Psalm 103 is one of the greatest songs of praise in all of Scripture. Unlike our psalms over the last few weeks, there is no historical occasion or event that is behind Psalm 103 for which it was written. This magnificent hymn of praise was written for no other reason than a realization of all that God has done. If we wanted to summarize Psalm 103 in two sentences I think it could be this: 1) in our limited lives there is no limit to God’s forgiveness, and 2) though our lives are fleeting His loving kindness is forever. Let’s look at this marvelous song of praise this morning.

Psalm 96 talks a lot about God’s glory. In one sense God’s glory is everywhere; Scripture says the heavens themselves declare the glory of God if we would only stop to look. But in another sense there are places where God’s glory is not yet revealed; places and people in darkness with no knowledge of God or what He has done for us in Christ. Just as we can’t see any beauty in a dark room until it is glorified by light, Psalm 96 is a call to God’s people to go into the dark rooms in God’s house and turn on the light as we glorify God in our speech, our work, our worship, and in how we pray and live, so that all that God is and all that He has done can be clearly seen by everyone in that room of His world. As we look at this enthronement Psalm of God and see what it says about His glory, let’s recognize that Psalm 96 tells us that we reveal God’s glory in three major ways: in our worship, our obedience and our witness.

We will be spending the next few weeks in the Psalms, the songs of God in Scripture. When I was thinking of all of the possible 150 Psalms to choose from to start our series, I chose Psalm 88 because it is potentially the saddest and most depressing Psalm of the entire book. But it is a great way to start the series, because as Elton John sang “sad psalms say so much.” If we look at the shape and contour of what we hope our life will be, what a successful and good life might look like, our expectation is that aside from a few dips and turns things will mostly be moving upwards. Growing happiness, growing wealth, increasing influence, greater satisfaction. At the same time, for those who are followers of Jesus our deepest hope is that our lives, our homes and our churches look more and more like Jesus because He is the thing of utmost value in the universe. So here is the conflict in our life: if our lives, our homes and our churches are moving in the direction that the world and our expectations say they should, always up and never down, then how will our lives, our homes and our churches ever hope to reflect the life of Jesus when the life of Jesus was a constant movement downward to the cross and into the grave before moving upward to glory? If we want to see our lives and our homes and our churches to bear fruit, Jesus says those things must first die and be buried.