A Life of Praise, Psalm 134

Psalm 134 is the last of the Psalms of Ascent, or Pilgrim Songs. These songs were not written by one person, nor were they written intentionally as a collection. They were written by many different people over an extended period of time, and then later these psalms were collected into a group, because they were especially suitable for singing on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And as pilgrim songs, they’re also relevant to a life of discipleship. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are strangers and pilgrims in this world. We live in this world, and we interact with people, but our relationship with this world has been changed forever because of Jesus Christ.

When we come to Christ we become new creatures by being united with Jesus in His death and resurrection. This is why Paul could say, in 2 Cor. 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” We have died and been raised with Christ, and because of this our relationship with this world can never be the same. We once belonged here, but now we don’t. Everything has changed. One commentator says it this way: “It is nothing less than a removal into a new sphere of being. [The Christian] is translated from earth to heaven; and with this translation his point of view is altered, his standard of judgment is wholly changed” (J.B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon, p. 209).

Have you felt this? You once felt very much at home here in this world, but now you don’t. Your relationship with unbelieving family members is not what it used to be. You try to maintain relationships with unbelieving friends, but the relationship is different than it was, and they sense that something has happened to you. You find yourselves interested in things that you couldn’t even understand before you were a Christian. I love T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi.” One of the Magi is speaking, after the long journey back to their homes: “were we led all that way for/ Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,/ We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,/ But had thought they were different; this Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death./ We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/ But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/ With an alien people clutching their gods./ I should be glad of another death.” They made the long journey home, but when they got there they found that they had changed. It wasn’t home anymore. They could no longer be at ease in the world. Have you felt this? Something has happened. It’s not just that you’ve changed your ideas about religion and have decided to be a good church-goer. You’re a new creature; you’ve been crucified and raised with Christ. And you’re no longer at home in this world, “with an alien people clutching their gods.”

Scripture is full of this message that our true home is in heaven. We’re here in this world, but we’re on our way to a better place. “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). We need to remind ourselves of this over and over, so we don’t get caught up in the priorities of this world. One of Satan’s strategies is to cloud our thinking and confuse our priorities. So it’s a good thing to sing these pilgrim songs regularly. They remind us of who we are and where we’re going. And they help equip us for a life of discipleship over the long term (which is why Eugene Peterson entitled his study of these psalms A Long Obedience in the Same Direction).

This last psalm in the series functions as a benediction to the whole collection, especially the final verse: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” But it’s also the conclusion of these pilgrim songs. Psalm 120 was a psalm for starting out, and along the way a number of different aspects of pilgrim life have been covered. But this is the last word, the thing that the series ends with. Conclusions are important. In both speaking and in writing we use conclusions to say “this is what I want you to take from this message; this is the conclusion I want you to draw from all of this.” And the conclusion of this psalm is that praise is central to a life of discipleship. It’s not the only thing–we’ve talked about many other subjects in this series–but it is central, and this series ends with it as a way of ensuring that praise has an important place in our thinking.

If you’re reading a version other than the NIV, the word “praise” may not be there at all. For example, the RSV reads: “Come, bless the Lord.” The word translated “praise” in the NIV is most commonly translated “bless.” It’s the same word that is used in verse 3: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” But when the word is directed toward God, it means praise, so often the NIV translates it in this way. 1 Kings 1:48, in the RSV, is: “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who has granted one of my offspring to sit on my throne this day, my own eyes seeing it.” And in the NIV it reads: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel....” We see the same tendency in the New Testament. Ephesians 1:3, in the RSV says “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” and in the NIV it reads “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” These are just two different ways of saying the same thing. When we bless God, we are praising Him.

Praise is central to a life of discipleship because of who God is. It’s easy to get sidetracked in this area. There are so many other things to occupy our attention. It’s so easy for other things–good and important things–to displace praise from its central place in our lives as disciples. This is one of the weaknesses of the self-help emphasis in much of evangelicalism today. The sheer number of books, radio programs and sermons along these lines sometimes gives the impression that the purpose of the gospel is to enable us to get our lives together (to get out of debt, order our families along biblical lines, fix our marriages, live successful lives, etc.). The chaos and turmoil of living in a fallen world is overwhelming at times, so anything that promises to help bring relief is likely to have some immediate appeal. And many of these things are good and important. But the primary purpose of the gospel is not to help us get our lives together. The purpose of the gospel is to reconcile us to God. And when we’re reconciled to God, the natural result is praise. Praise is central to a life of discipleship because God is at the center of our lives as disciples. This is a good test to apply to ourselves. If we begin to notice that we are praising God less and less, something has gone wrong. In all likelihood, God has been crowded out and displaced in our lives by something else.

Verse one is, first of all, an invitation to praise. Praise is a great privilege. When we consider who we are and who God is, it’s a wonderful thing that we’ve been invited to praise Him, that He desires to receive praise from the likes of us. Sometimes praise arises spontaneously, in response to God’s mercy and grace, or from a new appreciation of something He’s done. We may be especially moved in worship by a fresh realization of who God is and what He’s done for us. Or we may be overwhelmed with gratitude by God’s intervention in our lives, realizing that He loves us and is watching over us. Or we may have received a clear answer to prayer.

There are times like this when we can’t seem to help ourselves. Praise just wells up from our hearts. And at such times, we need to know that God desires to receive our praise. He’s invited us. He delights in the praises of His people. We can go one step further: when we feel praise arising in our hearts in this way, God is inviting us to praise Him. The Holy Spirit is drawing us, inviting us into His presence. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher of the 20th century, said this in a series of lectures to preachers: “Above all–and this I regard as most important of all–always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this–always obey such an impulse. Where does it come from? It is the work of the Holy Spirit; it is a part of the meaning of, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure’ (Phil. 2:12-13). This often leads to some of the most remarkable experiences in the life of the minister. So never resist, never postpone it, never push it aside because you are busy. Give yourself to it, yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you have been dealing, but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything, which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately, and thank God if it happens to you frequently” (Preaching and Preachers, pp. 170-71). This applies not only to preachers, but to all of God’s people, and it applies equally to praise. When you feel a sense of gratitude welling up in your heart, when you feel the urge to lift up your heart in praise, respond to it. God is inviting you into His presence. Don’t think of it as an interruption or a distraction. It’s a gracious invitation from the King of Kings.

But verses one and two are also a command to praise. We’re called to praise God, whether the desire is there or not. These first two verses address those who serve in the Temple. At certain points in the festival, it was the custom to spend the night, or at least part of the night, in worship. So the psalmist cries out to them: “Praise the Lord! Don’t just go through the motions and carry out your duties with cold and lifeless hearts. Lift up your hands and praise Him!”

We have a tendency to downplay the importance of what we do with our bodies in worship. We don’t want to fall into empty ceremonialism, so we do away with ceremony altogether. But what we do with our bodies affects us. The act of lifting up our hands in worship can help us lift our hearts to God. Kneeling in God’s presence, or falling on our faces before Him, can be an important step in humbling ourselves before Him. Acting reverently can help us become more reverent in God’s presence. The things we do affect the way we think and feel.

Western society has gotten this backward in recent centuries and has assumed that the process needs to begin in our minds. The assumption is that we need to think ourselves into the right frame of mind, and then we can go on to act in the right way. But the process is often just the reverse of this. Eugene Peterson has wise counsel on this: “You can lift up your hands regardless of how you feel; it is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated. Go through the motions of blessing. God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along” (A Long Obedience, p. 188).

We also make the mistake of thinking that structure will restrict our freedom. We want our relationship with God to be free and spontaneous, so we resist the idea of structuring our spiritual lives. But we’re created in such a way that we function most freely within structures and forms. If you want to experience freedom and joy in playing a musical instrument, you need to submit to a considerable amount of order and discipline. You need to learn the forms and structures which will work musically with that instrument, and you need to develop the physical skills to play within those structures. And having done that, you’ll then be more able to play with freedom and spontaneity. If you try to avoid the process of discipline and training, you’ll probably give up in frustration (or else everyone around you will wish you had). It’s the same with sports. We develop the ability to perform with freedom and spontaneity by beginning with order and discipline. We train ourselves to function within the structures of the sport.

This is true also in our spiritual lives. We function best with order and structure, and we need to train ourselves in spiritual disciplines. Learning to praise God is no exception. What do you say when you feel the desire to praise God? Things like “O Lord, we just want to praise you because you’re so awesome,” are OK as a starting point. But we need to learn a more adequate language and vocabulary for praise, like “Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep. O Lord, you preserve both man and beast. How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light” (Psalm 36:5-9).

How do we learn to praise like this? Think of the Psalms and other prayers in Scripture and the great hymns and praise songs of the Church as a school of prayer and praise. We learn to praise God by immersing ourselves in these things over a lifetime, and as we continue using them they become part of us. It’s interesting to look at Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the whale. His prayer is made up almost entirely of quotations from the Psalms, but it’s more than a collection of quotations. He’s not just reciting memory verses. It’s really his prayer, in the language of the Psalms. By praying the psalms all his life he’s internalized the language of the psalter. It’s become his language for praise and prayer, and when he comes into this situation of desperate need, he cries out to God, and what comes out is psalm prayer. He’s immersed himself in the school of prayer; he’s developed a language and vocabulary to use in God’s presence.

It’s a good thing to structure your devotional life in ways that will help you learn to praise God. The same structure isn’t going to work for everyone. We need to allow for differences in the way God has made us, which is why booklets on how to have a “quiet time” end up helping some people but not others. There are many different ways to go about structuring our prayer lives. But be intentional in submitting yourself to the school of prayer and praise that’s available to us in God’s Word and in the music and written prayers of the Church.

The last thing to notice here is that God’s blessing stands at the beginning and at the end of our praise. Verse three is a response from the Temple servants: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” Our praise always begins with God: He has invited us to praise Him, and we’re always praising in response to something He’s done or said. Praise, by its very nature, is responsive speech. So we respond to God with praise, but then He responds with further blessing. We can’t manipulate God or use praise as a magical formula, as some have tried to do. We don’t use praise to get what we want. We praise God because He is worthy, and He responds to us as a loving Heavenly Father. He is always primary. We bless and praise Him because of His abundant mercy and blessings to us, and then He responds to us with further blessing. Our praise is surrounded on all sides by God’s blessing. And, as we’ve seen in recent sermons, this is not an individualistic thing. The very structure of this psalm puts praise into a communal context. The congregation begins by addressing the priests: “Praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord who minister by night in the house of the Lord.” And the priests respond: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.”

Over the past hundred years or so the Church has increasingly lost sight of the centrality of God’s glory. A hundred years ago, most evangelical Christians looked at the Christian life very differently than we do today. Most would have understood, without question, the first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” The first part of that answer is essential to a life of praise: “The chief end of man is to glorify God.” God’s glory is absolutely central to a life of discipleship. All too often, especially in America, it seems that we’ve retained the second half of the statement: “The chief end of man is to enjoy God forever,” and have completely lost sight of God’s glory.

Praise is central to our pilgrimage through this world as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, and a new realization of God’s majesty and glory is essential if we are to live a life of praise. We can cultivate a fresh awareness of God’s glory by submitting ourselves to the school of prayer and praise that’s available to us in God’s Word and in the Church’s worship and music. We live a life of praise by ordering our lives so that praise is a priority. And when God fills our hearts with a desire to praise Him, we respond. And as we continue living in this way, we find more and more that our lives are characterized by praise, until that day when we praise Him face to face, together with apostles, prophets, martyrs and angels, crying: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.... To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (Revelation 4:11; 5:13).