-Transcript-
00:25 Welcome to the program. Welcome to Cafe. My name is Pastor Clark Covington here with another episode of KJV Cafe.
00:31 So good to be at the cafe today. I don’t know about you, but I got me a latte, almond milk latte with some coffee from Mexico on the bag from Food Lion. And us coffee snobs, we don’t always go to the Food Lion to get our coffee.
00:47 But when we do, we get that nature’s promise. It just says Mexico. I got no idea where it’s from, but it’s good.
00:54 Amen. Praise God for that good coffee. Praise God for another day.
00:59 Amen. So thankful. Lord has really been blessing.
01:06 I was feeling a little rough earlier this week and Lord has helped me to recover a bit and I just give all praise and honor to Him.
01:08 And guess what? Today, that’s what we’re doing. We’re showing praise to God.
01:12 We are looking at the idea of showing forth praise. This is the second part of a three to four part series. I haven’t decided yet how far it’ll go in showing forth praise to God.
01:26 The importance of praising God cannot be understated. You know, praise of God is worship. When we praise God authentically, we worship Him.
01:36 I gave the example, I believe, on the last episode or recently about like going to church and sometimes you’re not feeling like you really want to praise God. Something’s weighing heavy on your heart. That’s what the altar is good for, by the way.
01:51 Amen. Just taking it to the altar right there. And that is the altar at church I’m referring to.
01:59 But sometimes it’s hard for us to show forth praise to God. And I think that makes our praise more precious when we do. Number one, more precious when we praise Him in general.
02:07 And number two, when we praise Him through our difficulty, through our hard times, through our challenges. And what are we doing?
02:14 We’re praising Him in faith, knowing that He’s up to something great. So praise of God is absolutely a form of worship, very authentic form of worship.
02:20 Praise of God is warranted. Amen. God is worthy of such praise.
02:28 Okay. So praise of God is worship. Praise of God is warranted.
02:32 He is our creator. He’s our maker. All things are made by Him and without Him, nothing is made.
02:36 That’s Jesus Christ. And praise of God is wanted. I gave you worship, warranted, and wanted, three Ws, a little bit of alliteration here today.
02:46 Praise of God is wanted by the Holy Spirit. And there in the Bible, it says that God demands that we praise Him. Amen.
02:55 We are built, we are made to praise God. Amen. And we can learn so much about how to effectively praise God from King David and how he wrote the Psalms.
03:01 And of course, we don’t have time to go through all 150 Psalms. We barely even have time to go through one, but the one we’re talking about here today is Psalm 9.
03:09 And since it’s a short Psalm, and since you’re on the new year here, starting off a new kick, trying to read through the Bible, I’m going to help you and cover Psalm chapter nine for you right here. Psalm 9, the whole chapter, amen.
03:21 Not that you couldn’t go back and read it, but here we go. Psalm 9:1, I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart. I will show forth all thy marvelous works.
03:35 Now, Psalm 9:1 is actually our text verse. And the focus point of this text verse is showing forth God’s marvelous works, how we do that. That’s the focal point here this week.
03:43 I will be glad and rejoice in thee. I will sing praise to thy name, O thou most high. When mine enemies are turned back, they shall fall and perish at thy presence.
03:53 For thou hast maintained my right in my cause. Thou saddest in the throne, judging right. Thou hast rebuked the heathen.
04:01 Thou hast destroyed the wicked. Thou has put out their name forever and ever. O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end, and thou hast destroyed cities.
04:12 Their memorial is perished with them. But the Lord shall endure forever. He hath prepared his throne for judgment.
04:19 He shall judge the world in righteousness. He shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness. The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.
04:27 And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee, for thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek thee. Sing praises to the Lord, which dwelleth in Zion. Declare among the people his doings.
04:42 When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them. He forgetteth not the cry of the humble. Have mercy upon me, O Lord.
04:52 Consider my trouble, which I suffer, of them that hate me. Thou that liftest me up from the gates of death, that I may show forth all thy praise in the gates of the daughter of Zion, I will rejoice in thy salvation. The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made.
05:05 In the net which they hid is their own foot taken. The Lord is known by the judgment which he executeth. The wicked is snared in the work of his own hands.
05:15 Higion, Selah. The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God. For the needy shall not always be forgotten.
05:23 The expectation of the poor shall not perish forever. Arise, O Lord. Let not man prevail.
05:39 Let the heathen be judged in thy sight. Put them in fear, O Lord, that the nations may know themselves to be but men. Selah.
05:47 There’s so much that’s so beautiful about this Psalm. I love, by the way, in verse six of Psalm 9, O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end. That’s so poetic.
05:56 You know, you think of an end as a stopping point and perpetual as ongoing, and it’s an ongoing end. And that’s just awesome. That’s a little bonus scripture there.
06:03 But Psalm 9, really, you see in verse one, I will show forth all thy marvelous works. You see in verse 11, sing the praises to the Lord, which dwelt in Zion, declare among the people his doings. So showing forth, declaring among the people.
06:17 We see it over and over again in Psalm 9, this idea of putting forth what God has done, explaining what God has done, letting everyone know what God has done.
06:25 The idea of show forth, there’s actually a definition for show forth, and I’m using the old English S-H-E-W, show forth, to manifest, to publish, to proclaim. You know, you make a statement, go ahead and show forth your evidence, right?
06:43 Show it, right? The idea of the word manifest is to make known or certain or to clear to others.
06:54 These are the definitions I’m getting out of the dictionary. A beautiful form of praise is bragging on God, showing to others what he has done in your life. The church word for this would be testifying.
07:03 But I want to get deeper than just testifying because, you know, okay, brother, go testify. It’s almost become a common word in popular culture. Go ahead and testify now, you know, that could mean anything.
07:15 I was at a church one time and there was a service of testimonies. The preacher looked at me and shook his head and said, those weren’t the right kind of testimonies.
07:23 And what he was alluding to at the time, this is years and years ago, was that the people were kind of lifting either themselves up or just talking about how pitiful their situations were, but they weren’t really putting the praise on God, right?
07:36 They weren’t properly showing forth the praise of God.
07:41 And so that’s why I wanted to dig into this idea. And Psalm 9 is so beautifully written and short enough we’re able to read it on air here in its entirety, both last episode and this episode.
07:51 And it gives us not just a praise of God and not just a vocabulary to use to praise God or instructions, it’s not just urging us to praise God, but it actually is teaching us.
07:59 David’s giving us a master class on how we are to praise God. And I think where we need to start is that David knew God. David shows us in Psalm 9, it is by knowing the attributes of God that you can properly praise him.
08:15 And if you look at Psalm 9, it’s full of the attributes of God, that he is the most high, amen, that he is the judge, amen, that he shall catch the wicked in their own snare, their own traps.
08:27 All of these aspects of God, that he is steadfast and loyal, amen, that he is a refuge for the oppressed. I mean, you can find these traits of God throughout the whole scripture, Old Testament and New.
08:36 And so we see here that David is praising God by explaining the attributes of God in a way that helps the reader or those that were listening to this, if you were audibly saying it, understand who God is.
08:49 And I think that’s important when we’re praising God. You know, imagine two sons that want to praise their dad.
08:56 One son is never at home, imagine that. He’s always out and about with his friends, he’s busy, he has no time. He literally never spends time with his dad.
09:04 The other son knows his dad well, he spends time with his dad daily, and he just is very close to his dad. And so the first son, the one that’s never home says, okay,
09:17 if I’m gonna praise my dad, I’ll use words like great, powerful, awesome. Dad, you’re the best, okay? Now these words may actually be nice words, but they’re pretty empty coming from someone that doesn’t know the dad.
09:29 And the second son who knows the dad so well, you know what, he says, dad, you’re the one that helped me each day with my homework, the one that taught me how to cook, the one that loved me when I felt unlovable,
09:39 the one that protected me from the bully at school. And so we learn about dad through this praise, that dad is a teacher and a protector, amen, one that loves the unlovable, one that is an encourager,
09:51 and you learn all these traits. Now understand from the perspective of the dad, which one is more powerful, the testimony that was completely empty, full of just regular words,
10:01 or the testimony that had meaning, that both showed what God had done in the individual’s life, and did so in a way that helped to underline or to show forth the attributes of God.
10:10 That’s what David is doing here. It’s more valuable to praise God by knowing him. And so my question for you here today is, do you know God well enough to truly praise him as he desires to be praised?
10:23 And I don’t say that lightly, amen, but do you know him well enough to praise him as he desires to be praised? As we see in Psalm 9, I pulled out seven traits,
10:35 and this is just randomly, I made a list, turned out to be seven, which is the number of completion, God’s perfect number.
10:40 I’m sure you could pull out more traits, but in Psalm 9, we see these traits of God, the eternal nature of God. He always has been, he always will be. My little kids say, when was God born? I said, don’t worry about it, he was never born.
10:52 He is, he always has been, he always will be. Time doesn’t apply to God. Secondly, Psalm 9 points out God’s sovereignty over the world and all the inhabitants of it.
10:59 God’s unending power. Thirdly, he’s to be feared and revered, amen. The Psalm 9 literally ends, hey God, wake these people up and let them realize they’re just men, amen, to paraphrase.
11:10 Let’s see here, that’s the fourth attribute. Our fourth attribute would be God is a refuge, one we go to in times of trouble. Again, that’s throughout the Bible.
11:19 Recently studying Psalm 18 with my kids, and that’s a big part of Psalm 18, that God is a refuge. We’re talking about how they build forts and how they’re safe and secure in their fort.
11:26 And God is like that fort, but many million times more that when we go to God, we’re safe and secure.
11:36 And the other example that Jesus gives is like the mother hen with the chicks under her wings. God doesn’t forsake those that are his, not forsaking those that seek him. He is steadfast and loyal, and that’s such a beautiful trait, God’s loyalty and steadfastness.
11:49 Think about David and how David had sinned and messed up and God didn’t leave him. God allowed David to repent and God lifted David up and gave him great victories. An advocate for the humble, that’s who God is.
11:59 God loves the humble. And you can go ahead and lump in the poor there too. The humble and the poor, the down and out, those impoverished, God loves them, loves them, loves them.
12:08 That’s why God’s an advocate for them, and that’s why oftentimes in ministries you see the ministry going towards that group. And the judge, the one that repays the idea of falling into their own pit or their own devices.
12:19 I think of Esther 7:10, so they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.
12:26 Then was the king’s wrath pacified in Esther 7.10. I don’t have time to give you the context, but the idea is the enemy in that scripture there ended up getting killed by his own trap that he was trying to kill another, an innocent man.
12:39 And God poetically allows the enemy to be killed in his own trap. And so we see these seven characteristics of God being brought forth in Psalm 9 about God, showing forth praise to God.
12:51 And again, it kind of begs the question, are we doing this? And let me advise you that if you get to know God, okay, and how do you get to know God?
13:01 The Bible says that faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God. We get into the word of God. We study the word of God.
13:12 We listen to Bible studies like this. We listen to preaching, we go to church, we pray. As we get into the word of God, we learn more about the characteristics of God.
13:17 And then guess what happens? It’s a fruitful cycle where we can’t help but praise God. And then we get into the word and then we learn more about him and then we praise him again. And you just have this continuous cycle of fruitful praise toward God.
13:31 That’s why there’s 150 Psalms, amen. David didn’t lack any praise to God. And guess what? I think David was a man that spent a lot of time in the scriptures that he had at that time, amen.
13:36 The laws of Moses and so forth, the things that he had at that time. And he spent a ton of time praying.
13:43 I believe that David truly was a man that spent time with God and therefore this fruitful praise came forth. And so I encourage you today to take a look at where you’re at. Maybe you’re doing a good job.
13:56 Maybe you’re spending a lot of time with God and you’re seeing this and you’re just nodding your head saying this is true. Maybe you don’t know. Maybe you’ve been so busy.
14:05 Maybe you’ve been distracted. Maybe the devil’s thrown some temptations your way or some distractions or whatever.
14:06 I encourage you to get back in the Word and then spend time with God and look around your surroundings to see what God is doing in your life and then show forth praise publicly, not being ashamed, show forth praise to God and you will be doing what David has done here.
14:23 Tune in next time as we get to the next part in this multi-part series. Thank you so much for listening today. Take care, God bless and amen.