10,000+ Reasons to Worship God
Morning Greeting:
What are you praising God for this morning? Salvation? His gifts? How wonderful He is? Family? Help with a problem? There are countless reasons to.
This morning, I’m praising Him for____.
As you think about reasons to praise God, think about something that you might like to share during the announcement time. I’d like to give opportunity for some people to talk about God’s goodness. Maybe 2-4 during the announcement time.
Whatever reason you have for praising our wonderful God, let’s join together now in prayer and song to Him!
Introduction to Sermon:
10,000 Reasons (Bless the Lord) – by Matt Redman
I think we’ve sung it before as a church.
I’d sing it for you, but I know how that would go especially without any music accompaniment. I’d be sure to miss a note.
The chorus goes:
Bless the Lord, O my soul, O my soul
Worship His Holy Name
Sing like never before, O my soul
I’ll worship Your Holy Name
The song reiterates how “we live beneath an unceasing flow of goodness, kindness, greatness, and holiness, and every day we’re given reason after reason why Jesus is so completely and utterly worthy of our highest and best devotion.”
The song is based on Psalm 103 and also a hymn called “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven.”
I love the song. Beautiful. But though it is called 10,000 Reasons, it actually only lists about 7. And for obvious reasons. There’s truly an innumerable amount of good things in our lives, and good things about God, that we could be praising Him for. You can’t fit 10,000 reasons to worship the Lord in a 4 minute song.
And so, we’re going to talk about some reasons to praise the Lord this morning, but I hope you know this is far, far, from an exhaustive list. Matt Redman actually does better than me. He did around 7 in 4 minutes and I’ll do around 8 in 30. Preachers tend to be long winded, you know.
The rest of that 10,000 you’ll just have to discover yourself as you learn more about God through His word and experience His works and gifts in your life.
The more time you spend with God, the more reasons you’re going to discover to praise Him.
But, with that, I want to talk to you this morning about Psalm 65. It’s a beautiful psalm that shares at least 8 major categories of things that we can and should be praising God for. These are a great starting point and countless other reasons to worship God spring forward from these major things.
Theme: 10,000+ Reasons to Worship God
Text: Psalm 65
Verses 1-2
1) God Hears Prayer
God hears prayer. That right there by itself is at least worth 10,000 reasons to praise God, if you are as needy as I am. I pray to God a lot: about serious things, childish things, other people’s things, sometimes selfish things.
God hears my prayers and is extremely kind to fulfill so many of them. I certainly don’t deserve it and I’m sure some of them must look awfully small and silly to the King of the Universe. But though I’m small, though God is King of the Universe and out there making and destroying entire galaxies as we speak, God nevertheless feeds me, loves me, cares for me, and has helped me when I’m tired, sick, whatever. Of course, like anyone else, I’ve also gotten a lot of “no” answers to my prayers. A lot of those were selfish, but not all of them.
And some of the ones most important to me, even, have been a “no.” Should I get angry about this and ignore how abundantly the “yesses” outnumber the “nos?”
“God gives and takes away, my heart will choose to say, Lord blessed be your name.”
Shall I receive life, air, literally everything I have from God and ignore that fact because sometimes things really don’t go my way? When God has given me millions of breathes in this life, should I hate Him because one day the breathing will stop? Let’s not forget that it’s not God’s fault that sin and death and bad things happen.
No, I understand the bad is not how God wants things to be. But sometimes that is how things will be. Yet, I know, God is faithful and helps me abundantly and graciously when I pray, just as He does for all that come to Him.
Verse 3
2) God Atones for our Sins
That is certainly worth more than 10,000 unless you are very young. God has cast our sins as far as the east is from the west. All of our iniquities have been paid for by what Jesus did for us and God remembers them no more. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Man, I have no idea what the number of my sins are and I don’t want to know. And thanks to God’s graciousness, I will never have to know, because they have been paid for by Jesus and God doesn’t hold them against me anymore.
Have you thanked God for His forgiveness recently? You really should. It is such a heavy load off of our shoulders and I can’t imagine being able to enjoy life without that forgiveness.
I would also say, it is good to ask others to forgive you and to forgive others. This too is a wonderful gift from God, a heavy burden off of our shoulders.
Verse 4
3) God is Good and
4) God is Holy
How many reasons can you think of to praise God for His goodness and holiness? Alright, you get the point, I won’t keep saying it after this, but “hint, hint, wink, wink” God’s goodness and God’s holiness both provide us with innumerable reasons to worship God.
First, as to God’s goodness. Any blessing that you enjoy in life can be ascribed to God’s goodness. God answering our prayers is an expression of His goodness, but God has also given us a lot of good things that we have never asked for. I cannot remember asking for the beautiful trees and flowers and such that surround our house. I asked for a wife but was never so bold as to ask for one as good as Jenni. I certainly had no say in my loving family that helped raise me. People are usually very kind to me and often surprise me with some nice word or gesture of care, and I didn’t ask for it. The list goes on.
Now, I’ve gotten food poisoned a few times too. I’ve had days of illness in bed and I’ve suffered from depression and oppression. I’ve seen friends and loved ones suffer and die. I’ve seen hurting and pain happen to people and prayed fervently that it would stop, and it didn’t. I don’t know why God doesn’t just hurry up and wipe out all of the bad things and replace it all with His goodness. I am sure in a hurry for that. But I know I am wrong when I start to blame God for the bad things.
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
We can also praise God for His holiness. All that sin in your own life, and in other’s lives, and in the world that you are fed up with? God doesn’t do any of that stuff. He doesn’t like it and one day He will banish it from all the world just as evil is not allowed in His presence in heaven. As one who has been forgiven by Jesus and has the promise of new life, I can’t wait for that day.
Verse 5
5) God is our Salvation and
6) God is our Hope
Salvation is a big word. When God saved us, He didn’t just save us from impending judgment. That’s probably the most exciting reason to be saved by God! That’s what I most want to be saved from. But God has also saved us from a whole host of problems. My life isn’t perfect now, but boy was I on the wrong track before I became a Christian! There’s no telling what kind of situation I’d be in now without the grace of God.
He’s progressively saving me from my own sins as well. For starters, as a Christian, I am not a slave to sin anymore. I’ve been released and given a new lease on life. He helps me to increasingly choose the good and beautiful and reject the ugly and sinful. And one day He is coming back to save the world – just like we started to see in Revelation last week.
Speaking of Him coming back to save the world – God is our hope and the hope of all the ends of the earth. As Christians, we look forward to something called the Blessed Hope – this is the rapture, when Jesus comes back to take us to be with Him just before the awful events of Revelation begin to take place. And so shall we ever be with the Lord.
And being with the Lord forever is the greatest and best hope we could ever have because the Lord is wonderful and He is the ultimate problem solver. From that moment on, we aren’t going to need to worry about a thing any more.
We have a lot of problems we could be afraid of. One that hangs over the head of all is the simple fact that we are mortal and one day we will perish, and that tends to be a frightening thought. But God gives us hope in the face of all troubles.
Verses 6-8
7) God is Admirable because of His Works
God’s creation reveals to us how admirable He is. He is the God who made the mountains, calms the seas, gives signs in the heavens, and brings beautiful sunrises and sunsets.
Isn’t that a beautiful way to look at sunrises and sunsets, though? “The going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy.” The colorful shifts in the sky, the oranges, pinks, purples, is how the sky expresses its joy in God. Very beautiful phrasing there. Fitting: sunrises and sunsets can be very enjoyable to behold – a good opportunity to worship God and admire His handiwork.
We don’t have mountains around here, but that doesn’t mean we are short on wonders to admire. The lack of mountains gives us a very good view of sunrises and sunsets, fields of corn, forests and lakes. Stars in the sky at night. Rain and snow.
Being outside and enjoying God’s creation is refreshing for the soul and a good opportunity to admire God. We can see His goodness, beauty, and power revealed in creation.
Verses 9-13
8) God is Our Provider
God is our provider. The people in Indiana know this maybe better than others. We have a lot of farmland here, and it’s no surprise that most farmers believe in God – they depend upon Him for their livelihood after all. Farmers can dig and plant all they want to, but they remain at the mercy of the weather. And even if all the conditions go right, farmers still can’t actually cause the crops to grow. All of it takes place through God’s working in nature. Farmers have a lot to pray about.
If you’re a farmer, you probably realize easier than others that God is your provider. But He is for all the rest of us too. We also depend upon God to provide food for us – we just aren’t as close to the process as farmers are. We go and get it from Kroger or Martin’s or the Farmers Market.
He is our provider in countless ways. The trees around us provide the oxygen we need to live. The sun is just at the proper distance for our life to be possible. The atmosphere that protects us from the vacuum of space is a work of God. God provides all that we need for life and more.
Application:
At the start of this series, learning about the seriousness of worship, maybe at first to you worship seemed like a burden:
Real worship means you have to have right thoughts about God and what He does. Real worship means committing all of yourself to God as a living sacrifice – devoting your life to pleasing Him. Real worship means more than just lip service, it means a heart that is right toward God. That’s a pretty high standard.
But, fortunately, when we are looking in the right places and thinking aright, we can find 10,000+ reasons to worship the Lord.
He is so good to us:
He answers prayer.
He forgives sins.
He is good.
He is holy.
He is our salvation.
He is our hope.
He is admirable because of His works.
And He is our provider.
Close in Prayer