After the Song

Psalm 106

Types of worship- adoration
- confession
- thanksgiving
- supplication
Summation: believe and sing

God is not interested in moments, He’s interested in lives

1. Israel lacked memory
2. Israel lacked purity
3. Israel faced judgment
4. Israel needed zealous leaders
--Moses
--Phinehas
5. Israel needed a God of restoration
God hears zealous leaders
God gathers His people and makes them holy
God remembers His covenant

Turn please to Psalm 106….

While you’re turning there let me pose one question to you. Why are you here today? Why are you here at church? Maybe you are here because it’s part of your routine. Maybe you wouldn’t know what else to do on a Sunday morning if you didn’t go to church. You don’t want to be lazy and sleep in two days in a row so you get up and you come to church. It’s part of your routine. Or maybe you’re not sure why you’re here. By the looks on some of your faces, perhaps you just woke up and you’re asking yourself how you got here. Or maybe you came because of your family. Perhaps you are a child or a teenager and you came because your parents want you to go or make you come. Or you’re a parent and you come because you want your kids to grow up in the church and with good values. You come because you feel it’s an expectation placed on you by the congregation or community or whoever.

We might come to church for these reasons, but the true purpose for coming to church is to meet with God. The true purpose for coming to church is to worship Him. We just had Sunday School class and we’re going through some basic Christian doctrine using 100 question cards. The very first card asked, why did God create human beings? And the answer was that they would worship and enjoy Him forever. We exist to worship. When we are worshipping we are doing what we were made to do.

There are numerous categories of worship. We see them in verses 1-12. The Israelites, and this Psalmist, engaged in worship through adoration, supplication, confession, and thanksgiving.

Verses 1-2, Praise the Lord. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever. Who can proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord or fully declare his praise? The Psalmist is worshipping God through adoration. He’s praising God, an obvious form of worship. Sometimes our greatest experience of worship comes through praise. Perhaps at a concert or during a hymn or a chorus you sensed God’s presence like never before. And you understood worship in a fresh way.

Or maybe your best worshipping experience was through supplication. The Psalmist prays, Remember me oh Lord, verse 4, Remember me oh Lord, when you show favor to your people, come to my aid when you save them. He is pleading for something to God. It is a form of worship because he is recognizing that he needs God’s favor in his life. Perhaps our greatest experience of worship is through an answered prayer. Perhaps a prayer for healing or a prayer for the salvation of a loved one is our greatest time or worship. And when that body is healed or that loved one is saved, after all those years, we worship God. He’s real to us in a powerful new way.

In verse 6 we see another type of worship: Confession. We have sinned, even as our fathers did; we have done wrong and acted wickedly. Confession is another type of worship because it is recognizing that we are accountable to God for our sin. He’s the one we confess to. It’s His law that we have broken. His standards we’ve fallen short of. And I’m sure if I posed the question, when was the time in your life when you most sensed God’s presence, many of you would look back to your conversion experience. Perhaps then for the first time you realized how great God was. He was forgiving you so freely.

And finally, though there are other types of worship, the last one mentioned here is worship though thanksgiving. And in verses 8-11 the Psalmist thinks back to some of the things that he is thankful for. Things that God had done in the life of Israel. He saved them, He rebuked the Red Sea, he led them through the desert, he saved them from the hand of the foe etc. God had done so many wonderful and miraculous things for them that he worshipped simply by giving thanks. And maybe our greatest times of worship are through thanksgiving.

And as a summation to all these different types of worship the Psalmist declares that the people of God worshipped God. It says in verse 12, Then they believed his promises and sang his praise. It sounds almost like the close of a worship service. They worshipped through adoration, supplication, confession and thanksgiving. Then verse 12 is like the closing hymn. Then they believed his promises and sang his praise. But God…God is more interested, I believe, in what happens AFTER THE SONG. What happens after the great experience of worship, after the answered prayer, after the conversion, AFTER THE SONG?

God is more interested in worshipful lives than he is worshipful moments. He’s more interested in lifestyles of worship than he is weekends of worship. Too often, our lives are characterized by great, but short, experiences of worship followed by long work-weeks with worship on the back-burner. But how do we switch from the paradigm of a spiritual roller-coaster, where we experience God powerfully. Where we reach great mountain tops, but then descend deep into the valley. How do we replace that roller coaster way paradigm with what Eugene Peterson calls A Long Obedience in the Same Direction? How can we have a lifestyle of worship where we’re continually growing in grace? Can we have lives where we are moving upward in a worshipful experience daily? The truth is that if we are aiming for mere occasional experiences with God, we’ll probably find them, but then go downhill and get stuck in the trenches. We are either daily going upward toward God’s great mountain or we are…coasting. And there is only one way to coast: downhill.

So what did Israel lack that kept them from continuing in a lifestyle or worship? It’s clear that they didn’t. Most of the Old Testament tells of their rebellion against God. They had worshipful experiences, but not worshipful lives. What did they lack? Psalm 106 speaks of two essential things that Israel lacked. And if we are not experiencing lifestyles of worship, perhaps we lack the same things.

The first thing the Israelites lacked was memory. Not that they didn’t have the ability to remember, but they lacked the discipline of remembering what God had done for them. Let me read verse 13 and 21 for you. But they soon forgot what he had done for them and did not wait for his counsel. And verse 21, They forgot the God who saved them. Israel, after all the experiences of God they’d had, forgot Him! What? How foolish! How could they forget the God who saved them from the enemy? We would never do that, would we? But I fear that all too often that’s exactly what we do. We don’t forget God in the sense that we forget He exists, but we forget that we depend on Him. The Israelites forgot about God in the sense that it led them to not wait for his counsel, verse 13. Sometimes we forget God in that sense. We remember that He’s around, but we don’t remember that we need Him each day. We don’t remember that He is our leader. We don’t remember what He’s done in the past so we don’t way for His counsel in the present.

We need to remember. It’s a very Biblical concept. The Israelite people were to remember all the things that God had done for them in the past. They had numerous festivals and feasts. Each one represented something God had done. We have similar holidays on Christmas and Easter. We take communion in remembrance of Him. The church in revelation is told to remember the heights from where they’d fallen. We are to remember the cross. When is the last time you reflected on the cross and remember how he died for you?

Remembering gives us a bigger perspective. It helps us to see that God is in control. It helps us to see that the past has made us who we are today. Last week I went to a district seminar called re-focusing. And when we got there we wrote all the significant events in our lives that we could think of on little post-it notes. Then we put them in chronological order and ended up with a nice poster board picture of our life. And it was incredible to look over my past and see how God had been working in my life. He had put people in my life that had helped me enormously. Events occurred that, at the time, I didn’t think were good. But God used those events, and placed those people in my path, so that I would be closer to Him today.

We need to look back and remember what God has done. We are, all too often, more like the 9 lepers in Luke 17 that were healed and went on their merry way, than we are like the one who remembered what God had done and came back to give thanks.

The Israelites lacked memory and they lacked purity. Let me read verses 34 and 35. They did not destroy the peoples as the Lord had commanded them, but they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs.

Israel was a chosen nation. We remember back in the time of Abraham that God chose them. He said that through Abraham all nations would be blessed. It was God’s plan to make Israel His people so that, eventually, they would serve as the example to the nations around them. They would be a light to the rest of the world. They were to learn to be God’s people so that they could then be a change agent in the cultures around them.

But instead of being a change agent, they were changed. Instead of being in the world, but not of the world, they were in and of. God knew they weren’t ready to be change agents yet. That’s why He commanded them to destroy the people around them. He knew that first they had to BE His people before they could DO the work of evangelism. But they didn’t obey Him. They mingled. But more than that they adopted their customs. It is good for us, today, to have relationships outside the church. We should befriend those who are not saved. But it’s one thing to mingle with them, it’s another thing when we start adopting their customs.

The church is to be different from the world. We should not adopt their customs. We must be set apart. In a sense, the church is not part of the community, it’s a whole new community. The church must have different beliefs, different values, and live different lives. The church is to be holy for He is holy. But too often when the world looks at the church they see a reflection of themselves. They see the same immorality, the same pride, the same sin.

Two men were walking down the street and there was a sidewalk sale going on. They saw a nice looking suit and it was marked down considerable. They read the tag. It said, “slightly soiled, greatly reduced in price.” When we are slightly soiled, when we are no longer pure, blameless, and spotless before God, we lose our value. We are no longer worth what we were before because our worth is found in our ability to worship with clean hands and a clean heart.

And the reality is that when Israel lacked memory, when they forgot God, when they failed to wait for His counsel, when they lacked purity, when they mingled with the world and adopted their customs, when they did all these things judgment was on its way. Straying from God is a dangerous thing. Verses 40-43 tell us, Therefore the Lord was angry with his people and abhorred his inheritance. He handed them over the nations, and their foes ruled over them. Their enemies oppressed them and subjected them to their power. Many times he delivered them, but they were bent on rebellion and they wasted away in their sin. God’s judgment comes against a rebellious people. Israel’s bent toward rebellion was causing them to decay as a nation. The last line of verse 43 says they wasted away in their sin. When we fail to worship, when we fail to do what we were made to do, we are wasting away in our sin.

But God never slammed the door of judgment on Israel without providing a window of hope, restoration and possibility. They had the chance to become the worshippers they were created to be if only they would put two essential ingredients back into their lives. Psalm 106 tells us that one of those ingredients was zealous leadership.

The people of Israel needed zealous leaders if they were to have another opportunity to worship God with their lives. From time to time, they were given these leaders that beckoned them back to God. We are given two illustrations in verses 23 through 33: Moses and Phinehas.

Verse 23 tells us of Moses. So he (God) said he would destroy them- had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him to keep his wrath from destroying them. You remember the story. Moses went up the mountain to receive the 10 Commandments. While he was up there the people were down below and they forgot about God. They forgot about Moses. They convinced Aaron to lead them in building a golden calf so that they could worship it. And when they did this the Lord anger was aroused and He was going to destroy them, but Moses stood in the breach. Moses loved God. He understood God’s holiness. He loved the people too. And God was ready to destroy Israel and start over with just Moses. He could have taken pride in that. The people had certainly been a burden to him, grumbling against his leadership. But Moses loved the people enough that he stood in the breach and pleaded that God would show mercy.

Verses 30 tells us of Phinehas. But Phinehas stood up and intervened. And the plague was checked. This was credited to him as righteousness for endless generations to come. The story of Phinehas is similar to what we just heard of Moses. This time, the people were committing sexual immorality with the Moabite women. In fact the Israelite men were bringing the Moabite women right into the camp to do this. They were not even ashamed of their sin. And God sent a message through Moses that the leaders of Israel needed to destroy anyone who sinned openly like this. And sure enough one of the Israelite men brought a woman right into the camp, took her into his tent. And Phinehas stood up and intervened. He respected God’s holiness. He obeyed God and carried out the judgment against this Israelite man. He stood up for what was right. He stood up for purity amidst God’s people.

We need more leaders like Moses and Phinehas. We need leaders who will plead for God’s mercy when we are forgetting God, leaders who will stand up for purity when we are being impure. We need leaders like these in our homes, churches, communities, our nation and our world. Perhaps God is calling some of us today to be a leader. Maybe you have noticed something that isn’t the way it should be according to God’s Word. But instead of being a leader, you simply say to yourself, “someone should do something about that.” Maybe God wants YOU to do something about it. We should always be open to God calling us to take leadership, to stand in the breach, to stand up and intervene.

BUT, leadership alone will not help us. Leaders cry out and we need that, but we need something more than leaders. For if a leader cries out to an empty sky then the cry is worth nothing. We need something more than leadership because human leadership isn’t infallible. Even in this Psalm, verse 33, we see a fallen leader, and rash words came from Moses’ lips. Moses wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t infallible. He sinned. And there are no perfect leaders today. Leadership is necessary, but we need more than great leadership in order for us to live lifestyles of worship. And the obvious answer is that we need God. We need someone who will hear our leaders cry. And thankfully, we have a God that does hear. Verse 44 says, But he took note of their distress when he heard their cry. Our leaders cry out and God hears. We need God because, like we said earlier, we are prone to forget what He has done for us, but God, verse 45, remembered his covenant and out of his great love he relented. We forget God, but he doesn’t return to us in kind. He REMEMBERS even though we don’t deserve to be remembered. And we saw earlier that we were impure before God, but we see in verse 47 that God is willing to gather us from the nations. He is willing to cleanse us and purify our hearts again.

Why would He do all this for such a rebellious people? Why would he remember a people that had forgotten Him? Why would He gather a people that had mingled with the nations, adopted their customs, and worshipped false gods? The reason is given in the second half of verse 47. We are saved by God so that we may give thanks to (His) holy name and glory in (His) praise. We are saved to worship, just like it said in verse 8, Yet he saved them for his name’s sake, to make his mighty power known. We are saved to worship God, not just on Sunday mornings, but also on Monday morning. We are to worship God even AFTER THE SONG.

Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Let all the people say, “Amen!” Praise the Lord.