Dennis Tuuri

Psalm 95 is the scripture reading for today. Psalm 95. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to him with psalms. For the Lord is the great God and the great king above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the hills are his also.

The sea is his for he made it and his hands form the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, when your fathers tested me. They tried me, though they saw my work.

For 40 years I was grieved with that generation, and said, “It is a people who go astray in their hearts, and they do not know my ways. So I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.”

Let us pray.

Father, we thank you for calling us to worship today. We thank you that your intent is that we might indeed enter into your rest. Give us now attentiveness to your word by the power of your spirit and transform us into a people who rest in the finished work of the Savior as they march forward into victory. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Today we begin an overview of the worship of the church that in the providence of God and Lord willing will lead to our climax on our dedication for our new structure here the weekend of August 18th, 19th and 20th. August 18th is Festal Day, our celebration of God at Alderbrook north of Vancouver. Saturday, August 19th, we’ll have a dedication service here at 6:00. And then Sunday, we’ll continue and conclude this eight-part series on the worship of the church.

And so today is the beginning of this series and I want to begin today by looking at briefly an overview of the worship service that we have been led in by the spirit and by his word to develop here at Reformation Covenant Church. Now you have two outlines before you. Lord willing, the first outline is laid out landscape style and the other is portrait style.

The landscape style outline is an overview of the worship of the church in three columns. And I want to begin before we actually get to the call to worship explicitly, which is our subject for today. The call to worship, the first of eight talks on the worship of our church. I want to begin by commenting briefly on certain aspects of our worship by way of overview.

So if you’ll take that first of two outlines entitled “Worship: An Overview,” you’ll see that there are three columns on that outline. The first column lists the elements of worship at Reformation Covenant Church that we presently use and it is under the heading of worship as dialogue.

When God calls us to worship as he did in Psalm 95, as he did in Psalm 50, which we sang, as he did representatively to the church to Isaiah in the book of Isaiah, and as he does throughout the scriptures, calling men to worship him in his special presence at particular times, that worship can be seen as dialogue.

I had an instructor at Multnomah School of the Bible named Dr. Congden and he had this great overview of the Bible class where he said the Bible is a one-part book and then the Bible is a two-part book and then the Bible is a three-part book and the Bible is a four-part book and the Bible is a five-part book. And he had all these varying structures of how to look at the scriptures, all of them being useful.

Well, here I lay out three ways of looking at our worship. First, worship as dialogue. Second, worship as covenant renewal. And third, worship as God’s giving three gifts to us that we’ve spoken of quite a bit in the last few months.

The first column on the left, worship as dialogue, is laid out in dialogue fashion. In other words, the indented portions are the responses of the people to God’s sovereign actions in worship.

So our formal worship service begins with the call to worship. Now, we have an informal call to worship. The elders have determined that at 11:30 every Lord’s day, every Sunday, you’re supposed to meet here for worship. You have this informal call every Sunday morning to come and you respond to that by means of the processional as we come forward quieting ourselves before God. But the worship service actually begins with the formal call to worship.

The reading of a particular passage of scripture where God sovereignly repeats to you in a formal fashion, “Come worship me.” So the call to worship is the beginning of this dialogue of the sovereign God initiating what our worship is all about.

We respond to that call to worship by confession of our sins. You know, if we have a proper view of who he is, we immediately want to confess our sins. He then assures us of forgiveness. And that’s the third element there. And it’s his second statement in the context of this alteration, this dialogue back and forth before God.

We respond to his assurance of forgiveness by praising him by singing the glory of God. He then summons us in a formal fashion to heaven in the Sursum Corda, and we respond by singing praise to him using the Sanctus and the hymn of praise, and that concludes the first of three portions of our formal worship service.

The second portion begins as we move to the responsive reading. If you want to put an alliteration to this three-fold section of this dialogue, the first portion of that would be cleansing. The second portion, the middle could be called consecration and the third portion could be called commissioning.

So when God calls us, the first formal action is cleansing. It’s him giving us that first gift of forgiveness of sins, making us new people, giving us glory through the forgiveness of our sins.

The second portion of the formal worship, this dialogue structure, alternates back and forth, beginning with the responsive reading. We then sing a hymn of response. We then hear the sermon scriptures read to us rather. We respond corporately by praying that God would illuminate the text for understanding and then the preaching of the word occurs where God speaks to us through the preaching and we respond to that by the offertory and the great prayer.

Now what we’re trying to do in all of this is to model our worship according to what the scriptures tell us. God has called us forth. He has created us for the specific purpose of being a people of praise to him in all the world. Our highest obligation and our greatest joy should be to come forward and sing forth the praises of God. This is the penultimate experience. This is the mountaintop experience, so to speak.

When we get to the end of this series, by the 8th Sunday, we’ll begin talking very briefly about worship structures in the Old Testament leading up to our understanding of what the structure of the church building is to be in the context of the New. And what we’ll see is that the garden was on a mountaintop or a hill. Water flows down from a mountain. The patriarchs built little stone mountains in terms of their worship to God.

A bama in Hebrew, a high place was where people would go to worship in the Old Testament all the way down. We could trace it all the way through to the scriptures till the end. The New Jerusalem, the city of God comes down out of heaven. It’s here now and it is a mountain again.

So this is our mountaintop experience to come into the presence of God to give him worship and praise to receive his three gifts and to go forward as commissioned people to preach forth his word and to live in relationship to this God.

We worship on this day and this entire process begins with this dialogue as God speaks to us through the officiant and we respond to him through various actions and there’s this dialogue back and forth. The third element of this dialogue is the Eucharist and then the final commissioning scripture the closing scripture reading and we sing a song of consecration. God then places his blessing upon us and we sing forth his doxology. So the whole service is an alteration back and forth between God speaking to us and us responding correctly to him.

Worship can also be seen as covenant renewal. And what I’ve given you here are the letters that pastor Wilson is using in his talks on the covenant going through this theonomic model. I think first developed in that terminology by Ray Sutton. But as God calls us, it’s this transcendent God who calls us to him.

So God’s transcendence is indicated by his sovereignty in sovereignly calling us forward to give him worship and praise. But he then assures us of forgiveness. He then places us in the context of the hierarchy of the loving covenant God and his children through the assurance of forgiveness that’s provided as this worship service develops. And then he gives us a set of ethics. He preaches the word to us that through his word.

He tells us to live in relationship to his law. Word to us. He gives us ethics. We then take the covenantal oath so to speak. We move to the Eucharist and that’s a picture of the blessings and cursings. There’s judgment that occurs there if we come to this table hypocritically. Contrary-wise, there’s great blessing of union and communion with Christ with God rather through Christ that happens in the context of the Eucharist.

So the oath of the whole covenant renewal process that God sovereignly initiates with us occurs primarily focused at the Eucharist itself. And then finally, the fifth element of covenant renewal services, succession into the future, God places his benediction upon us in the dismissal from the worship service.

So God says, “You need to have covenant renewed, and I’m going to do it every Lord’s day with you in a formal way. I’m going to bring you forward, asserting my sovereignty, reminding you of who you are as my people. I’m going to give you my word. I’m going to have you enter into this covenant blessing of the Eucharist. I’m going to make you aware of blessings and cursings. The blessings are not to be earned. They’re given freely through Christ. But the curse stands out there as a potential if you come to this supper disobediently or high-handedly in sin against him.

And then I’m going to send you forth into the world, renewed people.

God initiates covenant renewal with us. But third, worship can be seen as a series of gifts to us. And we’ll go over all these over the next eight weeks in a little bit more detail as we move to the elements of our worship service. But I’ve listed them for you here. You know what they are hopefully by now.

We have first of all in that first section of our worship service, the gift of the new man. God makes us a new man through the forgiveness of sins. We want glory. He gives us glory. He renews us, raises us up as new men. This is a corollary to the peace offering of Leviticus and the feast of unleavened bread. The first of the three feasts that are described in the law of the covenant in Exodus.

Second gift he gives us is knowledge, wisdom, a new mind. Mind is a little too intellectual slant. New wisdom might be a better way to put it. We want to know how to be wise people. And by his word ministered to us by his spirit, he gives us a new mind through that gift of his word. And this correlates to the whole burnt and tribute offerings and the feast of harvest and Pentecost. Pentecost was the giving of the law at Sinai.

And then finally, the final gift of course is the gift of life, abundant life, a new world. He gives us, he creates in us new people. He gives us new minds that we might go forward and have a new world. And this correlates to the concluding offering of the Levitical system, the peace offering with the feast of in-gathering or Booths.

Now there are little numbers in this first column 1-7. Those are the seven sermons leading up to that eighth sermon on building and structures. So today we’re going to talk about the call to worship. The next sermon will be on the confession of sins, the assurance of forgiveness, and the glory of God and so on.

So that’s an overview of where we’re going with this series. Today we want to talk about the call to worship.

There’s an old phrase, well begun is half done. If you get the beginning right, you’re halfway done with the job. Beginnings are very important in terms of the structure of activities that we enter into. And that’s true in terms of the reformation of liturgy as well.

The motto of the reformers was “a reformed church always reforming.” We don’t think we’ve arrived at the perfect worship service. We want to continue to reform it, but we want to have that reformation dictated, guided, and directed by the word of God and the spirit as he ministers that word to us.

Liturgy. Every church has a liturgy. There’s no question of whether we’re going to have a liturgy or service of the people in worship. The question is, will our worship, will our liturgy, the word means service or work of the people, will it be guided and directed informed by the scriptures? Or will we decide what works best to make us feel good or what works best to get the most people in here? Or what works best to make people most comfortable?

You see, we want to say that ultimately we don’t know what makes us happy or joyous. Ultimately, apart from the wisdom of God’s word, we always go after the wrong thing to make us happy and joyous. And so, if we let our emotions, our wills dictate how we worship, then we’ve entered into what will probably bring great troubles to our lives.

Worship is the pattern. It’s the beginning of everything else that we do in our lives. It’s the first day of the week. It sets the tone and pattern for all of our lives. And if we begin worship improperly, then we’re going to have a hard time understanding this pattern in the rest of our lives. The rest of our lives will be affected by an improper approach to worship.

All churches are liturgical. This church is liturgical and we want to transform our liturgy and reform it in relationship to the word.

Let me give you an example of that. We used to after the preaching of the word and the offertory. That’s when we would have members become members of the church. That’s when we would administer the sacraments. And we’ve changed that. Now we go directly to the great prayer always after the offering. Why? Because as best as we can understand it, the tribute offering which corresponds to our offering here is always accompanied by the incense with that offering.

And the incense is directly related to the book of Revelation to the prayers of the people. So it seems that God wants the tribute offering our gifts of tithes and offerings to be layered with prayer. And so to separate that incense, the prayers of the people away from the offertory seems to be a violation of what Leviticus is instructing us in.

Now I, you know this is our best understanding of the word in terms of worship that we’ve come up with. And so we’ve made a change and today we’re going to have people join the church. We’re going to have a baptism. We’re going to have communion. That’ll occur after the great prayer. The great prayer will remain linked to the offertory. We’re a reformed church and our liturgy should be reforming as well. And it should be reformed in relationship to God’s word.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the call to worship as found in Psalm 95, which we just read.

Psalm 95 has been called the Venite, Latin for “oh come” because three times in the context of Psalm 95 it says “oh come, oh come, oh come.” Verse 6 of Psalm 95 is what Halkenberg called the beating heart of this psalm and we hear there: “Oh come let us worship and bow down let us kneel before the Lord our maker.”

Psalm 95 has been used in both the western and eastern churches as a call to worship, a call that also guides us in terms of what worship is for the last two millennia. Psalm 95 has great historical use by the church in relationship to the call to worship. And as I said, there is a three-fold occurrence of this “oh come” in verses 1, 2, and 6 as you look at that particular psalm.

So Psalm 95 has a historic use by the church. And so we turn to it today as one of the preeminent calls to worship that the church uses. There are many others. We just sang Psalm 50 about Jehovah calling to all the people to come and worship him and that’s an excellent call to worship as well. And that’s why that psalm was used today in the call rather than where we’ve used it typically at the offertory.

So the call to worship Psalm 95 has a structure to it and we don’t want to spend a lot of time on this but we do want to talk a little bit about the fourth book of the psalter. The psalms are broken into five books. Psalm 95 occurs in the fourth book of the psalter. Each of these books is clearly demarcated by a concluding doxology at the end of each of these five books of the psalms.

Psalm 95 is in the middle section of the fourth book of the psalter. And what we have in Psalm 95 is a section that begins there and goes through Psalm 101 and this forms the center of this fourth book of the psalter.

Now the fourth book of the psalter has as its middle point its pivot point in the structure of these psalms Psalm 98, the one we’re practicing after our meal will again today to sing in parts in the context of worship. Psalm 98 is the center of the fourth book of the psalter. And what it’s all about is it’s a declaration that the king has come and we are to shout forth his praises with musical instruments, singing and alleluia.

Psalm 95 begins a series of psalms leading up to 98 and then kind of backing out the same way that talk about the coming of the king. Psalm 95 begins this section of this book where we’re told to come—the Lord is going to come quickly. You guys come. He’s coming down to meet with us. Psalm 96 says he’s almost here. 97, he’s almost here. And then Psalm 98, he arrives. And the response in Psalm 98 is to shout forth his praises as the Lord Jesus has come.

And so this book of the psalter here has as its pivot point the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ and the joyful hymic instrumental response of God’s people to his presence. And Psalm 95 begins that movement towards Psalm 98, which we’ll sing at the end of the day.

So, at the beginning, we’re kind of starting with Psalm 95, and we’ll move to a conclusion at the end of the day by trying to learn again Psalm 98 in parts. And so, it has this kind of context. In other words, it’s a psalm that is a call to worship, but it’s a call to worship in the middle of a section in which worship is the focal point of all of human history with the Lord Jesus coming to us in his advent to the earth to bring all the world to praise and sing him praises to him. That is so Psalm 95 is a great psalm to inform us about our worship in the context of our worship service which is all about the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now look at Psalm 95 and we’ll talk about it a little bit and then make several points very quickly as we consider why God calls us to worship him and who he is that comes to worship him. Look at your scriptures and look at the way and I read it this way. Some of you might have noticed I paused twice or three times in the context of reading this psalm.

Verses 1 and 2 form a unit here. One and two form a unit and you this is rather obvious if you read them. “Oh come let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to him with psalms.”

Verse 3: “For the Lord is the great God.” Verses 1 and 2 are the actual call to worship. Verses 3, 4, and 5 describe who it is who’s calling us to worship. And then verses 6 and 7 repeat the call to worship. Okay?

So verses 1 and 2, he says, “Oh come, let us sing. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to him with psalms.”

There’s a three-fold repetition of the verbal call, the verbal way we’re to worship God in the context of this psalm. Sing, shout joyfully, shout joyfully with psalms. It’s all in the context of thanksgiving. And so the psalm begins with a couple of lines that tell us worship him. Then it gives us some instructions about who he is.

“For the Lord is the great God and the great King above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his for he made it. And his hands formed the dry land.”

Those are all a unit describing who it is who’s calling us to worship him.

And then we go back to what we had to begin with in verses 6 and 7. “Oh come.” That’s the third “Oh come.” Three-fold repeated emphasis. The trinity calls us. The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost all say come.

“Oh come, let us worship, bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.”

So again here we see another element of our worship that is this reverential view that we’re to have by way of kneeling, bowing down, prostrating ourselves before God. So we’re told to worship him by singing songs loudly. We’re told why we’re to worship him, who he is who’s calling us. And then we’re told to worship him with a reverential attitude, a humbling of ourselves before the sovereign Lord of all creation.

That’s the first half of Psalm 95. And it’s important as we’ll see as we go through this commenting on it. The second half is totally different, isn’t it?

Now, the first half, you can see if you lay it out how it’s like a song we sing. It’s got verses. The first verse is about singing. The second verse is about God. The third verse is about a reverent attitude toward God. In the Hebrew, it’s laid out in kind of a metrical setting. It’s poetry is what it is. But the second half of Psalm 95 is like prose. It’s not like poetry. It doesn’t have these repetitions and this chiastic structure and the structure of poetry.

It reads like a paragraph. Verses 7b through the end: “Today, if you’ll hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion as in the day of trial in the wilderness which your fathers tested me. They hide me though they saw my work. For 40 years I was grieved in that generation. Said it’s a people who go astray in their hearts. They don’t know my way. So I swore in my wrath they shall not enter my rest.”

End of psalm. Odd to end that way. And we’ll talk about why it does that. But you see the structure is a hymn-like portion at the beginning saying that our worship is to be in the context of praise and prayer as we’re called to it, who God is, and our worship is in the context of a reverential humble attitude toward God. And then the second half is a mostly warning but it begins at this statement “hear my voice.”

See you come together today to praise him to supplicate him to bow down before him and pray to him. Now you also come to hear his voice not to read his Bible. You come today to hear his voice. And you are urged in the second half of this psalm in the call to worship. You are urged and warned most strongly to attend to his voice when you come to worship him.

And it’s interesting that the second half which focuses on this verbal instruction that God gives us in the worship service is itself more verbal and proslike than poetic. The first half of the psalm is poetic. It says, “Sing to me. Pray to me.” Second half is proslike and it says “hear my word, attend to my word.”

And the end of the whole thing is if you don’t hear my voice, the implications, if you don’t praise my name, and if you don’t supplicate yourself before me, you’ll be like those people in the wilderness, you will not enter my rest. But if you do those things, God promises us that we enter into rest on this day. We are called to that purpose.

All right. Roman numeral II: Who we are called to worship.

This psalm tells us that we are called to worship our creator. Verses 4-6 in the middle of this first half, as we talked about, “in his hands are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his for he made it.”

The psalm asserts in the call to worship that you are called here today by your very creator, the one who made you for this particular purpose, not only you. He made the entire world and the entire world is described here and in other places of scripture as singing forth his praises. The birds chirp praises to God. The created order yields forth praises to him by his divine providence. And you are called here today to worship the one who made everything, who is the creator and is preeminent by means of his creating you.

But secondly, you’re called here today to worship the one who is your redeemer, the one who saved you. Verse 1, “let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation.” Rock steadfastness. No doubt about it. He is the one who has redeemed us and saved us. It is enough for him to demand our worship by means of or by fact of his creating us. But in his great love and mercy, in condescension to us. He also tells us that he has redeemed us and that is a second reason to come forward in response to the call to worship and to sing forth his praises.

We are his people. We’re the sheep of his pasture. He is our redeemer and our provider.

And third, he is our king. He has civil preeminence. “For the Lord is the great God. Verse 3, the great king above all gods.” If you’re called for the president to come before him and have a conversation with him. That’s one thing. But this is the one who is civilly in terms of governmental structures preeminent in all the earth. He’s the king of kings. He is our creator. He is our redeemer. He is the king of all kings. And he is the very one who calls you together today to give him worship and praise in the power of the spirit.

We read at the beginning of our worship service. Isaiah 6, verses 2-4 among other verses there. And we hear this and we maybe don’t think about it very often. We hear these words, but listen about these cherubim who worship at the throne of God.

Each one had six wings. With two he covered his face. With two he covered his feet. And with two he flew. Six legs. Six wings rather. Two are he’s using to do things in the context of the throne of God. But four of his six wings he is using to cover his face and his feet before the holiness of the creator of all things and the redeemer of the elect and the king of all kings.

I mean the seraphim give us a model there of what our we should be like as we come before for God. We just read we’re supposed to come and prostrate ourselves before him. You see, the seraphim are using two-thirds of their wings to hide their face before the holy and awesome God whom they serve. How much more us to have that attitude who have sinned in our hearts who did things horrible this last week when compared to the great things God has done for us. Who not used our speech properly in all things. Who have not sought to glorify him in all things.

But we come before this holy God today and we had better have an attitude like the seraphim of reverence and carefulness because we come before our redeemed, our creator and our king.

You know, I’ve got a dog and uh when I—it’s actually Elijah’s dog primarily. It’s the family’s dog. Whatever. I kneel down and I say, “Kesha, come,” and she starts kind of circling and she’ll know she’s in trouble if I’m mad, but she’ll I’ll lean down and I’ll put my hand like this and she’ll come under my hand. That’s what she does.

God calls us. He condescends to come down to meet with us. He says, “Come.” And we should be like Kesha coming to God on the Lord’s day, fearful to a degree because we know our sin. We know Kesha knows when she does something wrong. She crabbles. Now, I don’t want to compare worship to crabbling, but there’s an element to which if we don’t have that kind of reverential fear and approach to God that wants to be on as low as we can get on the ground, as covered as we can be like the seraphim, then we do not understand.

If we don’t like that, we do not understand what the worship of the church is. And we’re called here to understand those things and to respond that way.

Now, Kesha doesn’t adore me. We’re to adore God. Our fear is a reverential fear. We know that he’s redeemed us. We know that his we are his image-bearers. And so it’s not quite the same thing, but it’s got to have some of that in it.

The one who calls us is our creator, redeemer, and our king.

We used to when we first got going as a church, meet Friday nights for a while. Howard W. will remember this. Some of the rest of you might. We read through the Westminster Confession of Faith and could not believe what we found there. The wonderful summation, I mean, coming out of evangelicalism that never taught us about creeds and confessions and having fairly short confessions of faith to hear this. This is chapter 2 of God and the Holy Trinity:

“There is but one only living and true God who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions. Immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory. Most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. The rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and with all most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

God has all life, all glory, all goodness, all blessedness in and of himself, and is alone in and unto himself all sufficient. Not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things, and has most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever himself pleaseth.

In his sight all things are open and manifest. His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature. So as nothing is to him contingent or uncertain. He is most holy in all his counsels, in all his works, and in all his commands. To him is due from angels and men, and every other creature whatsoever worship, service, and obedience. He is pleased to require of them.”

Now, that’s a wonderful statement of the scripture teaching on who it is who calls us to worship him.

Today, we have from the earliest days of this church believed and practiced what some call command performance worship. This most sovereign God commands us to come before him and to give him worship that is honoring, pleasing, and good, and glorifying to him. We don’t come here because God is lonely and wants friends, which is what we were taught in some of the churches we came out of. We don’t come here to have a good time. We don’t ultimately come here to fellowship with each other. That’s one of those great gifts that we get at the end of the formal worship service. He brings us together at the table. It’s wonderful. But it is not ultimately why we are here.

We are called here today to worship this God.

Now, we’re trying hard to think of ways to use this structure to make it more worshipful. And one of the things we’ve talked about doing is having quiet in here. Now, I know we’ve got very little narthex or foyer, whatever you call it. Everybody’s happy to come worship God, but we want to create a mood of reverence and supplication before God as we come into this physical structure. You know, that’s why we don’t want people going out this door. You know, we don’t really want people walking in and out of the sanctuary during the preaching unless you really have to. If you have to go out, try to do it during a song where it’s less disturbing to people.

We’re trying to think of ways to create in the physical environment here this sense of reverence to this most holy God who is calling us to worship him today. That’s why we’re here.

Command performance—or that’s why we don’t learn new songs here. We learn them downstairs or at camp and then we work them into the worship service. And you’ll see we sang Psalm 56 this week and last week. Same responsive reading. Why? Because we learned it. Now we want to practice it, perform it rather before God and get better and better at it in the context of having learned it at camp so we don’t forget it and we can expand the number of his psalms that we know or the number of songs that are glorifying to him.

That’s where we’re going to work in Psalm 148 again next week. So, we nail it down in parts and after we learn Psalm 95, we’ll bring it in here to the command performance worship where we worship God and we’ll do it three four times to nail it down before we move on. So, it’s part of our retinue of worshiping and glorifying God.

This is the God we serve. He calls us forward to worship him today.

And what we want to do is we want to think about where we’re going. Sunday morning, we want to remind our children what it is we’re doing. We’re going to worship God. Yes, it will be fun afterwards. Yes, God gives us these wonderful gifts of the assurance of forgiveness and wisdom and community in the context of the abundant life. And that’ll flow over to our agape. It’ll be a fun day. But it must begin with the understanding that God calls us by his sovereignty to worship him in particular ways today.

What are those ways? Repeating now what I mentioned earlier but on your outline here under C: How we are to worship our creator, redeemer and king.

I’ve said that the church use Psalm 95 not just as a formal call to worship but as a guide to worship because it tells us first of all we worship God verbally. We sing, we shout forth praises. That’s a command of God. Do what you can sing forth loudly. Don’t be more afraid of your neighbor than you are of God. You should be fearful of offending God by not doing your best to sing forth loudly praises to him and to shout joyfully to his name. He commands us to worship him that way. Don’t worry about the person next to you. And if you’re going to embarrass yourself, focus on God when you sing. Obey this verbal aspect of our worship.

Physically. Verse 6, three-fold repetition. There’s a three-fold repetition of singing and shouting joyfully. There’s a three-fold call to God here. And there’s also a three-fold statement of worship, which means to prostrate or be face down before God. Bow down, kneel before him. Three-fold emphasis again. We’re supposed to prostrate ourselves before God.

Now, we haven’t figured out how to work that into worship yet in terms of kneeling. Haven’t tried it in these pews. We’ll see. But the point is, our worship must involve our bodies. That’s why we do what some people probably feel is this goofy thing with our hands. We all raise them in unison, not because we’re charismatic in that sense of the term, but because we’re trying to remind ourselves that worship is a verb. It involves actions on the part of God’s people. When he calls us forward, it’s that we might perform physical actions of singing, but then physical actions of having a supplicant spirit and attitude, but also in involving our bodies in the worship.

So, we come forward for the offering cuz it’s a way to remind ourselves. This is not a head trip. This is not an intellectual exercise. This is the word of God breathing upon us, calling us to worship him. And we’re to respond with all of our bodies, with all that we have in relationship to him.

We’re to worship him physically. We’re to worship him reverentially and thankfully, again, with his reverential spirit. We’re to worship him attentively. Be careful. Hear his voice. If you don’t hear his voice, bad things will happen. We’re to worship attentively, listening as well as we can, praying that Pastor Tuuri would get clearer and clearer so we can attend to God’s word being preached, his voice coming to us in the context of the preaching of the word. Be attentive to the word you’re reading in the responsive reading.

Be attentive to the elements of the worship service and the dialogue back and forth between God and us dictated by his word. Be attentive to these things and worship him in that way.

And we’re to worship him with an attitude of celebration as well as attentiveness in whole person. It is a celebration before God for his good gifts to us. We are to worship him. The scriptures say in that particular way.

Where are we to worship God? Well, this psalm says in his presence. Now, the psalms were written for temple worship. They went to the temple to worship him. And we come together on the Lord’s day. And Hebrews tells us where it is that we this worship is performed.

“Ye have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, who are registered in heaven, to God the judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.”

We go to the heavenly throne room in corporate worship. He calls us into his special presence in convocative worship. When we get to the Sursum Corda, we’ll talk about us going up and God coming down to meet with his people. We meet together in this physical structure determined by the elders to be the place and the time where God will call us to worship. And we will respond in this particular place carefully, attentively, celebratory in a celebratory way and in a way that is pleasing to him.

Verse 7 warns us, Hebrews warns us as well. What’s going to happen if we don’t attend to his voice and worship him correctly?

A. Spurgeon in his commentary on Psalm 95 says that it has about it a ring like that of the church bells. And like the bells, it sounds both merrily and solemnly, at first ringing out a lively peal—come sing aloud shout joy and praises to him—and then dropping into a funeral now as if tolling at the funeral at tolling out rather at the funeral of the generation which perished in the wilderness.

You see Psalm 95 goes from that first joyous peeling of the bells to worship him and then it goes to this slow peeling warning us to be attentive to his voice and to worship him or else there is…

Kinder, I’ve got it on your outline here, says that by ending the psalm this way, God sacrifices literary grace for moral urgency. You see, he emphasizes the importance of coming before him in corporate worship.

Hebrews 3 and 4 is a big commentary on Psalm 95, an application of it written to people who were prone not to come to special convocative worship. And he drew in all of these warnings to the church, to the members of the church to the Hebrews that he wrote to warning them of the dire consequences of failing to come together in corporate worship before God, failing to heed his voice.

The scriptures call us and warn us about what it is if we don’t come forth. And so the scriptures also remind us today of the great warning should we fail to heed his call to worship.

Well, let’s conclude with some short but obvious implications of the call to worship. God’s sovereignty and the proper…