Come, let us sing for joy to the LordActually that song is Psalm 95:1-5 word for word out of the NIV. So you might not like the song, but it's hard to complain much about the lyrics! The same is true for the song "Come Let Us Worship and Bow Down" by Dave Doherty. He picks up where Hill and Dalzell leave off in Psalm 95:6-7a
Let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before him with thanksgiving (and extol)
And extol him with music and song...
Come let us worship and bow downLet us kneel before the Lord, our God our Maker.For He is our God,And we are the people of His pastureAnd the sheep of His hand, And the sheep of His hand.These two songs are very different (the first is way uptempo, the second is slow and reflective) but they come (almost) word for world from Psalm 95. They also share in common the fact that ignore the second verse and stern warning of the Psalm--
Today, if only you would hear his voice,8 “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,So maybe that part of the psalm is just harder to put to music; it is definitely not happy-clappy. But the message of this part of the psalm must be important because that is the part that is picked up and used by the writer of Hebrews... twice (Heb 3:7-11, 4:3).
as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”
God is "the Rock of salvation" and we are "the people of his pasture" not because of what and how we sing on Sundays. The stern warning here is not to harden our hearts as Israel did at Meribah and Massah when they complained against Moses because they did not trust God to provide them water in the wilderness. They complained about the hardships of the journey and did not trust God to provide for them. You see, if we really believe that God is our Rock (from where water comes) and that we are the people of his pasture (thus taken care of by Him), then we will not have hard harts and become discouraged by the difficulties of our journey. That generation of Jew did not enter the rest of Promised Land because they didn't trust God on the journey.
It's one thing to sing the praise songs on Sunday. We need to sing them because they remind us of who God is and what God does. But those songs have meaning only if they lead us to trust and obey God daily as we live through the wilderness that can be our lives. We need to sing that last verse of Psalm 95, because that verse is the point.
1 comment:
Amen. I am so tired of church. Tired of this version of the gospel or that version. Everybody thinking they've got a corner on God. That they know how to get it done. As we finding ourselve looking for direction, looking for a place to be where we can be who God is creating us to be...I know that worship - all of worship is one of the key elements. I also know through personal experience that the depth of our worship is determined by the depth of our sacrifice. That all upward progress in the kingdom starts with a journey down. The further down, the higher the potential to rise. Where is this message in the church today? Where is the teaching on picking up your cross? Cleansing ourselves from sin? Pain and suffering are part of our human condition. Yet it is that very process that God uses to bring for gold. Worship - yeah I get it. Because I've gone into the dark places, I've wandered the wilderness, and I've learned what it means to worship him when it was all I could do to barely lift my hand. I love the thoughts posted here. We preach Deuteronomy 28 because it's the "Blessing" chapter, but the truth is that the blessings are contingent upon our obediance to God's word as noted in the first verse. The truth also is that failure to obey results in more that 30 verses of curses also found in the same chapter. Where is that message? The curses more than double the number of blessings for those who fail to live up to God's word. Anyway, just sharing some thoughts here.
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