EXTOLLING GOD

Meditations in Psalm 138

THE MOTIVATION OF PRAISE

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"I will bow down before your holy temple and will praise your name for your love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word. When I called you answered me; you made me bold and stout hearted"

Psalm 138:2,3

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IN OUR meditation in the first verse of this Psalm we saw David engaging in praise, and learnt something of the way he engaged in praise - the action of praising. What created this praise in the heart of David? In other words what motivated him to praise God? It is in the next two verses that David speaks of the experience of God that produced in his heart the praise he expressed.

THE HEART OF PRAISE

Praise to God is not something that is naturally in the heart. Praise is prompt and motivated by an experience of God and this experience becomes the substance of praising. We praise God for what he is and what he has done. This is the heart of praise - our experience of God. Without a real and genuine experience of God there really can be no real praise, at least not from the heart. Because of this the only ones who can truly give praise to God are those who have eternal life through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. The experience of eternal life which is fellowship with God brings the experience of the action of God in the life.

David tells in these two verses his experience of God. As we meditate on his experience we see straight away that it is the experience of all believers. Our experience of God in the way David describes might vary in each of us, but being children of God this is the experience we all have. Thus we praise God from the same motivation as David and for the same reasons, and like David, as we appreciate this experience ever more deeply, our praise increases.

1. The love and faithfulness of God.

David praises God for his love and faithfulness. For David no doubt this was an expression of David's experience of all that God had been to him in his life from the deliverances as a boy when looking after his father's sheep, when he fought and killed both a lion and a bear, to all the many ways God protected him from Saul when Saul sought to kill him, and God provided for him, and honoured his promise that he should be king over Israel. We are not told when this psalm was written, but David could have in his mind also the many ways God led him after he became king and gave him victory over his enemies.

We have every right to imagine that this psalm of praise was triggered off by some present action of God's love and faithfulness which filled David with praise, and which caused him to the remember all the love and faithfulness of God in the past. It is often some present demonstration in our lives of God's love and faithfulness that makes us suddenly want to praise. The motivation for continual praise is to ever be remembering the goodness of God towards us.

We don't know, but this psalm may have been written after psalm 51 where David faces God, convicted of his great sin in the seduction of Uriah the Hittite's wife, and the subsequent murder of Uriah by commanding that he be put in the forefront of the battle. David would have in remembrance that amazing love and faithfulness of God in his forgiving love towards him, not counting his sin against him but God himself providing atonement for his sin in the person of his only begotten Son. We need to understand that all the forgiveness of God in the Old Testament was through the merits of Christ doing and dying for sinners. Even though the cross had not happened, it was in the certain plan of God, and was always the means of God justly forgiving penitent sinners in the Old Testament as well as in the New.

The believer in Jesus is always someone who has experienced the love and faithfulness of God. Firstly we have experienced it in the fact the we have been brought out of this world's darkness into the light of the kingdom of God. We have experienced the love and faithfulness of God in convicting us of our desperate condition as one who has fallen short of God's glory. We may not have thought of this as an act of love and faithfulness at the time, because the experience was painful. As we look back we see the hand of a loving God, specially as we understand that it was all of grace. We are no better than others in the world and no more deserving of God's salvation than any other person in the world, and when we remember all those who have not so been blessed, the love and faithfulness of God towards us overwhelms us. Further God's love and faithfulness is total. God not only shows us our eternal need, but he provides all that is necessary for us to be delivered from the condemnation of the world. He provides the Saviour who purchases our redemption, and the Holy Spirit who gives us new life and the gift of faith to believe in the Saviour. In fact the love and faithfulness of God covers everything necessary to bring us to his heavenly glory.

This saving love and faithfulness of God is a source of continual praise in the Christian. The more we understand how much we owe to the grace and love of God the more we want to thank and praise him for his love and faithfulness. Great praising comes from those who live daily in the experience of the saving love of God in Christ, and are ever deepening their understanding of it day by day.

David experienced the love and faithfulness of God in the many ways that God had kept and delivered and lead him in his life. Surely every Christian looks back over their life and has to say that but for the love and faithfulness of God they would not be where they are, still in the safety of the salvation and love of God. As we look back we have to say, that such is the power of the world and Satan, and such is the weakness of our sinful flesh, that the only reason we persevered in the Christian pilgrimage has been because of the love and faithfulness of the Lord in keeping us. The times we can look back at the influences in our life for ill and away from God, what was it that kept us believing and walking with the Lord? Was it our strength and wisdom? No! Indeed No. We have to say that it was the love and faithfulness of God. When we see how so many people fall into great evil, because we understand the love and faithfulness of God to us, we have to say 'but for the grace of God that would be me'.

Then there is no Christian who has not known great blessings and great examples of God's loving providences in their lives. We have the times of great success and blessing. We have the blessing of the love and friendship which we acknowledge as from God. If we are engaged in any ministry of the Gospel, we can only say that it was the love and faithfulness of God that gave the blessing and lifted our hearts in praise to him.

David was a praising Christian because he counted his blessings. The old hymn can be well heeded - Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done. How sad it is that so often we do not remember the love and faithfulness of the Lord, and so our praise grows weak and thin.

2. A God who answers Prayer.

This is the second heart of praise that David speaks of. He gives testimony to the fact that he called upon God in his need and experienced the answer of God and the return of his prayers in blessing.

Prayer is a great and blessed experience of possessing eternal life. We have access into the holiest of all by the blood of Jesus, so says the letter to the Hebrews. Because Jesus cancels all the guilt and debt of our sin by his life and death for us, we can come into the very presence of our most holy God. We not only have the experience of actually talking face to face with God, but as David testifies to, we experience both God hearing, and God answering with action in our lives. Perhaps the action is not quite what we expected or had in mind, but we learn to realise that it is the action resulting from infinite wisdom and love.

There is not a greater motivation for praise than the experience of getting through to God and receiving his answer. We can bring to God in this way everything that concerns us. We don't have to be afraid of being totally open with him, and pouring out all our grief and pain. We never have to be afraid that we may bore God by our continually harping on the same subject, or that he will get tired of hearing our prayer. It is a wonderful source of praise that this is so and we can always talk things over with the Lord, and know that he has unlimited time and infinite love to offer us.

David tells us his experience of God in prayer that sent him praising. Notice that praising is telling out the goodness and blessing of the Lord, and giving testimony to it. God made him bold and stout-hearted. We don't know what incident or what person David was made bold towards. This is the wisdom of scripture. We can as a result of this apply David's experience to all aspects of life.

What praise we have because through our Lord Jesus Christ and his atonement for us, we are able to come with boldness to the throne of God, and know that there will be no condemnation and no rejection. What a source of praise it is to have God give us boldness before Satan's accusations and assaults, and to be able to stand in the evil day and having done all to stand. What praise it is to be able to put on the whole armour of God - the armour provided by the Saviour's work for us which Paul talks about in Ephesians 6.

Then there are the times when we have sought the Lord for some ministry which we have found daunting and terrifying, and we have trembling entered into this ministry, and the Lord has answer our prayer, for we find that the way has been prepared, fear has been lifted, and blessing has resulted. This is another source of praise that the fact of God answering prayer gives us.

Finally under this heading is it not a source of great praise that we have this privilege of praise. Again if we are to be praising Christians like David, then we need to constantly remember our prayers, and remember God's answers as they come. It is a most ungrateful heart that asks and receives but forgets to praise and thank God for his answer and blessing. Remembering the return of our prayers in blessing from God, will fill our hearts constantly with praise.

THE DESIRE EXPRESSED IN PRAISE

As our hearts are motivated to praise by God's love and faithfulness and his blessings in answer to our cry to him, there comes what David witnesses to at the beginning of verse 2, which is this desire to be near God and come into his presence. There can be no greater praise that we can express than to desire to come into the presence of God and bow before him.

David says he wants to bow down towards God's holy temple. David had desired to build a temple to God, but God told him that this was to be done by his son Solomon. David therefore had no physical temple in mind. No doubt he had the tabernacle where the sacrifices were made by the priest before God as witnesses to the great sacrifice of Christ to come, but what David expresses by these words of desiring to bow before God's holy temple was a desire to come into the presence of God and be near God. The temple for the Jew, and the tabernacle before the temple was built, was the place where God said he would specially manifest his presence. David thus simply wanted to worship before God.

Praise is always such a desire as this, and always is an expression of this.

TESTIMONY OF PRAISE

As we are motivated to praise by the remembrance of God's love and faithfulness and blessing, we are giving testimony to God. We are exalting God and giving him glory. We are exalting God by showing who God is and what he is like.

As we remember our experience of God, we see in them how God has exalted his name and his word, and how, as a result, he is shown to be over all things. The Name of God, or the names of God which we are given throughout scripture, express the very nature and character of God. In our experiences of God the name of God which he has revealed to us is shown to be a true revelation. God reveals his character in his actions towards us, a character of love, grace and compassion, and in his actions we see that God honours his name - he is faithful to his promises and all he has revealed. Because of our experience of God we want to express our praise to him by exalted God before others - exalting his Name and Word because God has exalted his Name and Word before us in his love and faithfulness and in his answering of our prayers.

CONCLUSION

The praising Christian is the one who as an experience of God, and an experience which is ever up-to-date. The more our experience of God deepens, the more will be our desire to praise. It is as we seek the Lord in his word and by prayer daily, and remember all his blessed action in our lives that we will grow in praise. Further it will not be simply the obvious blessing we receive from God that will be our motivation for praise, but the troubled times too, as we learn the truth that God is working for our good even in the times of trial.