singing about those speed bumps. I was going
real slow. I mean, y'all tell Randy, I was
going real slow and I hit one of those things
and my rear view mirror popped off. It's good
to be able to speak three times because you can
kind of go back and tie up some of the
loose ends that you left hanging. You probably
don't know what loose ends I left hanging,
but I know a few loose ends I left hanging. One
of them was my travel story. I never told
you the spiritual point of that whole story. It
really did have one. The point was, although
I did not know how in the world I was going to
get back to Abilene, I knew that I would.
I knew that God loves me, he's with me, and I
have Christian sisters and brothers who
would take care of me. So it was never a
question of am I going to be stuck in Dallas until
the Lord comes again. It was just how am I
going to get back. But I did think about those
people that don't have a community of
believers, so they have nobody to call or they
have no
one to depend on. You could go into an absolute
panic in the DFW airport if you didn't know
how you were going to get out of there. But it
was so nice to know that God has always
taken care of me, I'm convinced he always will,
and I have brothers and sisters who
help me in my craziness. So that was the
spiritual point of that story.
We started out this morning with the
storytelling psalm, the narrative history
psalm, and I
hope that if there's one thing I can leave you
with there, it's that you have realized
that you have a story, more than ever you've
realized that, and that you can verbalize
that and write your own psalm about the story
that you have, and that you'll look at each
day in your life as a story. It's a continuing
saga, isn't it? Of funny things, sad things,
serious things, but it is a continuous saga of
our life and our story and how God uses
us if we let him and if we acknowledge what he
does. A lot of times he does so many things
in our lives we don't even acknowledge because
we're not looking for the things that he's
doing. So let's look for those things, but most
of all, let's remember the salvation
story that we have. And then we talked about
the Psalms of Lament,
and I really hope that the point you got from
that was that we can tell God all the feelings
that we have, and hopefully we can tell our
brothers and sisters the feelings that we
have, too. And through sharing those feelings,
we can grow in our relationship to God and
to each other. This afternoon we probably come
to the most
familiar group of psalms. As we learned, it's
not the largest group of psalms, but it's
the most familiar group, and that is the Psalms
of Praise and Thanksgiving. And we're going
to be looking at a few of those. Oh, one more,
Lucy, I forgot. When I was talking about laments,
I forgot to mention there are two types of
laments. I talked strictly about individual
laments, but there is also a group of psalms
that are community laments. And in this group
would be very appropriate when you call out as
a church for your nation, when you're worried
about how your nation is going, you're calling
out to God in the nation's behalf. That is
a community lament, when it's for a group of
people. And so there are community laments
and individual ones, but we only looked at
individual ones in the last hour.
Okay. Someone might ask, you know, why does God
need to pray? Does he have a poor image?
Does he need to be reassured? And we know that
that is not true. But why does a person
who is in love need to be told that they are
loved? Why do we never get tired of being
told we are loved? And why does the other
person never get tired of hearing? Because
it's a part of the relationship. It affirms and
deepens the relationship. So with God,
we want to affirm and deepen the relationship,
but we also do it because God is God and what
he has done in our lives and what he continues
to do in our lives makes us give continual
praise to him. Augustine said of God, Thou
movest us to delight in praising thee, for
thou hast formed us for thyself, and our hearts
are restless till they find rest in thee.
So we have this desire even to praise God. He
wants us to delight in him and to delight
in praising him. There are many verbs of praise.
And I was thinking it would be really interesting
sometime just to go down the alphabet and using
an acrostic make a word of praise for
every letter of the alphabet. So I started just
a few. I took some of the easy ones.
I'll let y'all do the hard ones. A, adore. We
adore you. B, we bless you. C, we covet
relationship with you. D, we desire you. Just
going all the way through and getting words
of praise to God. Very simple way, but I think
it would be a very meaningful way to sit down
and write those down. Okay? Giving thanks to
God is a natural external expression which
comes from genuine gratitude to God. And I
think some of this grows out of the awe that
we feel for God. And I think we can restore
some of our sense of wonder and awe. And that
helps our gratitude. I think there's so many
things we take for granted that would restore
our sense of awe. Just watching a flower as it
opens up in the spring. Just all the simple
little things. Dew drops on leaves. The miracle
of those. The miracle of a sunrise. The miracle
of even a day like today. That's hard to
imagine. But just the beauty of today. And the awe
of how different it is from yesterday. Just the
awe of the changing of the weather. It's
just incredible. All these things that we can't
begin to understand. Oh, there's some
people that would try to explain it all away
for us. Tell us all the scientific reasons
for why it happens. But basically, the
awesomeness of a birth. I mean, what is more
awesome than
that? Just all of the many things that God has
built into his creation. I was listening
to a lady not long ago, and she was talking
about the birth process. And she was talking
about how that baby is naturally protected. And
she said, nature has given that baby two
means of natural protection. And I'm sitting
there thinking, God has given that baby all
of those means of protection. But there's so
many things that we attribute just to nature
in general, which takes away, I think, from our
awe of God. And really, truly, I think
borders on blasphemy when we credit other
sources of what God has done. But God has
made the world so wonderful. And he's made man
so wonderful. But for us to look around
and open our eyes and see all the wonder of the
things that he has done. And then that
natural human response that arises from that
renewed sense of awe is praise and thanksgiving.
As we look today at some of the psalms of
praise and thanksgiving, I'm going to go ahead
and have them hand out these sheets to you.
There are several psalms. We're going to be
doing something a little different than we have
been doing this morning. But all of you
will need a sheet. And I hope that you have a
pen. If you don't, maybe you can borrow
one from someone near to you. For those of you
who are listening on the tape, I'm sorry
you don't have the handout, but we're going to
be looking at Psalm 103. This is not the
entire Psalm 103. It's just the first 13 verses.
But these are the ones that we're going to
look at this afternoon. What I want you to do
when you get your sheet is I want you to
read quickly through these 15 verses, 13
verses, and mark distinctively the word Lord or God
or any pronoun that represents God. You can
mark it however you want to. One of the ways
that I do it is you can use it if you want to.
Like that. You can underline it. You can
circle it. But we're going to be marking some
other things later, so we have to have distinctive
marks. So go through. I'm going to give you a
few minutes. Don't forget the pronouns.
If you have a pronoun that refers to God, Mark
that also. We aren't going to have a
lot of time, so I'm going to give you a few
minutes, and then I'm going to ask you to
do that.
This is just a simple technique that we use
when we're studying the scriptures to help
different things stand out so that we can then
go back and look at them more closely.
I had you mark this so that you could go back
and we can look at what this psalm says about
what God does.
So let's go back now and just mark hopefully
the verses and I think God is mentioned in
every verse, is he not?
This is the group participation part, ladies,
so y'all can participate.
So let's look at some of the things that we
learn about God in this, these verses.
What is one thing we learn about God in verse 3?
He forgives.
He forgives our sins and he heals all our diseases.
I'm going to let you right now before we go any
further, take the top three sheets that
are scripture sheet and tear them off of the rest.
Now you have a chart on which you can write
down some of the things that you learn from
this psalm about what God does or what he has done.
He already said, the first one was, the way I
like to do it, write the first, like that.
Then he said, he heals all your diseases,
that's also in verse 3.
Write that down on your chart as you're going down.
What does it say he does in verse 4?
He redeems your life from the pit and then he
crowns you with love and compassion.
There's some more things you learn that God
does for you.
What do you learn in verse 5?
He satisfies your desires with good things.
This is the answer to what everybody's looking
for, the fountain of youth, God does it.
Verse 6, he works righteousness and justice for
all the oppressed.
Verse 7, he made his way known to Moses and the
people of Israel.
What did you learn about God in verse 8?
Compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and
abounding in love.
Isn't that wonderful to know?
Verse 9, he will not always accuse and he will
not harbor his anger forever.
You can just make these brief as you can,
summarize them however you want to.
Verse 10, he doesn't treat us as our sins deserve.
That thing he's not fair in the good sense, is he?
We talked about that.
You know how we all want fairness?
Sometimes we don't, sometimes we don't want justice.
I was taking Randy to the airport in Dallas and
I was coming home and I was going just
at the same speed the other cars were going.
It was over the speed limit but it was the same
speed that everybody else was going but
unfortunately the policeman stopped me and you
know, I'm thinking, why me?
You know, I didn't, well, I didn't say, well,
everybody was going just as fast
as I was going but I was thinking that and he
asked me what the problem was and I said,
well, you know, I just was kind of staying in
the flow of traffic and somehow that didn't
wash with him and he gave me a ticket and I was
so upset, you know, this is not fair
and I thought it was justice.
I got what I had done, I deserved it but
somehow it wasn't fair because everybody else was
going faster than I was but it's really nice to
read this verse and see that God does not
treat us as our sins deserve or repay us
according to our iniquity.
There's two ladies back there without sheets,
thank you.
Verse 11 basically says he loves us and some of
these are going to be repeated and if they
are you can just put the verse, I think you
have 45 lines left, put the other verse for love.
Verse 12, as far as the east is from the west,
how far is that?
Bigger than anything we can imagine, as far as
the east is from the west, he's removed
our transgressions from us, so he has removed
our sins and then we see what we saw in verse
8, that he has compassion of that one, isn't it
amazing when you look at the list that
you've made, all the things that you've learned
about God and what he has done just in these
verses by going back and pulling them out.
Well see when you're studying the text you can
do this and you can pull out this and
then you can really meditate on all the things
that God has done and that helps you in your
thankfulness and then you can go down and thank
him for each thing he has done because
where would you be if he treated us as our sins
were served?
Where would we be if he didn't, if he harbored
his anger against us forever?
Where would we be if he wasn't compassionate?
We would be lost.
So looking at these and pulling them out and
looking at what he's done and meditating on
and thanking him for each of them is a
wonderful way of praising him.
What did you learn about forgiveness in these verses?
We removed our transgressions as far as the
east from the west.
If you want to get to a practical application
of that, what does that say as far as you're concerned?
What does that say to you about forgiveness?
If you look in Ephesians 4:32, you see what it
says to you about forgiveness.
It's wonderful how you can apply these things.
You pull them out, you find them, you worship
and then you say, what does this mean to me?
One of the things here is what does forgiveness mean?
It says, God has forgiven me and he put it as
far as east is from the west.
You look at 4:32 of Ephesians and it says, to
Christians, be kind and compassionate to
one another, forgiving each other, why?
Just as in Christ, God forgave you.
It's often said, and I haven't been
contradicted yet, if you know of an incident
you can tell
me, God doesn't ask us to do anything he hasn't
already done first.
He forgave us first and then he asked us,
because we are forgiven, to forgive.
So when you study a psalm, and if you want to
do it this way, it's a wonderful way to
do it, to pull out, to look at what God has
done, to thank him for it and then to say,
what does this mean now for my life?
He has done all of these things for me, what
response am I supposed to get?
He is forgiven, what response am I to have?
He had compassion.
That verse also said, we have compassion
because he had compassion.
Let's look then at the next psalm, if you want
to go ahead and pull them apart you can.
Psalm 148, a very familiar psalm.
Okay, if you were looking for key words in this
psalm, and God would always be a key
word that you would look for, but what other
key word just stands out to you automatically? Praise.
Let's mark it.
And you can mark it any way you want to, I did
it with an exclamation point.
Just anything that makes it stand out so that
every time you look and you see that exclamation
point or whatever mark, and you can do this
with colored pens, like you could use red,
every time you saw a red line you would know it
was the word praise.
And you would see how many times then that
praise occurs in this psalm.
Why don't you go through and mark them now.
I'm not going to have you mark more this time.
You can do that on your own if you'd like to
later, but right now I'd like for you to
go through and mark everything that is to praise.
Go ahead.
Okay, my recommendation would be for you to
make a list in your margin and you just put
above your list what or who should praise him,
write it in your margin and then go back
and all the things that you've marked, list
them underneath there, it's going to be a lot.
That will help you make a list or an overview.