Psalm 145 is our text today. Psalm 145, pouring forth the praise of our God, the King. And indeed with these hymns we've just been singing, exhort us to do and enable us to do is what Psalm 145 lays out before us in such magnificent words here together this morning. Psalm 145. Let me begin by reading the whole Psalm so we have it before our minds as we enter into it. I will extol you, my God, the King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts. On the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works I will meditate. They shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness. They shall pour forth the fame of your abundant goodness and shall sing aloud of your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all and his mercy is over all that he has made. All your work shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and your saints shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power to make known to the children of man your mighty deeds and the glorious splendor of your kingdom. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and your dominion endures throughout all generations. The Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all of his works. The Lord upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to you and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand and you satisfy the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works. The Lord is near to all who call on Him, to all who call on Him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear Him. He also hears their cry and saves them. The Lord preserves all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy. My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord and let all flesh bless His holy name forever and ever. A truly beautiful Psalm as we come to this final Psalm of David in the book of Psalms. Just by way of entering into the thought of this Psalm, we can see that David here is exalting in his craft as a poet, as a sweet Psalmist of Israel in this Psalm. This Psalm truly is a fine work of art. I believe David is doing everything in his power to communicate comprehensive, all-embracing, all-inclusive praise. He has structured this psalm as an acrostic. That is, each two-line poetic unit begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, except for one letter, which has been intentionally left out. That in itself, by the way, takes quite a bit of skill. to write a poem like this, starting each line with a successive letter of the alphabet. But the point is to imply that this is an A to Z, if you will, of praise. This is a comprehensive kind of look at praise. But David hasn't stopped with just doing that kind of structuring. In fact, he's also created what we call an inclusio, a kind of an envelope or bracket to the whole psalm. pardon me, which repeats key words. Look with me at verses 1 and 2, where he says, I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. And then as he comes to the end in verse 21, he repeats this. My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and let all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever. Pardon me. This is all about encompassing all of our minds to take in all of God's revelation of His goodness and His greatness in His kingdom and to praise Him for it. And by the way, the repetition that we've just encountered in verses one and two and verse 21 also includes another key point of repetition throughout this whole Psalm. This is how David communicates to us comprehensive, all-embracing, all-inclusive praise. He repeats in the original this little word for every or all. And he repeats it by my count 17 times in this song. In other words, if something's repeated that often, you should probably pay attention to it. He's intentionally weaving this into everything he's saying. This is all, this is every kind of language. This psalm truly does what it talks about. It pours forth the praise of the Lord in a comprehensive way. But the whole point of all this poetic craft, all this skill put into lovingly praising the Lord, is to give you the gift of participating in the praise of the Lord yourself. David isn't simply writing this for his own benefit. God didn't put this in scripture just because this happened to be something David thought about, or because it happened to be something David really expressed really well. It's given to you as a gift. It's given to you to participate in this all-encompassing praise of the Lord. Your soul is elevated by this song. In fact, this song closes with, let all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever. And it enables you to do just that by you singing this song. It enables you to do that intellectually. As you meditate on who God is and come to know him, it enables you to do that ethically as your life is conformed to this reality and revelation of God. It enables you to do that aesthetically and beautifully, to see the overflowing goodness of God beyond mere propositions. It enables you to do this spiritually. So let's enter into this psalm here together. In verses 1 and 2, you commit your life to the highest purpose for which you exist. You commit your life to its highest purpose and goal. You see, this psalm is, according to the superscription here, right before verse 1, a song of praise. A song of praise. Now that might not immediately strike us as anything unusual, because how many psalms are songs of praise? And yet, In the original, the Book of Psalms, the entire book in the Hebrew tongue is not called the Book of Psalms. It's actually called the Book of Praises, we could translate it. And this particular psalm is the only one that takes that word and uses it in the superscription of a psalm. This is the only one in all the psalms that does that. It says, this is a song of Praise. It's almost as if this is a kind of summation of the Psalms. This Psalm, now that we've worked to this point in the whole book of Psalms, is endeavoring to draw together everything we've learned, everything we've encountered, everything we've experienced in our relationship with God. It's also the final Davidic Psalm in the Psalter. So this is where the Psalms have all been going. Even from the time the Holy Spirit moved David to begin penning these Psalms, and they begin to be collected and put together for God's people to sing, and as they begin to be arranged, they're all driving somewhere, they're all working somewhere, and this is where it's going. The Psalms have been taking us through all the twists and turns of life, through all the ins and outs of life, through all the ups and downs of our experience, in order to bring us to a vision of God and His kingdom that captivates our souls. And when our souls have a clear vision of God and His kingdom, then we begin to recognize Him as the true fulfillment of everything we live for, all of our desires. The very reason we were created is to be able to do this. You're being brought there. You're being called there. Your soul is being shaped to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, to perceive His goodness and greatness, His glory, and how it works out in all of His works and all of His ways. And you begin to see, this is what I want. This is what I desire. This is what I need in order to find true fulfillment in life. And you know what, folks? Whenever our human souls find fulfillment in something, there will be praise. You always, every single one of you in here, you always praise something that you feel like gives you fulfillment, that you find joy in. It's universal among humans. In fact, you don't just praise it yourself, you like to tell other people about it, don't you? If you've really found something exciting, if you've really found something joyful, what do you do? Hey, look at this. Don't you say something like that? Hey, isn't this great? Isn't this fun? You praise what gives you delight. That's what humans always do. And this psalm, culminating as the kind of character it is, is calling us to praise God. You see, praising God is not a side job that you do when the real work of life is done. And you do all the real work of life, and then the outcome of that maybe is praise or something like that, and you do a little bit of that too, But praise is the work of life. Praise is the reason you exist. You see, a life well-lived, a satisfying life, is a life of praising God. That's what fulfills the human soul. So this psalm ushers you into that life of praise. Pardon me. And just think about all the different ways it calls us to praise. And I'll just quote here from the ESV study Bible, which says this well. One remarkable feature of this psalm is the way it uses so many different words for praising. Extol, in verse one, to lift up God. Bless, in verses one and two and 10 and 21. We'll come back to what that means in just a minute here. Praise in verses 2 and 3 and 21, glorifying God for all of his magnificent qualities. Commend in verse 4, speaking highly of God. And then other synonyms like declare in verses 4 and 6. Meditate in verse 5. Speak in verse 6. Pour forth in verse 7. Sing aloud in verse 7. Give thanks in verse 10. And so they rightly say, the author has exploited all the vocabulary he can muster to describe this great activity, praising God for his greatness and his goodness. As if he tried to reach for the broadest expanse of human language possible, to try to communicate how great and good God is, to call us into that activity, to praise him. That's what we were made for. In fact, I would submit to you today, folks, that if any man who does not like to praise God would hate being in heaven. What a nasty, awful place where everything is centered on the praise of God. And so that kind of a man will get what he wants and he will go to hell. where he will spend all of eternity howling in the ultimate misery of being rejected by God, the true fulfillment of his soul. By contrast, the redeemed soul has no higher delight than to delight in God. This becomes his all-encompassing quest, his all-encompassing delight and desire. This is what everything in life begins to come in line with. I want to know God. I want to respond to Him with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength. That is, I want to love Him. I want to live in His life because there is no greater calling. And that is, again, what is meant by blessing the Lord. You've seen that come out in this Psalm already. I will extol You, my God, the King, and bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You. Pardon me. So here's this commitment of life to its highest purpose. I'm going to bless your name. I'm gonna do this forever and ever. And I'm gonna do it every day. That's the first use of that all word, by the way. This is all encompassing. Every single day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. What does it mean to bless God? We've thought on this often as we've gone through the Psalms. It's actually an amazing thing to think about a mere mortal, mere flesh, blessing God. Because what does it mean for God to bless us? When God blesses us, he gives us the power of life, true life, abundant life. That's the way it was from creation, right? God created his world, he formed it, he filled it, and he blessed his creatures and made them productive, gave them abundant life. And when he redeems, what does he bless us with in Christ? True life, abundant life. But if that's what it means to bless, how do we bless God? We don't give him life, we receive it from him, right? And yes, that's the blessing, the joy of God blessing us in the way he does. He makes us as creatures that can commune with him and return, if you will, that life to him. And that's what blessing God is. It's not merely praising. Sometimes even English translations will translate it as praise. But it's deeper than that. It certainly includes praise. It means to receive the blessing that God gives, to internalize, if you will, take it into who we are, and then live that out. Give our lives back to him as living sacrifices so that he enjoys our lives as the fitting and beautiful overflow of his own abundant life. We reflect his life back to him. We participate in his life with him. We give our lives as living sacrifices to him. So that's what the psalmist and this psalm is calling you to participate in. Give all of your powers. Give everything you are and everything you have. Holy to God is living sacrifices. Make that the crown of your existence and the very reason for everything you do. But you can see that what this psalm is calling us to is as living sacrifices is certainly not some kind of a morbid and dour thing, right? Well, this is what it means. If you're really going to follow God in this life, well, you're just going to have to give up everything. And it's going to be really hard. And everything you actually wanted in life, you're just going to have to sacrifice to God. And life will be sad for you, but that's just the way it works because he's God and you're a creature and he deserves everything, you don't deserve anything, so just submit. I mean, he's bigger than you are anyway, right? Quit thinking you have anything to live for, just give it all up to God and surrender everything and it'll be tough, but that's just what we gotta live with because we're creatures and he's God. That's not the attitude of the psalm at all, is it? Those were some true words that I just said, but completely in the wrong context. Because actually what this is calling you to is to give up your life. True. Is to surrender your desires. Yes, in a real sense. To lay down your life for Christ, to become a living sacrifice, yes. But that's the pathway to true joy, because that's how you receive God's life. As long as you try to have your life on your own terms, you actually won't have life. You'll die. And you give your life to him, and your life will be caught up into his eternal life. It will become a life of overflowing praise. It's enjoying God. This is what the redeemed soul knows that the world struggles so much with, right? Why would I love to be a slave of Christ? Why would I love to surrender my desires to Christ? Because I know that he gives everything. And that's what we want to, that's what our praise communicates. We enjoy God. In fact, as we go through the rest of the psalm here, it is in some ways just a pouring forth, a river of praise, pardon me, flowing on from one point to the next, all the way through the alphabet, that this catches us up into. And yet I think we can also see some particular focal points that the psalmist is drawing our attention to all the way along as we go into praise. And we can ask, why do we enjoy God so much? Why would I want to say, I will bless your name forever and ever? Or I could ask it a different way. In what ways can we delight in his dominion as our king? How does that work out in our lives? The psalm teaches us how to do that. So we see in verses three through six here, unsearchable greatness. Our God is great, unsearchable greatness. Great is the Lord, he proclaims in verse three, and greatly to be praised. His praise matches his character. His true nature is what calls forth this kind of praise. If it weren't the case, the praise would be not fitting. It wouldn't be right to devote ourselves to unceasing and uninterrupted and eternal kinds of praise. Actually, the God we're worshiping calls for that because that's His very nature. He is great, and great to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. Concerning His greatness, there is no searching, the text says. In other words, it's not possible for us to ever search all of this out, to explore it and all of its, you will spend, as I like to say, you will spend eternity getting to know more and more and more and more of the greatness of God. You've just begun in this life. You're only beginning to taste and see how great the Lord is. Some people think something like praising God forever, that's kind of hard to get excited about. Like won't that get boring after a while? Some people are so carnal that they even think that about what we do say in church. You go every week and you sing songs again, again, again, again. Doesn't that get kind of old, kind of boring? Well, if there were nothing more to learn of God, if God wasn't manifesting more and more and more and more of his greatness all the time, well then yes, that would get kind of boring. You know, if we were coming to praise some kind of a lesser being, Well, that would be the case. But his greatness is unsearchable. You will never stop learning of how great God is and all the ways that he has manifested that greatness. That's why Romans 11, 33 through 36 cries out, oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid for from him and through him and to him are all things To him be glory forever. Amen. That's just the Psalms said over again in light of Jesus Christ in Romans 11. Our God is great. Absolute, unbounded, infinite greatness. That is matched in this Psalm with a praise for his abundant goodness as he goes on here. In fact, If God was only greatness and not also goodness, He would be a God to be feared, but not loved. A God to be merely submitted to, but not actually taken up to in communion with Him. But part of His greatness is how good He is. And the psalm goes on to talk about that in verse 7. They, speaking of your people here, they will pour forth the remembrance, the fame of your abundant goodness and shall sing aloud of your righteousness. Pardon me. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all and his mercy is over all that he has made. God's people who have come to recognize his true character pour out rivers of remembrance of Him. That's the fame of His abundant goodness. And that's what we're doing here today, by the way. That's what we do every day in our lives as we pray, as we praise, as we interact with each other, as we testify of God's goodness to other people, even the unbelieving world, as we gather again as His people and seek His face. What are we doing? We're continually bringing up His remembrance. We're continually making Him known. We're saying he's worthy of constantly being thought of, attended to, worshiped, followed, obeyed, trusted, all of life. This is what we do. We pour this forth in a nonstop river of praise because his goodness is abundant. It's not small. It's not little. It's great. And so we sing aloud of his righteousness. And one aspect here of God's goodness is his that he is righteous. The psalm draws our attention to that in verse 7. In other words, he always does what is right. Which, of course, means that he always does what he in his wisdom knows is precisely correct in terms of his good purposes for his creation. Do you realize how important that is to recognize if you're going to praise God constantly? What do we tend to do? We wanna praise God for the things that we think turned out right in our life, but the things that didn't go the way we think it should have worked out, well, why should I praise God for that, right? That doesn't call forth praise from me. But when we recognize that the Lord is righteous, this is His character and His nature, He always does this, then everything that you experience becomes a reason to praise. Truly everything that you experience becomes a reason to praise because you realize I am learning more about what it means for the Lord to enact His righteousness, to do what is right in this world. And there's never a situation I can encounter that's not part of that righteous kingdom. I can praise Him in these things. The Lord is righteous. His good purposes are being enacted. I know the choir here has been recently working on the song, what God ordains is always good. What God ordains is always good. That's a confession like this psalm is talking about. It says in one portion of that song, what God ordains is always good. Though I the cup am drinking, pardon me, which savors now of bitterness, I take it without shrinking. It tastes bitter to me, but God is good. He is doing what is right. It will go on to say, my God indeed in every need knows well how he will shield me. To him then, I will yield me. To him then, I will yield me. I give myself entirely to God because he knows what he's doing in life. I ask you today, can you sing that? When you yield yourself in trust to his ultimate goodness, you will see the truth that God himself spoke to Moses and that is reiterated in this Psalm in verse eight. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Do you interpret all of your life that way? That's how God's, when Moses said, show me your glory, here's what God said. The Lord, his name, and he said that he is gracious and merciful. His grace has to do with that free favor that he gives so abundantly. His mercy has to do with his compassion for those in need. It's called forth by the misery and by need. And he is both, he is gracious and merciful. He is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Do you see God in that way today? I hope you do. In every experience, you see him as a God who is gracious and merciful, who has great compassion on you. that he is slow to be angry with you. He's a very patient God. He's a very forgiving God. He abounds in steadfast love. That's his covenant loyal love that he's always true to. You can count on him for that. That's part of his abundant goodness. So trust him. Delight in him in that. Praise him for it. The psalm then goes on, as it continues the river of praise in verses 10 through 13, to talk about the glorious splendor of your kingdom. God's kingdom is glorious. His reign, His dominion, His exercising of His good rule, all of His power worked out in what He has created and what He is redeeming is glorious. All your work shall give thanks to you, O Lord. Your saints shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power to make known to the children of men your mighty deeds and the glorious splendor of your kingdom. Pardon me. All, now that theme of all, by the way, you remember he announced it at the beginning, every day I will bless you. It's gonna start picking up here in this part of the Psalm. I think Dave is just getting warmed up. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord. everything you have done is going to turn around to give thanks to God. In other words, this is, you remember at the beginning, I will extol you my God, the King, now starting to expound on this King aspect of God, His kingdom, His reign. Those who acknowledge that reign, your saints, your faithful ones, they will bless you. Again, they'll work out, give themselves to you because you are the king. And what will that show up in? They will speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power to make known to the children of man, your mighty deeds and the glorious splendor of your kingdom. Let me just pause right here to emphasize another reason why this praise is so important. If I haven't convinced you already. Yes, this is the fulfillment of every one of your desires. This praise of God is the fulfillment of your desires. But not only that, The praise of God's people is exactly how God's kingdom is acknowledged and advanced. How is God designed for men to know that he's this great and this good king, that he is the true ruler of the world and no one else is, and they need to submit to him and trust him? Think about all the different ways God could have chosen to do this, and yet in his goodness and in his greatness, he chose to do this through the praises of his people. I think that's precisely fitting because God wants men to know how good and how great he is. And there's nothing like praise to do that. We talk often here, we want to reach out to our neighbors. We want to be a good testimony of Jesus Christ. We want to represent Christ rightly. We want to advance Christ's cause, those kinds of things, which are exactly right kinds of desires for God's people and for our church. You know what one of the fundamental things we should do in order to do that? Is praise God. Praise God all the time. Praise God gloriously. In fact, I would invite you as a congregation to work on our praise together so that everybody who comes in contact with this congregation has at least some kind of a glimpse of how great and how good our God is. That there is nothing that compares with Him. They might, you know, some people might be on a day like today, it's the Lord's day, but there are a lot of people out there who would say be at a football game. And there'll be a lot of people praising other people at a football game and saying how great they just did and how wonderful what they just did was. And people believe that. They really believe that message. They say, yeah, that guy really is great. Boy, I wanna be like him. I think I'll praise him too. That's what we humans do. But what if they were to come to God's church and they say, here's something worth praising that far exceeds anything man knows. And it's reflected, we know it, at least on some degree, and it's reflected in our praise. And so we love to sing. And in fact, we love to sing with all of our hearts to the Lord because the Spirit has opened our eyes to see Jesus Christ and His glory. I trust that we'll do that as God's people. That's what this psalm is equipping us and telling us to do. And so I would encourage you today, do you think often on the glory of the Lord's dominion? Do you recognize really how great it is? The world system wants you to relegate the glory of the Lord's dominion to the compartment of life labeled religious that has no practical bearing on real life. I mean, surely the midterm elections are more important to real life than the Lord's reign. But folks, we know the truth. Jesus, God in the flesh, died and rose again and ascended to glory and all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him. All judgment has been given into the hand of the Son. All earthly rulers rule by His permission, and He will judge them accordingly. His saving reign is manifested most clearly today in the church. This is what we're participating in. This is what we're seeing. This is what we're saying when we praise God. There's nothing that matters in all of life, on all of earth, like Jesus's reign. And our praise shows that. Jesus's reign is going to be established over the entire world in the future. Does that fill you with hope and joy in believing? Does that control how you think and act every single day? Does it thrill your soul and make praise start to pour forth? Let me urge you today, think much on Christ's coming kingdom. Think much on Christ's coming kingdom. Maybe you're one of those news junkies who always has to make sure you catch up every day on what's going on in the world, right? Guess what? Not much out there is gonna tell you the most important thing in the world happening today is Jesus reigns. Jesus is Lord. And that's actually being worked out in this world, whether men acknowledge it or not. And there's no emergency out there that's outside of his control. Jesus reigns. And what does that mean? Think much on his coming kingdom and the glory of this kingdom. Learn about that. Let your mind and heart dwell on it. Learn, let your imagination, if you will, even be shaped by God's revelation of himself in Christ in his coming kingdom. Because folks, that is your true home. That's where you really belong. Not this present world. You belong in his kingdom. And that's glorious. say it, praise God for it, the glorious splendor of his kingdom. This is our God being revealed to us, it's why we praise him. The psalm then moves on here in verses 14 through 20 to just begin walking through all of his ways and all of his works. In fact, if I could give a heading to this section, I would just pick the words of verse 17, the Lord is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works, all his ways, all his works. And here is where that theme of all really comes into play and starts being used all the time. It says in verse 14, The Lord upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to you. They hope in you and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand. You satisfy the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all his ways and pardon me, kind in all his works. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him. He also hears their cry and saves them. The Lord preserves all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy." Do you see how in David's sanctified imagination, he's just walked through life and said, everything I look at, God is manifesting his greatness and goodness. So let's do the same thing. We'll just, we'll take a tour. in these verses of God's ways and God's works. Pay attention to the verbs here and what God is doing as we are like tourists. And what does a tourist do? A tourist looks at things. So we're gonna look at what God is doing. It says here in verse 14, the Lord upholds and he raises up. This is the action we see God doing all around when we open our eyes and see it. Who is he raising up? Who is He upholding? The falling ones, the ones who are bowed down. Who is that but those who have been humbled, even recognizing their own sinfulness and their own weakness, and have called upon the name of the Lord, who cast themselves on His mercy, right? It's those who know they are weak. Somebody can be Well, and I think this is often true in our sinful condition. We can be very poor materially. We can be very poor intellectually. We can be very poor in a lot of ways and still think ourselves to be quite good, quite strong, quite rich, not even recognizing our true spiritual condition. But those who really recognize their true spiritual condition, the Lord upholds them all. Those who turn in faith to Him, He never lets them go. God is constantly doing that. In all that's happening in this world around us, God is constantly raising up the fallen, picking up those who are bowed down, because that's the kind of God he is, in his greatness and his goodness. And so it says in verse 15, the eyes of all look, wait, hope. They look to you. They lift up our eyes to the hills. Where does our help come from? Our help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. And what does he do? He gives them their food in its season. Even the way God orders this whole world in his providence is precisely to be good to those who trust him. Last night, many of you were at what was called a harvest party. Why do we call things harvest parties? Well, because it's the season, it's the time when the crops are brought in. God has given the food. Did you see that? Or did you just think that's just, are you a naturalist, a scientific materialist who thinks that just happens? Or did you see that God was just giving you food in order to bring you to his eternal kingdom? God was giving you food precisely to reveal to you how great and how good He is. Could you give life to those plants? Did you give life to those plants? Did you bring about that harvest? How are you even alive today? God just gave that to you. And He's ordering all of life, even the change of the seasons, to make sure you recognize that, to make sure you see that, and then respond to Him in praise. pardon me, you open your hand, you satisfy the desire of every living thing. As you look, even take your eyes off yourself, look around all living things. How are they alive? By God opening his hand. That's how they live. God is constantly working to give life, constantly working to call forth praise of his living creatures to himself. And that's why it says in verse 17, the Lord is righteous in all his ways and kind, chassid, that is, The same term of chesed, his steadfast love, now describing God. This is the way he is. He always is this way in all of his works. And that's why he is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. You call upon the name of the Lord, he answers. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him. All of your desires brought to fulfillment in him. He's a saving God. He preserves. He fulfills, He hears, He preserves. He also destroys the wicked. This is what we're watching take place on the world stage right now. That's what we're seeing happen as God unfolds His plan for history. Does it call forth praise? All of God's ways and all of God's works, we should praise Him. And that's why it comes to verse 21 here, the consummation of all flesh in its highest purpose. My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord. I've looked around and I've seen. God is great and God is good. I'm going to praise him for it, but it's not enough for me personally to do it. All flesh needs to come together in a great symphonic chorus of blessing his holy name forever and ever. And I think it's significant, by the way, that the song closes on this note of all flesh. And here I come to our conclusion too. You know the first time in the scripture this phrase is used, of all flesh? is in the context of the flood, the flood that God sent in Noah's day. In Genesis 6, verse 12, the Bible says that the Lord looked at mankind and all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. It was all flesh was corrupt. And God brought judgment. God had to bring a flood, even destroying all flesh, except for Noah. and what he saved in the ark. And yet, in that very action, God showed salvation through judgment. He promised, he made a covenant, that he would never again destroy the earth with flood. And he began working, building off of that, to bring all flesh to praise his name. The prophet Joel, in chapter 2, verse 28, prophesies this. And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit my spirit, my own life-giving spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. God giving himself to mankind to have true life with him. That's what this psalm is looking forward to. It's looking forward to life in the kingdom of God. So you praise him. So just as we come to a conclusion today, What do you do when you are thoroughly enjoying something? You praise. What do you do when you are experiencing life, vitality, energy? You praise. You give your life to something, you bless. Who is worthy of praise forever and ever? Who do we bless? It's our God. We need to do this today because our praise is acknowledging God's great kingship. We need to do this today because our praise is advancing Christ's great kingdom and his work as we look forward to his coming again. And so I just urge you today, sing Psalm 145 to participate in the true fulfillment of your life and the true fulfillment of the whole world. Sing Psalm 145 to glorify and enjoy God forever. And that is why we confess, as we have been together as a congregation, 1 Timothy 3.16, which you'll find in your bulletin. And I would invite you to confess before men and angels, so that all men know the greatness and the goodness of our God, as it's been manifested in Jesus Christ and His kingdom. If you need to look at the bulletin, it's right there in front of you. And let's confess this out loud together. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory, Jesus is Lord. Let's look to Him in prayer.