Psalm 150 is our text today. Psalm 150. Well, here we have arrived. At the end of 2015, we started our series of sermons through the psalms, and now we have arrived at the final psalm, all 150 of them. Pardon me. I'm thankful for that. But of course, much more importantly than merely the fact that we've now arrived at considering the 150th psalm, we need to ask ourselves, have we arrived? Have we actually followed where the Psalms are taking us? Have we ascended in praise to God? have taken us on an ascent to God. Our souls are being shaped to sing the kingdom of God in Christ by the Psalms. We are ascending up the mountain, if you will, to the presence of God by his spirit. We are becoming, our lives are turning into living flames of sacrifices of praise. So I wanna ask you today, is that taking place? Is that taking place in your heart and life and in us as a congregation? I'm here to urge you again today, just as we come to the conclusion of the Psalms, don't let your souls be shaped by the liturgies of this world. This present age is trying to call you to worship, and it's going to teach you a liturgy of life, even by its pressures, by its concerns, by what it praises. Instead, you need to sing a new song to the Lord. the song of redemption, the song of the kingdom, the song of the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Psalms are God-given songs for communion with him, for singing in the spirit, and thus for shaping your soul to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, shaping your soul to savor Jesus Christ. I really believe that if you've come to internalize the Psalms, You will be savoring Christ every time you sing them. And what's more, the Psalms themselves entice you to this wonderful life in Christ from the very first word of the entire book, blessed. Blessed is the man. They're calling you to true joy, to fulfillment of life. So we have now reached the summit of the Psalms. And as we come to this summit, I want to share with you a quote that I've had in my notes, my study notes for the Psalms, ever since we started back in 2015. Pardon me. I got this from a 19th century commentator, Franz Delitzsch, who says this. Having risen, as it were, by five steps, in this closing psalm, it hovers over all the blissful summit of the end, where, as Gregory of Nyssa says, all creatures, after the disunion and disorder caused by sin, have been removed, are harmoniously united for one choral dance. Pardon me. And the chorus of mankind, concerning with the angel chorus, are become one symbol of divine praise, and the final song of victory shall salute God, the triumphant conqueror, with shouts of joy. There is now no need for any special closing barakah, blessing, a pronouncing a blessing on the Lord. And you'll remember why he says this, because at the closing of the previous books of the Psalms, they have closed with a blessing. But he says there is now no need for any special closing barakah. This whole closing psalm is such. Nor is there even any need of an amen. The hallelujah includes it within itself and exceeds it. Pardon me. This is what God has been calling us to. A true vision of all of God's purposes being fulfilled. A true vision of all of God's plans throughout all of creation, redemption, consummation of all things in Jesus Christ, coming to fulfillment and participation in that now by faith. So that leads us right into this Psalm, Psalm 150. Let me read it for us. Praise the Lord. Praise God in His sanctuary. Praise Him in His mighty heavens. Praise Him for His mighty deeds. Praise Him according to His excellent greatness. Praise Him with trumpet sound. Praise Him with lute and harp. Praise Him with tambourine and dance. Praise Him with strings and pipe. Praise Him with sounding cymbals. Praise Him with loud clashing cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. The first point I want to draw your attention to about this psalm is that it's presenting to you the high point of life, the high point of existence, which is praise. The high point of life is praise. Of course, the main point of this psalm is unmistakable as you read it. Not only does it begin and end with hallelujah, praise the Lord, just like the preceding psalms have done, it actually uses that root, that word for praise, hallel, in every single line of the psalm, every single one. Not only that, the psalmist here manages to use this term for praise 13 times in a mere six verses. You would think there was an emphasis here. Nine times in a row, the psalm says, praise him. So the psalms leading up to this psalm, Psalm 146, 147, 148, 149, have all been calling us to praise the Lord, to shout hallelujah. But now in the final psalm, We've really hit the climax of that. This is not just the beginning and the end, this is everything. And indeed, that is the high point of our existence. The reason you exist today is for the praise of the Lord. We all praise what we find joy in. And here in this psalm, there is exuberant, overflowing joy. That's what it's calling you to participate in, absolute, if you will, almost abandonment to joy. This is abundance of life, overflowing, surpassing kind of joy and life. Just like the Psalms begin by calling us to the blessed life and then lead us on that pathway, delighting in the Lord's Torah or instruction, for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, like Psalm 1 says, Now we're seeing that blessed life has come to fulfillment. That blessed life has come to fulfillment, in fact, in music and dancing, sheer joy in the presence of God. Now, as you look at this psalm, you're going to notice right away that the fulfillment of the blessed life then, if that's what this is showing us, is not self-indulgent hedonism. In other words, it's not reveling in the pleasures of me. When all of life is fulfilled, when my every desire has been brought to its climax and fulfillment, is it going to be about me? Absolutely not. In fact, it's going to be all about God. Ultimate fulfillment comes in praising the Lord. And is that not a profound spiritual truth, a reality that Jesus taught us, that the one who saves his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for my sake in the Gospels, that's the one who will save it? Is it not what the Apostle Paul taught us when he said, I am crucified with Christ? There's no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. In the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Folks, at the heart of all true fulfillment is actually self-abandonment, self-surrender. It's not seeking my own fulfillment. It's not seeking my own joy. But finding it in Christ and therefore finding it in myself. That's why this psalm brings you to the climax of all of human existence. by calling you to praise the Lord. You give your life away, pardon me, as a living sacrifice of praise to the Lord. Praise is the high point of life, precisely because praise is not about you, but it's about the Lord. Hallelujah, praise the Lord. The Psalm begins. And that leads us right into this first verse here where it says, Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in his mighty heavens. Here we have sanctuary, the place of praise. If all of our existence is fulfilled in praise, here's the place where we have the focal point of praise, the sanctuary. Where shall praise be given? Praise God in his sanctuary. Now, verse 1 could be saying to praise God in his holiness. Sometimes you'll find it translated that way, in his sanctuary or in his holiness. And if we were to translate it in his holiness, we might communicate the idea of praising him for his transcendent perfections, his uniqueness, and his purity in all the perfection of his being, contrary to creation, uniqueness apart from creation. However, and of course, that's a biblical truth. Pardon me. However, the parallelisms in this psalm, in each one of the couplets, present a synonymous parallelism and not a contrasting parallelism or an antithetical kind of parallelism. And that leads me to think that in verse 1, we have the same kind of thing going on. The parallel in verse 1 is, praise him in his mighty heavens. It's talking about a place. And so I think in the beginning of verse 1, it's talking about a place as well here. Praise God in this place, His holy place, that is, His sanctuary. And so if that makes you ask, well, where is that? Where is God's sanctuary that we are called to praise Him in? I think the answer to that is actually important because it reveals why the psalm would call upon us to praise God in this place in particular. In Exodus 15, verse 17, Israel rejoiced in this way as God delivered her from the bondage of Egypt. They said to the Lord, you will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain, the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode, the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established. God brought his people out of bondage in Egypt precisely to bring them to a place where he dwells. a place that is set apart for his glory that he shares with his people, his sanctuary, his mountain even. And then in Exodus chapter 25 and verse eight, as the Lord begins to give instructions for the tabernacle, he says, and let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst. God dwelling with man, with his people. You see, the sanctuary is the place where God dwells with man and exercises his saving reign, where he shows himself to be a king. Often in the Bible, his throne is pictured in the sanctuary precisely to save his people and bring all of creation to its intended fulfillment. So, as you can tell from what we read from Exodus already, when the psalm says, praise God in his sanctuary, it certainly the initial focal point would be on God's holy place in the tabernacle, in the temple. But I think it's also important to realize it cannot be limited to there. For one thing, when we think of verse one here, it may very well have primary reference to God's heavenly sanctuary because of the parallelism again. Praise God in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty heavens. What was the earthly tabernacle even when God revealed it to Moses as a place where he would dwell on earth with men. It was a copy or a pattern of the heavenly. Why did God have Moses build it the way he did? Because it was supposed to say something about God's eternal dwelling place, the heavenly sanctuary. In fact, when we get to the New Testament, Jesus said that he was the temple. that He is the meeting place of God and man, the place where God dwells with men and reveals His saving reign. And then we go on in the New Testament, we find out that His people in union with Him are built as living stones to be a dwelling place of God by the Spirit, to become a living sanctuary. You see, folks, when we're talking about the sanctuary, we're talking about God in union and communion with his people and his creation. The sanctuary is the heart of all things. The sanctuary is the place of connection and communion and fellowship between God and man. That's why we've seen this in the Psalms. Psalm 63 too, for example. So have I looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. This is what the godly people long for in the Psalms. And in fact, Revelation chapter 21 and 22 reveals to us that in the new creation, this is where we will dwell. There's no longer a need for a temple in the new Jerusalem because God is present to his people there as they praise him face to face. They are in the sanctuary. They are in the presence of God. So when we think about this Psalm telling us, praise God in his sanctuary, it's not simply saying, praise the Lord everywhere, like praise him in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty heavens. That's certainly a biblical thing to say, as we've seen in the preceding Psalms. This is calling for praise right at the heart of the universe, the heart of everything, the heart of meaning, the heart of purpose, the heart of creation. This is calling for praise right at the nexus of God and all of his creation, right at the place of fulfillment. In fact, it's calling for praise right at the place where the godly long to be, because it is in the presence of God. We might say, looking back from our New Testament perspective, this is calling for praise in Christ and in union with his people. Praise him in the assembly of the godly. This is now all of creation and its very purpose for existence coming to fruition in the assembly of the saints in glory. Why did God make this world with its processes, with its powers? Why has God directed the history of the world in the way he has? To make all of it end up right here at the sanctuary and be taken up into praise for him. That's why everything happens. Pardon me. From that sanctuary then, this sanctuary in the new Jerusalem, the praise of the Lord flows out like a mighty river to bless all of creation, to fill heaven and earth with the glory of the Lord. The beauty of this is, even as we sing this psalm today, we participate by the Spirit in this praise, in the assembly of the godly. This becomes the place of praise. where we rejoice in Jesus Christ and make his glory known. This psalm calls us to praise the Lord, where? The place of praise, which is his sanctuary. Then it moves on in verse two to superabundant greatness, the reason for praise. Praise him for his mighty deeds. Praise him according to his excellent greatness. The Psalms have trained us to sing of the Lord's mighty deeds, have they not? Psalm 106.2 says, who can utter the mighty deeds of the Lord or declare all his praise? And you think back with me over the course of the Psalms as we've learned about declaring the Lord's praise. What are key load-bearing points that continue to come up again and again for which we ought to praise the Lord? Well, first of all, creation, right? He is the maker of all things. pardon me, all that is not God, all of this universe, He made and He sustains in being. In His providence, He directs it. He upholds all things by the word of His power. And so everything we are encountering, everything that our senses take in, our sight, our hearing, our smell, our taste, our touch, all of that is revealing to us the greatness of our God. As we study it, as we press into it, as we observe it, It's simply unfolding, it's shouting out, I came from the hand of the living God. This is who he is and what he does. We should praise him for that. The Psalms have taught us to praise the Lord for his providence, for how he directs from the smallest level, the most intimate detail of life into the great patterns of history and the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. This is cause for praise the Lord. And God working all these things, the Psalms have taught us over and over and over again, to think of the mighty deeds of the Lord in terms of his deliverance and salvation. Pardon me. Of course, that paradigmatic event of the Exodus and God delivering Israel from Egypt, but that flowing out into all of life. What is God doing that's so powerful, that's so great, that calls forth eternal praise? He is saving. That's the kind of God he is. That's what he does. Over and over again, he overcomes any and every obstacle, put in his way, in his way, if you will, of saving his people, put in his way the mightiest empire that earth can muster. And what does he do? He overthrows it. Put in his way all the schemes that men have ever been able to come up to with all of their wisdom, all of their might, all of their technology, and what they think makes them so powerful. Put in God's way that to saving his people, and what does he do? He brushes it aside like it's dust on the scales. And he saves his people. In other words, you put in God's way Satan himself, and all of his legions, and can they stop God from saving and delivering his people? Maybe we could even ask this today. Put in God's way all of your sin. Pardon me. And how much you have failed and how much you have rebelled against him. When he sets himself to save someone, can that stop him? Absolutely not. He's God. And that's why a redeemed soul who has any sense of how deep our sin is, who has any sense of how powerful our enemies are, our spiritual enemies, the principalities and the powers and the rulers of this world, a redeemed soul has any sense of that, who then looks at God's salvation and says, this is a God worth praising forever with all of my being, because I owe my very existence to him. Praise the Lord for His mighty deeds. Praise Him for His excellent greatness. Pardon me. This is what we are called to do. He has revealed Himself supremely in Jesus Christ and His work of redemption. We just sang about that. At the name of Jesus, every knee will bow. Every tongue confess Him, King of glory now. Right? Pardon me. That's a very fitting response to this psalm because that's what God is doing. He's showing himself to us. I can't help but quote Charles Spurgeon here on this point that God's super abundant greatness and the reason for our praise. Spurgeon says, his being is unlimited and his praise should correspond to therewith. He possesses a multitude or a plenitude of greatness. His much greatness it talks about here, and therefore he should be greatly praised. There is nothing little about God, and there is nothing great apart from him. If we were always careful to make our worship fit and appropriate for our great Lord, how much better should we sing? How much more reverently should we adore? Such excellent deeds should have excellent praise. Pardon me. That is why we gather, is it not? We want to make His praise glorious. We see, at least in some measure, a foretaste by the Spirit of how great He is, and we want to respond to Him with fitting praise. By the way, in light of this exhortation to praise Him for His mighty deeds and according to His excellent greatness, do you work on your praise? Do you practice? I mean that sincerely. Do you practice your praise? You ought to. If you want to give God praise that is fitting to Him, that is in some small measure compatible with, in keeping with the great work of redemption that He is doing, should you not endeavor to give Him your best? Shouldn't you work on this? That's part of what we do together as a congregation, is it not? We learn to praise the Lord. Are any of us born knowing how to praise God the way we ought to? No, we're born for that, praising the Lord, but we're not born knowing how to do it very well. And especially when our sinful hearts then have to be subdued to be able to receive a vision of God's greatness, we often find out as we enter into this Christian life, we haven't learned very well how to do this, and we need to practice. So let me encourage you in your households, in your home, Here as a church, as a congregation, let's work hard at giving God praise that is fitting for his excellent greatness. Let's practice that. This is why we do things like sing songs together, why we have singings like this afternoon, why we have a choir or why we practice even speaking God's praise to one another. Let me urge you to praise him according to his excellent greatness. And may God work in such a way by His Spirit that we as a congregation more and more reflect that. Because that leads me right to the next point here in this psalm. In verses three through five, we have song and dance, or the way of praise. Praise Him with trumpet sound. And as you read this, you should think a ram's horn, the blast of a ram's horn, not the kind of trumpet that we have today. Pardon me. The blast of a ram's horn that would assemble the people for special occasions, that would announce victories, that would muster the army for battle. This is the sound that God is to be praised with. Praise him with lute and harp. Perhaps we don't have exactly these kinds of instruments with us today, but basically these stringed kind of instruments Praising with tambourine. You know what a tambourine is. And dance. The same dance that we saw in Psalm 149, pardon me, verse three. Praising with tambourine and dance. Praising with strings and pipe. Stringed instruments, pipe instruments. From a flute to anything else that's a pipe type instrument, right? Praise him with sounding cymbals and loud clashing cymbals. Again, we don't know exactly what these instruments are. Both of them are called cymbals in this verse. We could maybe translate this literally as praise him with sounding cymbals and praise him with shouting cymbals, if we were to try to take those words very literally here. Evidently, there's some kind of distinction, maybe smaller symbols and larger ones that would be used for different purposes, some more melodic, some more clashing. We don't know exactly what that means, but it would be some kind of a percussive instrument here that God is worthy to be praised with. A little digression here, this just occurred to me. That last hymn we were singing, pardon me, Oh, love, how deep, how broad, how high. I can hear that to lute and harp and tambourine. Can you? Maybe we'll get there someday as a congregation. We'll sing that with joy to the Lord with a lute and a harp and a tambourine. That would be a great song to sing in that way, to rejoice in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ in all of its depth and breadth. But this is what the psalm calls us to. I want to pause for a moment here just in thinking about this psalm as a culminating kind of a psalm. And it tells us the way of praise. It's already talked about where to praise God, why to praise God, and now it tells us how, if you will, with these instruments, make music to Him, song and dance. Why music? Why does God pick that way of a culminating expression of responding to Him? I'm sure there's a lot we could think about actually in trying to answer that question and delve into all that it means in our lives. But I would like you to note that music is a participation in the realm of spirit. As one man has put it, music is to be understood in terms of the life that moves in it. A life that is perceivable only to a rational being, who can organize sounds in terms of the spatial metaphors that transform them from inert events to actions, joined by a virtual causality in an imagined space of their own. When you hear music, you're not hearing noise, right? In other words, you hear some sounds as simply noise. There are a sound event in the world, but they don't mean anything. You hear other sounds as music. There's something going on here. There's an inner meaning. There's a movement. There's a causality going on that the rational mind, you, you souls made in the image of God, hear. You pick up on. You move with. That's a gift from God. Pardon me. This is a movement in the realms of sounds and spirit, relationships within the world that even go beyond what we can express in words. We talk about things like melody and harmony and rhythm and tempo and phrasing and timbre and balance and all these kinds of aspects, way we try to describe in words what's going on in music. But we're recognizing there's something good here. In fact, even lyrics, the words we sing to music when we do, we don't always have music with words. Sometimes we have just music by itself. But even when we do then set words to music, you know what you find? You find the words get taken up into a heightened realm of meaning than the words themselves can express. There's more going on here than words can express. which is why you can never evaluate a song simply in terms of its lyrics. The music is communicating. The music is moving us. In fact, from a materialist perspective, well, not materialist, material perspective, one of the reasons I think God calls us to use music, and why it's so fitting in this whole regard, is that music is simply gratuitous. When you sing a song, it doesn't put food on your table. It doesn't put clothes on your back. It doesn't help you pay your bills. It doesn't advance your career. I guess unless you're a career musician or something like that, right? It doesn't do any of those things. From a purely material perspective then, music doesn't serve any purpose. Why even do it? And yet humans universally do it. No matter what their condition, even if they're the poorest of the poor, they will sing. You see, folks, as one man has put it, the end is music. We're learning something about our God and we're responding to him, even on a creaturely level, in ways that are impossible for us to do otherwise. Music is in many ways the height of human culture and creativity, which is, by the way, why it's very revealing about the nature of a culture, the music that it produces. Sometimes, as in our day, you see the moral and spiritual emptiness at the heart of a culture by the music that it produces. But music is in many ways a fulfillment of creation. All of the physical properties of this world are meant to be taken by intelligent creatures like you and I and turned into song. It's beautiful. You see, the end result of God breathing in the breath of life is that it is returned to him in praise. What we're pushing here toward is something the Bible calls worship in spirit and truth. When the Spirit of Jesus Christ is at work, what happens? People sing. Ephesians 5, be filled with the Spirit. Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with melody in your hearts to the Lord. There is no real participation in the Spirit without music. God is calling us to adhere to something transcendent, something wonderful. And part of the reason he uses music, I believe, is it simply doesn't serve any other purpose. It is designed to draw us to God. Pardon me. For that very reason, we as believers ought to give ourselves to making music for the glory of God, to praising God in song and dance. Pardon me. It reminds me of an occasion in scripture back in Nehemiah chapter 12. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this story. That as Nehemiah had led the exiles back to Jerusalem, as they rebuilt the walls, pardon me, there in Jerusalem, when they saw what God had accomplished for them and they rejoiced in it. You know what the Bible says? It's said that their rejoicing could be heard far away because it was very loud. They were so joyful in what God had done for them, keeping His promises, delivering them, making His mighty deeds known, that their praise was known. Again, let me quote Spurgeon here as he applies this to us. Make all men to know that we are not ashamed to worship. Summon them with unmistakable sound to bow before their God." How do we do it that? If this is the culmination of our earthly existence, to praise God, let us ask ourselves, what are the Psalms calling us to? They are calling us to exuberant praise, not embarrassed praise. to giving our whole selves to praise. Now, yes, that has so many different forms, as the Psalms themselves reveal. There are times of lament. There are times of sorrow and suffering. That is true in this present age. And yet it works through to praise. And God's people praise him. And through that, they make known the reality of their God. Again, let me reiterate something I said last week. I believe one of the most convincing arguments for the gospel and the reality of Jesus Christ that God's people can give is exuberant praise, delighting in God, because that's when others can see there is something really good, fundamentally good here that nothing else can match. And so let us just ask ourselves, in our singing, in our praise as a congregation, Can unbelievers come in and say God is truly in their midst? Would they believe that by watching you sing? Would they know that by hearing us? It should be that way. The psalm says praise him in this way and we want to give ourselves to do it. So that leads me to the last verse of this psalm. and where it talks about living souls. Here we have the what of praise. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. The Psalms as an entire book close on this note. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. In fact, let me give you a little bit more literal translation to make a connection in our minds here. We could translate this very directly, all the breath praise the Lord. Let all the breath praise the Lord. The breath, right? All of it. Where did that come from? It should take you right back to Genesis chapter two, verse seven, where it says the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. That's the same term right there. And man became a living soul, right? When God gave mankind life, when he breathed into mankind life, what was that for? It was to make everything come back out, if you will, in praise to himself. That's why God gives breath. Do you ever ask yourself, was God mistaken in giving the breath of life to a world he knew would use it for cacophony and mayhem, for ugly music that doesn't praise him, for lying and for slander, for blasphemy even? Was God mistaken to give the breath of life to that? I think the answer we can give is no, because he knows it's all going to come to an end here. All breath is going to praise the Lord. That's what it was made for, and he will accomplish that. Pardon me. Our very life itself, as our breathing makes clear, is designed to take in this world around us that God has made and to put it back out intelligently, reverently, joyfully, in praise to God. We need to do that. That's why you are a living soul. So to conclude here today, let me return our attention to that quote I gave at the beginning. about Psalm 150. Having risen, as it were, by five steps in this closing Psalm, the Psalms hover over the blissful summit of the end, where all creatures, after the disunion and disorder caused by sin, have been removed, are harmoniously united for one choral dance. and the chorus of mankind concerting with the angel chorus are become one symbol of divine praise, and the final song of victory shall salute God, the triumphant conqueror, with shouts of joy. There is now no need for any special closing barakah. This whole closing psalm is such. Nor is there any need even of an amen. The hallelujah includes it within itself and exceeds it. In a real sense, folks, we can say, as the Psalms close here with hallelujah, that very expression by a living soul, hallelujah, is the culmination of existence. That is what everything means. That is what everything is for. Enjoy that. Give yourself to it. Because what we have right now is a foretaste of our eternal hallelujah. And so if you would respond to the Lord of God today in faith, let's confess, hallelujah, Jesus is Lord, together as a congregation. Hallelujah, Jesus is Lord.