the sheep of his pasture.

We are his people. He has made us that. We did not make ourselves in this relationship to God. We have been put in it according to grace, drawn near because of his matchless mercy toward us. To what end do we serve?

We serve for his glory. We serve that his goodness might be known. We want to declare that greatness and that majesty and that excellence that belongs to him. We have the best work to do. We serve by the help of his spirit.

We are upheld by the spirit of God in the service that we render to the God who gives his spirit. We are now a part of his kingdom, part of his family. We are servants of the Most High. We are priests and kings because of Jesus Christ.

We are walking in the triumph of our great God and saviour. We truly know him, having been known by him. And so our service should not be cheerless, but cheerful, not joyless, but joyful, a service that enables us to smile even through tears and to press on even under burdens as men and women who would take no other service were it offered to them.

Pressing On in Hope Toward the Reward

Is that how we think about what we do for God? That yes, though it may be at times difficult, at times it may feel like an uphill struggle, at times it may feel like we are accomplishing little or nothing of what we might have longed for and hoped for and even prayed for, that nevertheless it is because we serve our God that we can do so with gladness.

It is this which helps to lighten those burdens, this which helps to sustain us in the long and sometimes dark way, this which helps to set our eyes toward the reward which the Lord will give to all those who have loved his appearing.

So let us not give the impression that serving the God of heaven is a heavy, worthless, and joyless task, but let us make a joyful shout to the Lord and serve him with gladness, and so testify that he is the best of masters and we the most willing and eager of servants.