Our scripture reading this morning is Psalm 66, so I invite you to turn there this morning. Psalm 66, let us hear God's own word. Shout for joy to God, all the earth. Sing the glory of his name. Give to him glorious praise. Say to God, how awesome are your deeds. So great is your power that your enemies come cringing to you. All the earth worships you and sings praises to you. They sing praises to your name. Come and see what God has done. He is awesome in his deeds toward the children of men. He turned the sea into dry land. They passed through the river on foot. There did we rejoice in him who rules by his might forever. Whose eyes keep watch on the nations, let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Bless our God, O peoples. Let the sound of his praise be heard, who has kept our soul among the living and has not let our feet slip. For you, O God, have tested us. You have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net. You laid a crushing burden on our backs. You let men ride over our heads. We went through the fire and through water. Yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance. I will come into your house with burnt offerings. I will perform my vows to you, that which my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble. I will offer to you burnt offerings of fatted animals with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams. I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell you what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened. He has attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me. So far, the reading of God's Word. Well, this is a season of Thanksgiving. Even the television tells us that this is the season of Thanksgiving. But one might wonder if someone came from outer space to observe us in our season of Thanksgiving, What might such an observer conclude we're thankful for? Perhaps what we might seem to be thankful for is sales in stores and football on television. And I suppose there's a limited extent to which those things might be the source of Thanksgiving. But it raises for us, doesn't it, what should we think about Thanksgiving? What should we think about praise? What does Thanksgiving and praise really look like? And I thought it might be good for us to continue to reflect on that. We reflected on that on Thursday, but it may be true that we could be thankful more than one day a year, that we could spend some time and energy asking ourselves, what does praise really look like for us? What should praise and thanksgiving look like for us? We live in a time when there are groups of Christians who have thought we really need to revive praise among us. There hasn't been enough praise. And that motive is a good one. But sometimes those folks tell us that what praise ought to look like is few words often repeated with intense emotion. I think it's good to pause and ask, is that what the Bible teaches us about praise? Is that how the Bible would encourage us to think about praise? And when we turn to the Psalms, we find that praise in the Psalms is rather different. Oh yes, there's intense emotion, that's good. but there's profound, elaborated reflection in the Psalms as the content of praise. We're not encouraged in the Psalms in any way to put our minds to sleep as we praise, but rather to engage our minds with our hearts to praise God in his fullness. It's as if the psalmist is saying to us, when you think how great God is, When you think how glorious God is, we need to stimulate our minds as fully as possible to think about that God, that his character and his ways would encourage and direct our praise. So that our praise shouldn't be shallow. Our praise shouldn't be abbreviated, but should be full and rich. And Psalm 66 helps us to begin to think about it. Psalm 66 doesn't teach us everything about praise, but it teaches us some important things about praise. And so we want to look into that, or at least I want to look into it, and I hope you'll want to look into it with me today. What does Psalm 66 have to teach us about praise? And as we look at Psalm 66, we see that it is a psalm that encourages us to praise. Over and over again, we're called to praise. That's the way it starts. Shout for joy to God, all the earth. Sing the glory of his name. Sing to him glorious praise. Here's a call to us. Here's an invitation, perhaps a command to us, that we would engage in praise. And the psalmist does not want us just to praise, but to think about what praise contains, what praise is like. And twice it says, verse 5, come and see what God has done. Praise will fill the hearts of those who think about, who see what God has done. And then later in the psalm, verse 16, come and hear all you that fear the Lord. This psalm is both engaged in praise and teaching about praise for us. And so it's a psalm in which we should be helped in our reflection about praise. Helped, I hope, in directing our prayers. One of the things that struck me in this psalm is that in the whole psalm, the psalmist never asks God for anything. That's kind of interesting. It was a challenge to me because I thought how often my prayers quickly become a list of requests. Could you do this? Could you do that? Could you do the other thing? There is no request of God in this psalm. It is simply a reflection, a thanks, a praise to God for what he's already done. Now, this is not to say we should not make our requests known unto God. God invites us to come to him with the requests of our heart. He, many places in Scripture, helps us to see that call to praise and to request. But this psalm reminds us there's a time also just to commune with our God in thanksgiving. Just to commune with our God in praising him for who he is and what he's done. And that who of praise has a triple quality in this psalm. Who is God? Well, there's a threefold perspective on God in this psalm. And who praises him? There's a threefold perspective on who's called to praise him in this psalm. And so this psalm stimulates us and challenges us and reminds us of what a great and good God we have. First of all, who is God? He is the God of all the earth. He is the God of all the earth. That's the first point that this psalm makes. Shout for joy to God all the earth. And I think that's very important for us to be renewed in that confidence. God is the God of all the earth. Our God is the God of all the earth. One of my ambitions in life, and I doubt that I will realize it, is to go to Egypt. I would love to see the temples in Egypt, down at the Valley of the Kings, see where the pharaohs are buried. We all have different places we'd like to travel. My wife encourages me to go and leave her behind. I don't understand that. But when you think of those gods of ancient Egypt, when you think of the time and energy and money that went into building those incredible monuments, those gods were always just the gods of Egypt. They were a god of one place. They were gods of one people. And even in Old Testament times, When Israel was a small nation and not anywhere near the most powerful nation in the neighborhood, they recognized by the revelation of God that their God was the God of all the earth. He wasn't the God just of one place and land or one small people. They always acknowledged their God was the God of all the earth. He was sovereign. And so the whole earth is called to worship, and we're called with the whole earth to worship the God who is sovereign, who does awesome deeds, who rules the world in his might. And I think that's important for us to be renewed in that. Sometimes I think we can feel we're a small group of believers. We're a limited part of the world. And the Psalms say, look up, look up. Your God is the God of awesome deeds of all the earth. If you go back to Psalm 65, when you're reading Psalms, it's always good to read the Psalms around the Psalm you're concentrating on. In Psalm 66, we're not told a lot specifically about what the awesome deeds of God are. But in Psalm 65, we are. What are the awesome deeds of God? Well, he made the seas and he made the mountains. He sends the rain. He blesses the harvest. He's the God of nature. He's the God of creation. He's the God of preservation. And this is the God who deserves praise from all the earth. The commentators are a little at disagreement on verse 4, whether we should read all the earth worships you, as the ESV renders it, or whether it should be all the earth will worship you. Hebrew verb tenses are notoriously problematic, and Professor Vinnie can explain all of that to you after church in the foyer. He'd be delighted to do that. But I think, at least in part, this verse is pointing forward to the Great Commission that Jesus gave his disciples. Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. And we live in a period of fulfillment where we can say much more clearly, much more confidently, much more completely, that all the earth does worship the Lord. Sunday school a few weeks ago, we had a Chinese student from Italy talking about planting reformed churches. Last year we had a student from Romania talking about planting a reformed church in Bucharest. And just in our limited little experience here, we see how the Lord is at work in Southern California. Some of you have seen how the Lord was at work in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Romania, in China. Today, on this Sabbath day, voices are being raised all around the world in praise to Jesus as God. Today, I don't think there's one voice on the face of the earth praising the ancient gods of the Egyptians for all of their amazing temples. God is the God of all the earth. He is the God, and he calls the whole earth to worship him, to acknowledge him, to praise him, to rejoice in him, and we're called to be part of that universal, worldwide praise. Praise the sovereign God. But this psalm reminds us that we're not only to think of God as the great God of all the earth, but we're also to think of God as our God. He is the God, and he is our God. He's not only the sovereign God, he's the Savior God. And that's what this psalm focuses on. Verse 6, he turned the sea into dry land. Boys and girls, you know what he's talking about there, don't you? That's the story of the Exodus. When Israel was in the house of bondage, God called them out. God liberated them. God delivered them. God saved them. And when they came to the Red Sea, and Pharaoh's forces were coming after them, and many in Israel panicked and thought they would perish there by the sea because there was no escape. What did God do? He opened the sea so that they could pass through on dry ground. He turned the sea into dry land. They passed through the river on foot. Boys and girls, you know what that is, too, don't you? That's the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land. He not only led them out of the house of slavery, he led them into the promised land. The God is our God. The sovereign God is the Savior God. And how glorious that is to think about God as the deliverer. God as the rescuer. God as the provider. And that's what he's done for us in Jesus Christ, hasn't he? He's led us out of the house of bondage, the slavery of sin. And he's led us into the promised land of his people. And this psalm, you see, is calling us to reflect on how great, how glorious, how wonderful our God really is. And then, interestingly, he focuses, having briefly focused on the Savior God as the one who rescues us, Many spent some more time in this psalm reflecting on the Savior God as the one who tries us. Verse 8, Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard, who has kept our soul among the living, and has not let our feet slip. For you, O God, have tested us, you have tried us as silver is tried, you have brought us into the net, you laid a crushing burden on our backs, You let men ride over our heads. We went through the fire and through water, yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance. Isn't it interesting that he talks briefly about the deliverance and briefly about the land of abundance to which they've been brought, but he spends more time reflecting on how God, in the midst of being a Savior God, is also testing us and purifying us. and trying us and bringing us through difficulty. And those are the things for which perhaps we're not quite so quick to praise God. Those are the things certainly at the time don't seem very praiseworthy. Can't we just go straight from the deliverance to the abundance? We'd rather have it that way. But he seems very deliberately to want us to pause and think about the importance of the testing, of the trying, of the crushing that we experience in life. That that's part of the saving work that he does in us. And therefore it's part of what we have to praise him for. And so our God is a God who delivers, but he's also a God who brings us through tough times. And we don't have to look very far around this congregation to see people who've gone through tough times. In fact, you know, there's a tradition that some people follow that at Thanksgiving dinner, they go around the table and everyone's asked to mention a blessing they've received. That's a nice thing to do. But this psalm would almost say maybe sometimes we ought to sit around the table and talk about the tough times we've gone through that the Lord has brought us through and how the Lord changed us through that, how the Lord purified us through that. But then it says, and this is the part we like more, Yet you have brought us to a place of abundance. God leads us through the testing and the trial to the place of abundance. Jesus came and said, didn't he, I've come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. That's the promise. We experience often a foretaste of that in this life, but ultimately we will experience that. We will know that only in the life of the world to come. the abundant life, the full life, the life in which at last all the tears have been taken away, all the sins removed, all the struggle eliminated. And the psalm says, that's the nature of our God. He's the deliverer. He is the trier. But he's also the one who gives us a life abundantly that lasts forever. What a glorious picture of God is emerging here. And so we're not surprised that all the earth is called to praise the God, the sovereign God. And here, particularly, his people are called to praise our God, the Savior God. And so we're called to bless him, to praise him. That's why our singing in church is so important. It's the occasion at which we're all able to join together in praising God. And it's why it's so important that we have to work hard at thinking about the words that we're singing. Sometimes the more familiar the song, the more difficult it is to really concentrate on the words. But it's critical that these words form the patterns of our thinking about the great God whom we serve, the glorious God that we're called to praise. Well, the sovereign God of all the earth, the savior God of his people, the God, our God, and the last part of the psalm is about my God. It becomes very individual. The psalmist doesn't just think about the call of the whole earth to praise. He doesn't just think about the call to the congregation and the people to praise, but he thinks about the individual, the call of the individual to praise. The God, our God, my God, my God. Each of us should have that confidence that we're praising God individually as well as corporately. and universally. My God. And what does the psalmist reflect on when he thinks about my God, the sustainer? If God is sovereign over the whole earth and savior of his people, he's also the sustainer day by day in the life of each individual who believes in him. And what does the psalmist particularly prays God for as his own personal sustainer. It's interesting. The thing he most emphasizes is that God listens to him. God listens to him. He had gone through a time of trouble and he prayed and he vowed and God listened to him. And so he comes into his temple to worship with thanksgiving and praise because God had listened to him. You notice how the psalm ends, blessed be God because he has not rejected my prayer. You might think that's a slightly funny way of putting it, negatively. But the psalmist is so thankful that the God who might have turned him away, the God who might have said to the psalmist, there are plenty of reasons for me not to love you or care for you. That God, my God, has not rejected my prayers. He's listened to me. And he's loved me. He's listened to me. And he's loved me. Again, that last verse. Blessed be God because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me. Again, how tempted we can be in the trials of life to think God must not be loving me or this could not be happening. And the psalmist is saying to his God, you listened to me and you always loved me. You know, it's interesting in this psalm, at several points, the psalmist has reflected on the opposition to God. The psalmist knows full well there's opposition to God. In the section about God as the sovereign of all the world, he talks about the enemies of God, those who are hostile to God. And what does he say about them? They'll come cringing to you. That word may well mean they're shrinking before you. The enemies of God can never succeed. And then when he's thinking about God, our God, our Savior, he thinks about the rebellious. See that in verse 7. And that word rebellious has the sense of those who've turned aside from God. Those who are not walking in his way. Those who've determined to go their own way. And as God overcomes enemies, so he overcomes the rebellious. But the individual soul also has enemies. And here in this psalm, what it reflects on, first of all, is trouble can be an enemy to our souls. Again, the psalmist doesn't go into a lot of detail about the trouble, but it's clearly an external that has come upon the psalmist. Some struggle from the outside, maybe his health, maybe his work, maybe his family, maybe his friends. We don't know exactly, but some external trouble has come upon him to disturb his life. And he's prayed about that. When God has heard his prayer and answered his prayer, he comes to worship God with his people and with sacrifice in the temple. Whenever we read about sacrifice in the temple in the Old Testament, we should think of Jesus. Jesus is the fulfillment of all those sacrifices. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice. And so when we come to worship, we come to worship because of the sacrifice of Jesus for us and for our sins. And he comes, it's interesting how stressed this is. He comes with his mouth. His mouth vows, his mouth promises, his mouth tells what God did, his mouth praises, his mouth prays. God wants us to use our mouths in coming to him. God, again, is why it's so important that we really engage with the songs we lift with our mouths. We don't want our worship to be empty and hollow and formal. We want our worship to be loud and exuberant and emotional with our mouths, but we want it to flow sincerely from our hearts. And for all that the psalmist stresses using our mouths in praise to God, He reminds us that our mouths must be engaged only as a reflection of what's genuinely in our hearts. Verse 18, if I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. And that doesn't mean he doesn't listen to sinners when they pray and repent. It doesn't mean he won't listen to us unless we're perfect, because then none of us would be listened to. What it means is, if deep in my heart the motivation of my life is wickedness, and only with my tongue am I saying what's true and good and right, God won't listen to me. If I'm a complete hypocrite, God will not listen to me. My heart must be the source of what my mouth is declaring to God. And then he listens. Then he responds. Then he loves. Then he answers. And that's what we're encouraged to think about and know here. Again, this psalm doesn't tell us everything about praise. It doesn't tell us everything about God. It doesn't tell us everything about us. But what it tells us is so critical, so foundational, so valuable. Who is the God we praise? He is the God, sovereign of all the earth. He is our God, savior of his people. And he is my God, sustainer for me and for you in every circumstance of life. And so here indeed is for us a triple praise. A praise that instructs us in praise. A praise that calls us to have a sense of the various peoples with whom we praise God. That calls us to think also about our hearts in praise. And to be sure that our hearts are rejecting the sin that would beset us. So that we can come with mouths to praise God openly, honestly, sincerely, joyfully, passionately. because God is the God, God is our God, God is my God. May God grant that that's true for every one of us here today, and may our hearts every season of the year be filled with praise. Amen. Let us pray. O Lord, our God, we're thankful for the psalmist and for the way in which your spirit worked in his heart and mine to help us to understand something more about praise. The psalmist helps us to understand you, O God, and we rejoice in that, that you are sovereign, that you are savior, that you are sustainer. And we are thankful, O Lord, that the psalmist helps us to understand ourselves, that we are part of a whole world of praise, that we are part of a church of praise, and that in each of our hearts, in each of our minds, in each of our mouths, we are called to praise. How good you are, how kind you are, how great and majestic you are, but also how near, how loving you are. And so, O Lord, we pray that you would fill our hearts with praise, For you. Hear us, for we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.