These are my notes for a lesson I taught on Psalm 117 at a nursing home in Raleigh, NC on March 20, 2016.

Call to Worship: Hebrews 12:28-29

Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

Scripture Reading 1: Lamentations 3:22-26

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”

The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Scripture Reading 2: Ephesians 3:14-19

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Lesson text: Psalm 117

Praise the Lord, all nations! Extol him, all peoples!

For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.

Praise the Lord!

Lesson

What is God like? People have many answers to this question. If you ask 10 different people, you will almost certainly get 10 different answers.

Moreover, many people would claim that God’s nature has changed over time. An all-to-common belief is that the God revealed in the New Testament is different from the God revealed in the Old Testament.

The God of the Old Testament, it is claimed, is a god of vengence and wrath and anger. The God of the Old Testament judged the earth with a great flood and ordered the Israelites to commit genocide.

The God revealed in New Testament, these people say, is different! This God is love. This God reveals Himself in the gentle person of Jesus Christ. Instead of declaring war on the nations, this God heals the sick and gives sight to the blind.

This view, that the wrathful God of the Old Testament is different from the gracious God of the New Testament was rejected outrightly by the early church. A man named Marcion taught this view a hundred years after the ascention of Christ, and the saints of old stood up and say, “No!”

Scripture teaches us that there is one living and true God. The same God who formed Adam from the dust of the ground is the God of the Bible all the way through to Revelation.

The very same God of whom John wrote “God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” is the God of all of scripture.

The God of the Old Testament is without a doubt a God who has wrath towards those in rebellion to Him. Yet the God of the Old Testament, who is the true and living God, clearly reveals Himself to be a God of mercy and of love.

Look at our passage again:

For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.

Great is His steadfast love!

His faithfulness endures forever!

The Old Testament makes this message no less clear than the New Testament: God is a God of love. God is a God who cares deeply about His people.

Yet how do we reconcile God’s love with His wrath? Indeed, God promises that no sin will go unpunished. God is a just God! When people openly rebelled against God in Numbers 16, we see God bring fire from heaven to punish some of the people; after that, he causes the remainder of the rebels to be swallowed up into the earth. God does not look lightly on sin.

Again, how do we reconcile this wrath and judgment with his steadfast love and faithfulness?

To understand, we have to look back to the first man Adam who rebelled against God and fell from his standing before God. This first man that God created, the father of us all, once walked in intimate fellowship with God, but chose to bring the curse and judgment of God onto himself.

Yet not only did Adam bring God’s curse on himself, he brought it on all his descendants. Because of the sin of our first parents, we too are born into the world as sinners! We are born as those in rebellion to the God who made us.

Now this is the situation mankind find ourselves in. All mankind stands in judgement before the perfect, righteous God and creator of all who made all things and deserves all our praise and cannot overlook sin.

And yet in this brief Psalm we read:

For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.

Great is his steadfast love!

  • His faithfulness? It endures forever.
  • His mercies? They never come to an end!
  • His love? It surpasses knowledge!
  • His goodness comes to those who wait on Him.
  • His steadfast love never ceases.
  • He is the Lord merciful and gracious.
  • He is the Lord slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Where does this love come from? How does God show us this mercy? Why are we, “children of wrath”, instead recipients of His faithfulness and goodness?

Because God loved his people so much, he sent Christ into the world to bear the curse for us. As unbelievers, we all stood before God dead in our trespasses and sins.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Friend, God shows this steadfast and abundant love in the most extraordinary way possible. He took on flesh and bore the sins of the world on a cross so that we might receive mercy and faithfulness.

Being recipients of the abundant love of God does not mean that our sin goes unnoticed. It does not mean that our sin does not have to be paid for. Instead, it means that Christ was punished for our sin.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

How are we to respond to this steadfast love? How should we react to this faithfulness?

If you are a Christian, your calling is clear. You are to praise the Lord! So our Psalm says:

Praise the Lord, all nations! Extol him, all peoples! … Praise the Lord!

Your whole life is to be a sacrifice of praise:

Through Christ then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. (Hebrews 13)

If you are here and you are not a Christian, how should you respond to the love that God shows to a lost and dying world?

Friend, God calls you to respond to Him with praise.

Even those who have not put their faith in Christ, even those who have not received the forgiveness of sins, even those who remain in rebellion to God are called to praise Him. All people everywhere, that includes every person sitting in this room, are recipients of the kindness of God. Every new breath that we breathe, every raindrop that falls from the sky, every ray of sunshine that reaches earth are marks are God’s kindness to His creatures.

And God’s kindness, the Bible says, is to lead us to repentance. God’s patience is to lead us to salvation. And God’s salvation is to lead us to praise.

If you are hearing my words at this moment, you are hearing the good news of what Christ Jesus offers to a lost and dying world. You are hearing it because of the kindness of God. If you are hearing of the salvation offered to you in Christ, it is a mercy of God. God calls you to turn from your sins and put your hope in Christ. God invites you to know the fullness of his steadfast love and mercy. God invites into his faithfulness that knows no end.

Speaking again to Christians, I conclude:

If you know the steadfast love of God, if you know His abundant faithfulness to you, Praise the Lord! If you have received the grace and forgiveness bought for you by the blood of Christ, it is because God sought you out to worship Him.

Worship God, dear friend. Worship Him in Spirit and truth. Praise His great name. Worship Him in holiness. Worship him in truth. Worship him in reverence and awe. Worship him with a heart overflowing with love for him because you know of his overflowing love for you.

I am well aware how often our frail hearts can feel cold towards God. If we are honest, we all know we do not worship Him as we ought. We do not have the zeal for him we should.

But even then, God shows us mercy. Even in our weakness, especially in our weakness God shows His faithfulness and grace.

So God calls us to pray with the Apostle Paul before us that God

may grant us to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in our inner beings, so that Christ may dwell in ours hearts through faith—that we, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Christian, is your faith weak? Do you not worship God as you ought? Do you lack joy in your heart? God invites you this with confidence knowing that God will strengthen our hearts. That God will grant us knowledge of Christ. That we will be filled with the fullness of God.

This is the very faithfulness of God that we are praising Him for. God shows compassion to us as a father shows compassion to his children. Jesus tells us that just as fathers in this life give good gifts to their children, so much more our perfect Heavenly Father will shower good gifts upon us. So, God will revive weak hearts and fill us with joy in Him. God will enlarge numbed minds so we will know the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ.

So again:

Praise the Lord, all nations! Extol him, all peoples!

For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.

Praise the Lord!