Playlist For | Week 3

I'm wondering if anybody else in the room like myself has ever underestimated someone or something. Anybody? Someone or something underestimated. Two years ago, I found myself on my neighbor's patio,

holding my daughter as tightly as I could thinking I'd never let her go again with tears running down my eyes and I could hear the faint sound of the nine eleven operator coming out of the phone saying, sir, sir, are you there? Sir, is everything all right? What had transpired just moments

before had felt like an eternity to me. My wife was out and about doing something and I had our two year old daughter with me. We had went grocery shopping just for a handful of things. And we had gotten home and I had parked the car. We had lived in more of an apartment, condominium

style housing at the time. And our parking spot was directly in front of our sidewalk that took us all the way down, and then we'd have to go right down another sidewalk, and then we'd have to turn right again, and we'd be in our little cubby of a patio.

And what had become so common for us would we we would take our daughter out of the car, and we would place her on the sidewalk

and she would start doing her little hobble thing down the sidewalk. And it was a little bit of a ways, so she doesn't get very far. And that became normal routine for us. And so I picked my daughter up out of her car seat and I set her down and say, you can walk. She starts doing

her little two year old walk all the way down the sidewalk.

I'm thinking I'll just grab the groceries real quick, close the doors, and I'll catch up with her. So I turned my back and I closed the door, I grabbed the groceries, turned around, get to the sidewalk, fully expecting to see my little girl, and she wasn't there. No Nora. So thinking,

okay, I don't think she's fast enough to make it all the way down this sidewalk and get to the other sidewalk where the building would block my view of her. But at the same time, I'm thinking, I'm kinda impressed. She's getting pretty fast. This is awesome. She's gonna be a truck star.

And so I pick up the pace and I start jogging and turn the corner to look down the next sidewalk and no Nora. Pretty confident that there's no way she could have made it to our little cubby of a patio, but very hopeful, I pick up the pace with a bit of panic in my step and I get to our patio and I turn and no, Nora.

At this point in time, my heart races going up and I drop those bags and I make my way back and I'm starting looking behind bushes and I'm going, Nora, Nora, where are you? I'm looking down sidewalks that we never walked down.

And I don't see her. And so I jog a little bit more to get to the main sidewalk where our car was parked at the other end. And at this point, I'm like panicked. I'm just going, Nora, Nora, where are you? Nora, full panic mode. I lost my mind. All logic goes out the door. I pull my phone out. I call 911.

She answers. I say, my wife's gonna kill me.

I tell her, I lost my daughter. I can't find her. She was just here. I only turned around for a second. I can't find her. You gotta get out here. You gotta help me. I think someone took her. She's not here. I've looked everywhere. I can't find her. I'm looking around bushes the whole time. I'm in full panic mode. And I'm thinking, you know what? You guys are gonna take a while. I'm gonna just get in my car and start driving. Maybe she got a little bit further. If someone took her, I gotta go see what cars are on the road right now. I gotta get out there. And I get the sidewalk and I just book it. And as I'm running, hear a I

put the phone down. I'm carrying it and I'm like, where did that come from? And I look over at our neighbor's patio and they have this big old chair that's just in the corner of their patio. And I look at the bottom of where that chair is and I see these two little feet.

And so I run over there and I look behind that chair and there's my daughter, Nora. And I grab her and I fall on the ground of my neighbor's patio,

tears running down my face holding her so tightly like I never let her go again and dropped my phone and I could hear the faint sound of the 911 operator saying, sir, sir, are you there? Sir, can you hear me? I pick up the phone. I said, yes, I'm all good. I found my daughter. She decided

to play a rousing game of hide and go seek with dad today. And she won. I completely underestimated what a couple seconds of turning my back to my daughter would do. I completely underestimated that my daughter would take this as the prime moment to say,

I am going to hide from dad. I completely underestimated how smart she was to say, I'm gonna go find a chair on someone else's patio that we've never stood on and hide behind it. I was I lost. I was in full panic.

My worry for us as followers of Jesus, if if you're in this room and you have placed your faith in Jesus, my worry for us is this, is that we underestimate the power of praise. That we underestimate the significance of what it means to be people who praise the Lord.

And to do it gladly and to do it regularly and to do it communally, to do it individually, that we underestimate the significance and the power of praise. My big idea for us today is this. It's that praise is about obedience, not preference. Praise is about obedience, not preference.

Now you might be thinking and sitting here, okay, Caleb, I haven't come in the last three weeks. We're still talking about praise and worship. Are we really doing this again? Yes.

Yes, we are. If we do not become people of praise, we will miss out on something. If we underestimate the power and the significance of praise, we will miss something in our walk with the Lord.

And so we will continue to talk about this. We're in this entire series called Playlist Four, where we're going through the entire book of Psalm. And this book is rich with songs. It's rich with poems. It's rich with

praising God through the breakthroughs and the excitements of life. It's rich with even praising God through the tragedies and the battles and the difficulties we go through. We see it all throughout the book of Psalms. And what's unique about the book of Psalm is it's kind of split up into this really cool

different sections. You may have never noticed, but as you make your way through the book of Psalms, there's different headings that start with book one, book two, book three, book four, book five.

And of those five headings of book one through five, at the beginning, chapters one and two kind of begin all of that. And then at the end, there's a conclusion. And there's kind of this crescendo at the end, which we'll get to later in the series. I don't wanna spoil it for you. But we called it playlist four because

it it reads and works almost like a playlist.

Like if you were to make a playlist, you'd be thinking through, okay, if I wanna make a play list and I want it to be intentional and I want it to take people on a journey when they listen to it, a lot of artists do this with their albums is they wanna take people on a journey. The book of Psalms is taking us on a journey. As a church, we are going on a journey of listening to the beauty and the wonderful music that God has written on these pages.

And so book two is where we land. Psalm 47 finds itself in book two. And this is a unique section of scripture because it flips the script from last week. Last week, book one spent a lot of time talking about our personal relationship with God and how we personally praise and worship

God. And in book one, it uses this word for God called Yahweh. Something like 200 times. And then it uses this word for God, Elohim, something like 30 times. Now the difference between the two is this. Yahweh is a personal name of God.

And so it makes sense. Book one uses a lot of this personal nature of connecting with God on a personal level. He is the God of each and every one of us. And then using that name Elohim, which is this name of God that is grand.

It's to help you understand. It was to help the reader understand that I'm talking about the God who created heaven and earth. I'm talking about the God who has orchestrated time and as it is, who is looking to the future and sees the past and orchestrated it all to be done and taken care of, and he knows the number of hairs on your head. He loves you and cares for you more than the number of grains

of sand that are across the whole world. Like that God, almighty, powerful, is where we would be thinking of when we hear the name Elohim. Book two, where we reside, where Psalm 47 exists. It flips it. Fascinating.

So the name of God Elohim shows up some 200 times and the name of God Yahweh shows up only some 30 times. It's very fascinating that it does this because book two is about the nation of Israel coming together and praising the Lord. And so for you and me in our time, it's about us as a church, the communal body of Christ

praising the Lord. And in order for us to praise the Lord, there's a few things that I think we need to work through. And in order to get there, we must read Psalm 47 again, and I'm gonna read it for you. So if you have your Bibles, I'd love for you to open up to,

the book of Psalm. I love the idea of having the word of God in front of you. If you got the physical Bible, and you don't really know how to get there, I just wish you'd take it, go down the middle, and you're gonna essentially be there. Go look for Psalm 47.

You don't have a Bible, get the Bible app out. Like, that's a good second option. And then something that is so true about this church, because we're a church, we have Bibles. How cool is that? If you need a Bible, we will give you one.

Go to New here outside. Talk to our ushers. We will give you Bibles. Walk out here with a Bible. I believe in having the word of God in front of you. I think there is power in reading it, not just hearing it. The word of God transforms

us into becoming more like Christ. Get the word of God in front of you. That is my plea. That is my hope. Go get one. Amen? Amen. Are we at Psalm 47 for everybody who is there? Yes. Yes. Thank you. You and me, we'll read this together.

Come, everyone, clap your hands, shout to God with joyful praise. For the Lord Most High is awesome. He is the great king of all the earth. He subdues the nations before us, putting our enemies beneath our feet. He chose the promised land as our inheritance, the proud possessions of Jacob's descendants whom he loves.

God has ascended with a mighty shout. The Lord has ascended with trumpets blaring.

Sing praises to God. Sing praises. Sing praises to our king. Sing praises for God is the king of all the earth. Praise him with a psalm. God reigns above the nations sitting on his holy throne. The rulers of the world have gathered together with the people of the God of Abraham for all the kings of the earth belong to God. He is highly honored

everywhere. You almost can't read that without getting excited. Like you see the word choice in the different text and you're like, oh, yes. There's an excitement to this. There's this joy that starts to come out. And not only that, we are gonna do it for the Lord.

So first and foremost, you might be asking, okay, what kind of foundational thing do we need to lay? And it is this. It is that praise is for the Lord and the Lord alone.

We must lay that foundation that our praise is for him and him alone. In the book of Exodus, the 10 commandments come into play, and one of them is you will have no other gods except for the one true God. And then Jesus

begins to reiterate this in the New Testament when he's talking and he brings up this concept of you can't serve two masters. And what he's alluding to is that you have one object of praise. You have the capacity to offer your worship and your praise to one thing. You cannot do more than one.

And the plead of the holy scriptures and for the follower of Jesus is that it is for the Lord and the Lord alone.

There is no if, ands, buts about it. You can't throw anything else in there. It is for the Lord. So the foundational step to our praise is we have to know who it's for. We have to know why we're doing it. And you might be thinking, alright, why does this matter? Why is this significant?

There is a very real peace that when we praise, God does a work in us, and it's a part of our transformation. But what I wanna warn us against is that we do not become people

who look at praise as something that is just to make me feel good. In other words, praise is not a means to an end. You don't just praise because I wanna get something out of it. Praise in it of itself is the end. That we become people of praise, that we are not just people who praise from time to time.

Now while there are real benefits to it, and I think those are just by the grace of God we get them, do not get confused that it is for the Lord and praise itself is the end, that we give him all glory, honor, and praise. Now the reality is is sometimes it's hard to actually

do that. Our minds can get distracted. We can get kinda unsettled and we don't know really. There was this Instagram post that was going around that I found interesting and I was like, oh man, this was this was actually really good. Something on the Internet turned out alright. It

was this pastor and he had posted this thing and it basically said, hey, you can go to church, you can listen to the sermon, you can sing the song, but if Christ Jesus is not Lord of your life, you have not surrendered your heart to his rule and reign, that you sit under following Jesus himself, then what are we doing?

I thought about that and I was like, yeah, what are we doing? Because praise comes from the heart of surrender. That's where it comes from. It's not like, okay, I'm in this routine and I got this thing going. And routine's great. But we need to not come in here fragmented

with our minds all over the place. Kind of lackadaisically making our way through the worship set, listening to the sermon, but instead we are here under the rule and reign of Christ Jesus.

When I was in middle school, my parents had sent us kids to a Christian middle school. And at Christian middle school, you have chapel on Wednesdays. And at chapel on Wednesdays, you have worship. And the worship team is other middle schoolers. So you can imagine how wonderful it sounded. And at Christian

Middle School, with Christian Chapel and middle schoolers leading worship, middle school Kayla didn't like it.

And so I had to go into chapel thinking, okay, how am I gonna entertain myself? How is this gonna be something fun that I work through and have to sit through? And so I came up with this, oh, I love entertaining my friends. I love making them laugh. It's a great time. And so me and my friends, we'd sit in the very back row. And whenever worship was going on, I was like, this is my time.

This is my time to shine. And I would I would head I had longer hair back then. I actually have a picture

of what I looked like in middle school. So not quite as long as I have it now, but it was still long hair. And you can head bang with that. And so during the middle school worship set, I would be head banging with air guitar just going nuts. I loved having a chair in front of me because I could play it like a drum.

And I would just just pound that. And I would just yeah. All my friends are looking at me, you're so funny. Keep going. I was like, yeah, I will. And the best part of it all was, you know, teachers and administrators.

You know, if you've ever worked in kids ministry, youth ministry of any type, you're like, I know that kid. They like come up to me, Caleb, like, yeah. You gotta stop. I was like, you're distracting people. And my genius, genius middle school brain, But bible teacher, mister Evans, I'm worshiping.

Like what's he gonna say to that, right? Oh man, that was a nuisance. But you look at that, was I worshiping? Was I genuinely worshiping the Lord? No.

Now you and I, we might not come in here on a Sunday morning and be air guitar ing, head banging, and slamming the drum of the chair in front of you. But we do come in distracted. I mean, about it. I went in with the idea

of being distracted in my mind. I got distracted myself. And then I became a distraction of other people.

We can come in here so distracted, so fragmented that we begin to rob other people around us of the opportunity to praise the Lord. It's you gotta nudge your spouse and you had something come to your mind. You're like, hey. I know you're worshiping, but have you thought about this and what we're gonna do after this? And you think or maybe you're with a friend or you you get distracted and you start becoming a distraction of other people around me. Maybe I

talked to a lady,

love her dearly, dear friend of mine yesterday, and she's like, you were talking about this? And then there were two ladies behind me that were just yapping to each other. And I was like, why won't they stop yapping at each other? And I was like, but we can become a distraction to other people in the room when we become distracted.

And so when we come into a place like this, do we come in expectant and ready that my praise today is for the Lord alone? Would he align my mind and my heart and my soul and my body to just praise him and him alone?

Would we be that kind of people? That praise is for the Lord and nobody else. It's not for me. It's not for someone else. It is for me to offer to him. And that draws us to number two. Praise is a sacrifice.

Praise is a sacrifice. In the book of Hebrews,

which is found in the New Testament. So Psalms is the Old Testament. If you don't know much about your bible, you've got two major sections. You've got the Old Testament, which is all about God laying the stage for a savior, for a Messiah. He's redeeming the people of Israel and continually calling them back to him, back to him. And then the New Testament is Jesus Christ crucified, conquered death, rose again, and the establishment of the church as we know it today. And so we get to this point in the scriptures where the church has been established. The gospel is just running rampant. People are coming to know the Lord. They're being saved like crazy. People are getting baptized.

And we get to this point where the author writes, therefore, in Hebrews thirteen fifteen, therefore, let us offer through Jesus a continual sacrifice of praise to God, proclaiming our allegiance to his name. It is a sacrifice in and through Christ Jesus that we offer our praise. We sacrifice, we lay things down,

and we praise him. In the Old Testament, before Jesus Christ crucified on the cross, in order for the people of God to kind of atone for their sins and become right with God, they would have to offer a sacrifice. And had to be a blood sacrifice. And so they would

take clean animals as the scriptures would call them. And they would take them to the altar and they would be sacrificed. And this is how, this was like the sacrificial process in which they would become right with God. Praise God we don't do that anymore.

Jesus shows up on the scene. He lives a sinless life. He's crucified on the cross. He is that final blood sacrifice. His blood poured out for you and for me. This system is now gone. Jesus paid it all.

The scriptures say that he who knew no sin became sin so that we could become the righteousness of God. There is no more need for that. So then we see in Hebrews, we come over and it says, what is our sacrifice? What is our continual sacrifice? It's through Jesus of praise. That's what we get to sacrifice.

We get to do it. We're called to do it. Praise is about obedience, not preference. It's not about what I want but what he is worthy of. It's not about what I want but what he has commanded me to do. Praise is a sacrifice

and it really is. Some of us were getting ready Sunday morning and we're getting breakfast ready for the family and you spill a little bit of Cholula on your shirt and you're like, why did I wear the shirt? And then you gotta go change your shirt and you're frustrated and then you finally get everybody in the car and maybe you got a few kids and you got them in the car. And they're just screaming, I wanna hear it count by tens. I wanna hear it count by tens. I wanna hear it count by tens. I don't wanna listen to count by tens.

And then you turn on count by tens and it plays the whole way here. And you're all frustrated. Maybe that's not you and you got to drive here alone in the peace and quiet of your own car. Or maybe you just had one other person with you and they're respectful of the morning drive as well.

But then you hit every red light and nobody's and someone cuts you off and you're all frustrated like, I'm here right right. That guy coming off. I'm just trying to go to church. And then for all of us, we get to Power Road. You've been on Power Road recently?

Oh my goodness. If you were in a good mood, you weren't the moment you hit Power Road. I'm telling you. And the cops are going nuts out there. They are are they are strict as strict can be. Three of our staff members on our comm team specifically got pulled over on Thursday

coming to work. It was crazy. I don't know what's going on with our comm team.

Bunch of criminals. Imagine coming to church with a ticket sitting in the car. Yeah. You'd be frustrated. You'd be mad. You'd be all kinds of distracted. Just think, oh, can't believe that cop did that. Oh my goodness. Why didn't you let me go? It's Sunday. I was going to church.

And that's the that's the jovial side of the difficulty of coming to church. There's the very real sense that there's some of us in this room who are walking in with a diagnosis that we never thought we'd hear. There's some of us who are sitting here because we've lost a loved one that we never thought we'd lose. Their life ended too soon.

They had so much more life left. There's some of us walking in for the first time after that miscarriage that you never thought would be your story. There is the heaviness and the realness of life that we all walk in to church with. And we get to sacrifice those things before the Lord.

And we get to say, God you got this because I don't. The only thing I can do is praise you. And through your praise, he works and does some amazing things. The bible is littered with different people offering the sacrifice of praise, especially in the book of acts. There's a story in there, Acts chapter five, the apostles.

They had been preaching the gospel and people were receiving it and it was amazing, but it was really frustrating, the religious leaders of the time. And so they pulled the apostles in and they're like, stop it.

They're like, no, we're not gonna do that. And they're like, fine, we'll kill you. And then some smart dude comes in and he's like, wait, wait, wait, don't kill the apostles. You're really gonna frustrate all the Christians out there. Like they'll be mad. They're like, what do we do then? So they flog them and they beat them and they walk out bloody and beaten and bruised and they just look like they have been absolutely

tortured. And it says in scripture in Acts chapter five that they walked out praising the Lord. They were praising him. Bruised, beaten, blood dripping down their bodies. And they praised him. And then there's Acts chapter 16 with Paul and Silas. They find themselves in prison

for preaching the gospel And prison in bible times, like prison's not good no matter what. In bible times, like there was no hygiene. There was no taking care of anything. Everything was dirty. Lots of people died just from malnutrition not being taken care of. Like prison was bad.

And it says that Paul and Silas began praising the Lord.

And as they praised the Lord, there was like this crazy earthquake and the gates opened and all the prisoners could have escaped, but they didn't escape. And then the guard of the prison thinking, oh my gosh. They've all escaped. I'm gonna be killed because I'm the one who let them go.

They were all still there, and then he gave his life to the Lord. It was crazy. So what started with praise ended with a Roman guard giving his life to the Lord. So cool. But all throughout the pages of scripture, whether you're in a battle or you're in a breakthrough moment of life, it is praise that we sacrifice.

And I like how the verse ends in Hebrews. It says proclaiming our allegiance to his name. Our praise is a declaration of our devotion to Christ Jesus.

Every time you praise his name, every time we come together as Rock Point Church, as the body of Christ, and we praise his name, it is us collectively coming together proclaiming his name and his name alone. And I saved the best for last. Praise is holistic.

Praise is holistic. What do I mean by that? In Mark chapter 12, Jesus is asked the question, what is the greatest commandment? And he tells them the greatest commandment is this. It is that you would love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength.

And he goes through this list. And as I'm thinking through this list, I'm going, heart, okay, I got heart. Soul, got a soul, awesome. Mind, got a mind. Strength, awesome. I have strength, I have a body. And Jesus says, love the Lord your God. And he's actually mimicking

or quoting found in Deuteronomy about loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is so vitally important to our walk with Jesus that we praise, that we love the Lord with everything. Not just our heart, not just our soul, not just our mind intellectually, but also our strength, our bodies.

Romans chapter 12 says that we would offer our bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and pleasing to God. This is our true and proper worship. So the bible is littered with this idea that our faith in Christ Jesus

requires every aspect of who we are. It's fascinating because the the other religions of the world, a lot of them focus on, like, enlightenment and elevating the soul or something like that. And it's, like, mystical and weird and you're kinda confused. The bible, the Christian faith, walking with Jesus,

it commands that our bodies are a part of it. Scripture actually tells us we'll have bodies in heaven and the body is a central part of who we are. It's not just something we throw around and, oh, we won't have it later. Oh, it just gets older and decays. But no, it is an active part of who we are in Christ Jesus.

And we are to worship him and praise him accordingly. I actually think this is the hardest part of offering the sacrifice of praise is that piece, the strength, the body. I think it's really easy for us to be like, oh, no. Like, I read the words and, like, I do believe in my heart.

My soul is good, me and God. Intellectually, I I can, like, read the bible and the words of the songs we sing, they make sense. I agree with them. But then when it comes to physically interacting

with praising the lord, that seems to be us as a church, the hardest thing to jump through. The hardest hoop to make our way through. Because

it can be weird. It can be awkward. I mean, think about it. Like, you're putting your hands up and you're, like, praising and the person next to you, you're thinking, did I put deodorant on today? Are they smelling me? You know, it's awkward. It can be it can be weird. But yet,

the Lord calls us to it. And the Hebrew word in which we get the word worship from, it can be translated to prostrate. You have no idea how much time I spent practicing enunciating that. It means to means to lay down.

The the word bless, the the Hebrew word where we get the word bless, it translates to kneel. It can translate to to kneel. So it's a physical interaction. The word thanksgiving often referred to extending

a hand. Think about when you're thanking someone or in that nature. You'll extend a hand, shake their hand. Thank you. At least you should do that. If you don't do that, do it. If you've got kids, teach your kids to do it.

It requires our whole self. Praise is holistic. Richard Foster in his book, celebration of disciplines puts it this way. He says, singing is meant to move us into praise. It provides a medium for the expression of emotion. Through music, we express our joy, our thanksgiving. No less than 41

psalms command us to sing unto the Lord. If singing can occur in a concentrated manner, it serves to focus us. We become centered. Our fragmented minds and spirits flow into a united whole. We become poised toward God. This

is what singing does. It leads us to praise. It takes that distracted mind that we can come in with and it starts to center us. I don't know if you ever felt it. Like you come in and you start worshiping and maybe you're singing a little. And the first song, you're you're, I don't know if I'm getting into it. I don't know if I'm feeling it. But by the second song, you're like, yeah. This is awesome.

It's it's that action of I am singing. I'm praising the lord, and he is drawing all of us together in a united whole to praise him. To get off of our distracted world, to stop looking at what's in front of us but to look up to the holy throne of king Jesus. And it's powerful and it's palpable.

In fact, you don't even need like a worship team to praise the Lord. Like, we could praise the Lord in this room with our voices together. And so in an awkward kind of way, we're gonna do this together. And so I'm gonna start a song. Many of us are probably gonna know it, and I'm gonna say, let's sing this together. Ready?

Amazing grace. Come on. Keep going. Come on. Come on. If you know it.

Like me. I'm so sorry. Should have kept going. Come up here and you can lead us through it. If you didn't know that song, that's okay. What you do know is there's a room full of people who were just singing the amazing grace of Christ Jesus that saved a wretch like me. That's powerful. I hope that's encouraging

to you, to every one of us that we can lift a joyful noise

to the one true God with our voices, with our bodies. We can do it heart, mind, soul and strength. It's one of my favorite things about leading our young adults ministry right now. We have such an amazing community of young adults who are on fire for the Lord, and they love to worship.

They worship with everything they have. They're unapologetic

about it. They're not afraid, and they're so undistracting with it. They are so locked in that this is for the Lord. We've got people on their knees laying down, we've got people coming to the front just because they want to be closer to the words and the music and what they're hearing,

and they just want to express their love and adoration for the Lord through praise with everything

they have. That's my hope for us as a church, as a community, that we would be people of praise. Not just people who praise, but people of praise in every moment. When we come together communally, when we're alone in our car, when we're doing things individually, but also when we come together as a united whole so that our fragmented minds can be united

together to praise Jesus. Now there's one thing when it comes to praise and talking about praise that has always kind of tripped me up and it's that I don't always think that singing feels all that manly, so I'm going to talk to the men in the room for a moment, you might be thinking, singing, I'm like a man. I don't do that.

Let me draw your attention. I don't know if you know much about the authors of the book of Psalm but one of the primary authors is this guy named David. King David. King David was the king of Israel, he's regarded as a man after God's own heart, he's the only person in the Bible with that kind of

indication and character statement about who he was, and so as a man after God's own heart, he leads the the people of Israel, but when he was a young boy, he was a shepherd boy, and when he was a shepherd boy, he had to protect the sheep and sometimes a bear or a lion would come to take the sheep and his job was to go after that sheep and rescue that sheep, and so he would kill the lion or he would kill the bear as a young shepherd boy, and then there's this wild story where he goes and the nation of Israel is scared of this Goliath guy, and he's tall and scary and everything, and the whole nation of Israel, the whole army is like, we ain't gonna fight and this little shepherd boy comes in, he's like, I'll fight them.

And so he fights them and he wins, and so the nation of Israel advances

and he becomes a little more popular amongst the nation, and then it really ticks off the king at the time, his name's Saul, he's mad, he's like, why is he getting all the attention, everybody's like, yeah, David, and Saul's over here like, why isn't everybody saying, yeah, Saul, so he gets mad and he starts threatening David and he goes, I'm gonna kill this kid, and so then David has to go on the run, he's living in the wilderness, he's living in caves, he's living off of the food of the desert, I don't even know what that was, you put me in the desert, I'm gonna die.

And so David's out there, he's like weathering the elements and everything, and he's living in the wilderness, Crazy stuff. And then he ends up being king of Israel and he leads the nation of Israel and he is one of the primary authors of the book of Psalms. And Psalm is littered with poems and songs

and laments which just means songs of distress and grieving and working his thoughts, feelings and emotions out of distress with God. It's chock full of it. And so this is a rugged dude

and he praised the Lord. I believe one of the most manly things a man can do is praise the Lord. A good description of godly manhood is a man who knows who his king is and praises him. So men of Rock Point church,

would we be the ones to lead the way? Would we lead the charge in praise? Would we lift high our voices even though we think we sound like walruses?

Would we be the ones who raise our hands and lift this place high for the sake of our families, for the sake of our loved ones, for our wives and for our children and for the people of God, would we lead the way?

Because that's what David did with the nation of Israel and they went through one of the most prosperous times of their nation, was under the rule and reign of a king who said, my king is greater. I am nothing in comparison to him.

And he became a man after God's own heart. So let's become man after God's own heart, let's praise him, let's lift his name high. There's an irony to this coming from me, honestly, and it's because when I was like 17, that middle school me kept growing up and I kept liking worship less and less. I kept liking

even church and sermons less and less. I would go and I would sit, but for the most part, was like, alright, I'm more looking forward to this being done than actually being in it.

And I don't know if you're noticing, but the worship team is coming out, if this happened to me when I was like 19, I was mad. I was like, they tricked me. They tricked me, the pastor is supposed to end his sermon, pray,

and I leave, and the band is coming out, and I know what that means, it means we're gonna pray some more. It would like frustrate me.

I got so good at this, or it frustrated me enough that I started to come up with plans and I would like, I would sit on like an end seat towards the back, like right here, my guy with the collar, yeah, right there,

you, no, I don't think you're gonna do this, but that's where I would sit. And so I would sit there, kinda in the back, on the end seat, because you know pastors, they always love to pray at the end of their sermons, so everybody's gonna bow their heads, close their eyes at some point before the worship starts. And I was like, okay,

Pastor's gonna say pray. And when he does, woah, I'm ducking out. And you know, you got a little swift move. You make your way out of here. Kinda hide yourself so the ushers don't judge you and recognize your face.

That was me. And and my gentle but direct observation, even for us as a church that I've noticed over the years, is we don't always end with worship. We don't always end with praising through music and song.

And so when we do, sometimes it feels like an interruption to our day. Richard Foster has another quote where he says, Activity is the enemy of adoration. Are we so busy in our minds and are we so focused on what our schedule looks like and how something's gonna go? And when we feel like something's an interruption,

we will forego a moment of praising the Lord Most High. To go get our kids early, to jump in the coffee shop lines before it gets busy, to get to the car before the parking lot gets all crazy? Would we really forgo a moment of praise

for that? Would we give up an opportunity to praise the very one who put the breath in our lungs? Man, I would hope not. I would hope that we would take this moment as an opportunity to say, yes, we get to praise the Lord. Some of you are there.

It took me a while to get there. But do you know what the the the number one thing that I can attribute to my love of praise through music and song today? Like, could do whole worship services. I could forego the preaching. Like, forget, like, let's just sing. Let's just worship. I'm for it. It took me engaging

with my strength. Because I was there with my heart, I was there with my soul as I grew, I got there. I was there with my mind, I was like, yes, I believe this, I believe in the words. But when I started praising the Lord with my body, with my voice, with my strength, oh man, I fell in love with it more and more.

When we planned this and we said worship was gonna be at the end of, like, every sermon, it was like, yes. I want that to be us. I want that to be us as a church, that we would be the kind of people who praise because praise is for the Lord and the Lord alone,

because praise is a sacrifice that we offer, because praise is holistic and we're gonna give every piece of what we have. I believe God has so much more for us than to duck out of here early. But to take this moment and take hold of and say, I get to praise my Lord because it's not about my preference,

it's about my obedience. It's my obedience as a follower of Jesus to take this moment and say communally together as the body of Christ, we will praise his name. So Rock Point Church, would you stand on your feet as I read Psalm 47? It says, come everyone, clap your hands. Clap it up. Shout to God with a joy of praise. For

the Lord most high is awesome. He is the great king of all the earth. God has ascended with a mighty shout. The Lord has ascended with trumpets blaring. Sing praises. Sing praises to God. Sing praises to our king. Sing praises Rock Point Church.

The gonna be a people of obedience in this place. Amen? Come on. We're gonna lift high the praises of Jesus all across this room. We're going to shout Jesus for the mountains, for our church, for our community, and for our families right now. Amen? Amen? Come on. Have some passion. It's okay.

Shout Jesus from the mouth. Sing it out. Come on. We can be doing better than that. Come on.

Guys, this is personal for your family right

No matter your season, we are the do

only who We

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Man, if you ever wonder what is heaven gonna look like, what is heaven gonna sound like, I really feel like this is it. Man, I hope you guys had an amazing

service. Before you go, reminder, if you are new here, right outside those doors, we would love to know your name and just say hi. And if you're in need of prayer or just need to talk in any way, we have people in the back who are ready and excited to pray with you. Other than that, have an amazing Sunday. We will see you guys next week. Thank

you so much for joining us for church online this weekend. Make sure to stay up to date with everything happening here at Rock Point on our social media or by visiting rockpoint.il.