How to Give God Praise Part 1-1 Chronicles 16:8

-Transcript-

00:27 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the Cafe.

00:32 Good to have you here today at KJV Cafe. We are looking at a great truth in God’s Word. That’s from 1 Chronicles 16:8, how to praise God, David, King David’s instructions for praise.

00:49 Now, rarely in a longer message do we do 30 minute segments, but here we are in the second part of a two part series because the message was so big, it couldn’t fit in one. 

01:03 And so whether it’s the 28 minute segment or the 30 minute segment, that’s what we’re back for. I should mention that we’ve got many different formats here at KJV Cafe.

01:11 If you haven’t visit facebook.com forward slash KJV Cafe or kjvcafe.com to learn more. Okay, so here we have David giving instructions on how to praise God. Why is that important?

01:27  When God delivers us, do we offer him praise? Do we even know how to offer him praise? Are we paying attention when God delivers us? We need to realize that God is fully sovereign and fully in control.

01:44 For example, the Bible says that all good things come from God, amen. But do we give him credit for all good things in our lives or do we want to give ourselves credit or give a friend credit or give the universe credit or something ridiculous?

01:59  We need to get back to the book, amen. And David here in 1 Chronicles 16:8 writes, give thanks unto the Lord, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the people.

02:14 Give thanks unto the Lord, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the people. Well that right there is a wonderful prescription for praise. That right there is great instructions for how to praise God.

02:27 That right there is given by a man of God for people that love the Lord, amen. And think of the context in which David was giving this. David was giving this psalm of thanksgiving in 1 Chronicles 16:8.

02:45  He was giving it as he had just been able to bring the ark into the ark of the covenant where God resided into the city of David, which is now modern day Jerusalem.

02:58 And in the past program, we spoke about the idea of giving thanks because that’s how this psalm starts, give thanks unto the Lord. I want you to think about how often we really do that.

03:09  As I’ve mentioned earlier, is it all the time? 1 Thessalonians 5:18 tells us in everything to give thanks.

03:18 And we want to do the will of Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 5:18 says it’s the will of Christ Jesus concerning you. And David gave thanks for God’s presence in his life, for the victory over his enemies, entering into the chosen land as the superpower.

03:33 These are all things worthy of giving thanks to God for. And then we look at our lives. Are we giving God thanks when we overcome an enemy in our life? Maybe it’s an issue at work or school.

03:46 Maybe it’s something with family. Maybe it’s even a virus and we’re sick or something and we get better. Are we giving God the proper glory? We used to do prayer requests in our church alone.

03:57 And every once in a while, there’d be a praise report. Now I’ve started to add praise report to our bulletin, and we’re starting to do praise reports and prayer requests to get our people focused in on this idea of praising God. 

04:09 Not just praying to God and making our requests known unto him, though he wants that, right? But also to giving him praise, giving him thanksgiving, because those things go hand in hand.

04:21 I mentioned in the previous episode about Philippians 4, 6, be careful for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. 

04:34 So again, prayer and supplication goes right along with thanksgiving. We are to give thanks in all things for what God’s done in our life.

04:42 And that means spending time praising his good works, praising him throughout the day, finishing your day in prayer, thanking him for what he’s done.

04:52  And if you don’t know how to do that necessarily, you always can just simply recollect and you just sit there and say, okay, I’m going to walk through what happened today. 

05:02 And amazingly, how much of it you will see God’s hands and, well, Lord, you’re blessed here.

05:11 And Lord, I wasn’t planning this, but you really lined this up here. And oh God, how you really sent this saint of God over to comfort me here. And oh Lord, even though I had this obstacle here, you got me through it.

05:20 You see how that just shapes our minds and puts our minds on the true one holy God and how David would do that and how David did that throughout writing the Psalms and all his adult life. 

05:34 He’s turning to God, even when he sins, he turns to God in repentance beautifully. And part of the beauty of what David was doing is pointing out what God had done for him and his chosen people.

05:47 And do we do that? And I think by taking time to look at, just honestly, are we people of praise? Are we people of thanksgiving? Or are we just out in the world? Look at the modern church.

06:01  Look at the most modern church you can think of, right? How often are they able to articulate proper praise to God if they don’t know God’s word? And I’m not saying that the modern church doesn’t as a whole, but many modern churches I’ve seen, they’re real light on the scriptures.

06:19  If there’s any scripture included at all, it’s just one to match up with a message that’s aimed at entertainment or for the preacher or whatever it may be.

06:27 Again, I’m not criticizing all modern churches. I was saved in a large church. We just finished our foster care training in a beautiful large church.

06:35 And both those churches offer a modern service, but they also happen to be heavily involved in the scriptures. But there are many modern churches that just don’t teach the word.

06:47  And so if they’re not teaching the word, how can people know how to properly praise God when that’s in the word? And our text for us here, 1 Chronicles 16:8, give thanks unto the Lord, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the people.

06:59 That is crystal clear instructions for praise and giving thanks unto the Lord. Again, if you listen to the previous episode, we’ll get it online eventually. 

07:09 You can hear a lot more details about giving thanks and all the ways that we give thanks and all the ways that David gave thanks.

07:18 For time’s sake, we’re going into the second part of this instruction, which is call upon his name, call upon his name. Well, how do you do that? I mean, to truly praise God, we must be in fellowship with God.

07:30  We have to have communion with him, right? Praising God equals fellowship with God.

07:36 Or better yet, if you don’t have fellowship with God, you can’t properly praise him. Now, you may think otherwise, but think about this. I mean, give this some thought, okay? 

07:49 Can you imagine someone praising you that you’ve never met? How inauthentic would that feel? How awkward would that be? I mean, if someone you’ve never met and they don’t know anybody that you know, right, they come up to you and they tell you, you are just the smartest person I’ve ever met.

08:09 You are so smart and so kind. And you might wonder, well, what’s the basis for your opinion? I mean, are you just trying to flatter me? I mean, I don’t know you. I haven’t done any math problems in front of you.

08:23 I haven’t helped anyone that you know. How can I be kind and smart in your eyes? You see, is that not how God feels when people don’t know him and don’t fellowship with him, and yet they want to offer him some kind of awkward praise, maybe again at a service on a Sunday or maybe just randomly trying to maybe gain favor or something?

08:41  I mean, is that not how the Lord feels? In order to call upon his name, we have to be motivated to do so. The Bible says the natural man is at enmity or warfare with God, that no one wants to return to God.

08:55 So we have to be in his word. We have to be saved and born again by accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, by his finished work on the cross, realizing that it’s his blood that saves us, amen, from a destiny of hell and brings us to heaven only by what he did on the cross, realizing that our sin debt had to be paid by him because we couldn’t do it on our own. 

09:14 We get to that point, we accept Christ, we get the Holy Spirit living within us, then we get in the word.

09:29 It’s discipline. I’ve been running lately, amen, very slowly, very slowly, but I’ve been running and that takes discipline. The body doesn’t want to do it, amen, you eat dinner.

09:32 What do you want to do? You want to hop on the couch and watch a football game if you’re me, okay? But hey, it takes discipline. So you know what? That’s good for the body. Let me go run.

09:42 You know, the Bible talks about this. You know, if that’s temporal and everything and that’s good for the body, how much more so is turning to God and seeking the spirit, good for the soul and good for eternity, amen, good for your eternal being, seeking God. And we use that same kind of discipline.

10:00 You know, you say, well, I’m very busy, Brother Clark, especially in the mornings, I got a lot going on. I do too. And so you have to say what comes first, Lord, I’ll always put you first and let those consequences fall where they be.

10:12 And that means that, you know, if you have to get up early and you’re more tired through the day or if you have to set an appointment for later on or whatever it is, use that discipline. 

10:22 As you use it, as you get into the word, you are going to be calling on the name of God. And many people in this world will never get there.

10:31 I don’t know what the percentage is, but a large percentage will never ever get to this point right here to call upon the name of the Lord. And again, without it, how can we properly praise God? Pride gets in the way. People want to take credit.

10:48 They don’t want to give God the credit. They want to give themselves the credit. I mean, can you think about how many award shows there are and how many award ceremonies there are? And it’s not just in entertainment or sports.

10:55 I mean, look, look at the corporate America. There’s all kinds of awards and all these things set up for people to award people and recognize people. And there’s nothing wrong with getting awards, amen.

11:07 If I got one, I’d be pretty happy, amen. But that pride takes over. And instead of saying, God, you did this, man says, wants to say, I did this.

11:16 There’s a sense of worldliness, you know, giving credit to another source. That’s what the world does. And so the world’s going to keep doing it.

11:25 Amen. It would sound odd to give credit to God when the world thinks that you and your own abilities did something when we know better as Christians that all good things come from God. 

11:35 And most importantly, I believe there’s great unbelief in those that don’t want to praise God.

11:39 They don’t want to praise God because they don’t truly believe he is who he says he is. And he’s a rewarder of them to diligently seek him. There’s great unbelief in the world today.

11:45 And that leads to lack of fear of God. People don’t really believe God is who he says he is. They are willfully ignorant.

11:58 They realize there’s no way that the cloud can turn into the river without an intelligent design. Amen. They realize there’s no way that mankind can repopulate without an intelligent design.

12:08 They realize there’s no way that, you know, the trees put out the air and they suck in the thing that we breathe out or whatever it is. 

12:15 Okay. I’m not a scientist, but they realize there’s no way that all these things just happen.

12:20 So what they do is they become willfully ignorant. They say, I don’t want to hear it. I want to pretend it’s not there.

12:25 Even though it is there, even though the God, not it, but he, he is there. Amen. I want to pretend it didn’t happen.

12:32 And that was going on at the time of Jesus. Amen. After he had risen from the grave.

12:37 What did they say? The authority said, okay, make something up. We’re going to bribe everybody. You guys make up a story.

12:42 Right. They just wanted to pretend he rose from the grave. Amen.

12:47 He said he would go and do it. He did it. And they still didn’t want to believe he was seen by over 500.

12:49 They didn’t want to believe historians say that Jesus Christ lived. Some historians will even say that he was risen again. Amen.

12:53 But they still don’t want to believe you got lack of fear of God. And then you have, of course, one of the biggest factors in not calling upon the name of the Lord deception by the devil. 

13:03 We read that in the scriptures that the devil blinds the people of this world so that they’ll be deceived.

13:09 They won’t believe in Jesus Christ and unless God gives them sight, amen, they won’t see, they won’t understand. And we see the devil’s doing this to people all across the world. Amen.

13:19 They are blind to the ways of Jesus Christ. Even his chosen people. If you were to witness to a Jew, many of them, you would show them, like say the book of Isaiah and say, this is clearly Jesus.

13:33 They’ll say, I don’t, I don’t believe it. It’s not that intellectually they don’t understand. It’s that they have not.

13:40 It’s not their time. Amen. They have not been given the sight to see, so to speak, what the scriptures say, because the Bible tells us that this is the age of grace.

13:50 This is the church age. Not that a Jewish individual could not be saved, but that it’s mostly Gentiles being saved. Amen.

13:56 And then we’ll have the rapture. We’re taken out. And then God turns his attention again to the Jewish people.

14:01 God is not done dealing with the Jewish people. And we have to wrap up here for today, but please tune in tomorrow for the second part in this series on David’s instructions for praise. 

14:13 Thank you for listening. Take care. God bless and amen. 

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