Psalm 100 | Thanking God
1 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
2 Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!
3 Know that the Lord, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him; bless his name!
5 For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.
Introduction
What happens when a church is filled with Psalm 100 people? What happens when a joyful noise of praise and thanksgiving rises from them? What happens when singing isn’t forced, it’s barely contained?
When a church is filled with Psalm 100 people, two things happen. First, the people are really happy and free. Second, outsiders see that and want in. We want to be Psalm 100 people so we need two key insights.
Why we thank God (vv. 3, 5)
How we thank God (vv. 1, 2, 4)
Why we thank God (vv. 3, 5)
Look at verses 3 and 5. There are 7 reasons why we thank God:
Verse 3: who God is and who we are
1. He is God
2. He made us
3. We are his people
4. We are the sheep of his pasture
Verse 5: our favored relationship with God
5. He is good
6. His steadfast love endures forever
7. His faithfulness endures to all generations.
In other words, God is on his throne, everything is going his way, and he loves us.
Knowing that is the ground of all thanksgiving. Every problem begins when we forget it. When Paul drilled down to the very heart of sin in Romans 1:21, he said, “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.” A thankless heart isn’t just a problem. It’s a sin against God who is good and does good (Psalm 119:68). Every kind of evil begins there. Francis Schaeffer said, “A heart giving thanks at any given moment is the real test of the extent to which we love God at that moment.” Thanking God is loving God. So thankfulness is not an optional add-on to the Christian life; the Christian life cannot be lived without thanksgiving.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Paul called this world the “present evil age” (Galatians 1:4). It’s not easy to thank God with a broken heart or a tragic diagnosis. It’s not easy to thank God in the depths of anxiety and depression. It’s not easy to thank God in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep, and you don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, but you think it’s more than you can bear. Nowhere does the Bible say thanking God is easy. But nowhere does the Bible say thanking God is optional, only for the good times.
Though we may not be thankful for our sufferings, we are to thank God in our sufferings. The Bible says, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5). The Bible says, “rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). And glory there shall certainly be. “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).
The pain of this world is itself a reason to thank God. There is an end to it. Glory is coming. For the Christian, this world is as close to hell as you’ll ever be. Even when this world is killing you, and you can barely breathe from the pain, God is in heaven filling eternity with reasons to be thankful. The best is yet to come. Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal.
The Bible says, “If there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). And these are the things Psalm 100 people know. Our God is the only God. We are his people. His creation. He’s our Good Shepherd, and even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, it’s so he can take us to the green pastures and still waters we long for. We know this because he’s been faithful for generations. God has never disappointed one person who trusted him.
We know these things ultimately because of Jesus Christ. He’s the reason for our greatest thanks. All the promises of God find their Yes in him (2 Corinthians 1:20). Every promise in the Bible God made, every hope in the Bible God gave, every joy in the Bible God promised find their Yes in Jesus. Because after thanking God, Jesus took the bread, his body, and broke it, and took the wine, his blood, and poured it out on the cross to restore God’s unthankful people.
Yes, life is still hard and still hurts, but in Christ, even death is now a portal into a better world with him. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good (Romans 8:28). We have victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:57). We’ve been rescued!
When Psalm 100 people give thanks, they find hope for tomorrow because there is hope for tomorrow. As Ray Ortlund said, “God has designed reality in such a way that we praise our way into a better future.” Thanksgiving moves us closer to God’s heart and a better tomorrow.
Now, second, how we thank God.
How we thank God (v. 1, 2, 4)
Our thanksgiving can be too reserved. We can let those around us affect the way we thank God. After all, we don’t want to downplay real pain and sorrow with seemingly shallow thanksgiving. But thanking God is never shallow. How could it be? Whoever saw a child run to his parents with arms wide open and a smile on his face and a big, loud “thank you” bursting from his mouth and thought, “Okay, that’s enough. No need to be all showy about it.”
Verses 1, 2, and 4 show how to thank God.
First, verse 1, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord.”
The meaning here isn’t that we should come up to God and shake his hand, look him square in the eye, and express a mild but firm, “Thank you.” No, it means we should be effusive. We need to get over our reservations and let loose. And not just every now and then.
A joyful noise is loud and raucous. Like an underdog college football team at home against a big-name rival. The underdog wins. The crowd goes nuts. The band plays and dances. The fans storm the field. It’s impossible not to smile. It’s an unexpected victory, just like our salvation in Christ. That’s a joyful noise.
A “joyful noise” was how ancient Israel welcomed their king. Psalm 100 people parade into church celebrating the exaltation of King Jesus. They come in rowdy and ready to party. The big game has been won upon the cross. His resurrection proved it. We’re on the winning side! And now, we’re in that in-between time, basking in the afterglow of the victory before the big party later on, and we can’t stop talking about the final play that sealed the game. We keep replaying it in our minds and telling everyone we see. A joyful noise!
Second, verse 2, “Serve the Lord with gladness.”
How do Psalm 100 people serve the Lord? With gladness. They aren’t lazy. They’re hard workers because they know whom they serve, and that makes all the difference. Psalm 100 people don’t view serving God as a chore but a privilege. They serve the Lord with gladness out of response to his goodness.
Psalm 100 people are like the underdog football team before the big game. Nothing about it will be easy. It’ll demand their all. It’ll hurt and be hard. They’ll have to get dirty and sweaty and bloody. So what? They run out on the field. Psalm 100 people know they don’t belong there—not based on their merit—but here they are, loved by God, ready to serve out sheer gladness.
Third, verse 2, “Come into his presence with singing.”
This means we come with a song of praise on our lips to God. We sing about what we delight in. That’s why so many songs are about love and lovers. Psalm 100 people sing loudly to God because they delight in him.
Fourth, verse 4, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!”
I love how commentator Derek Kidner explains it. “The simplicity of this invitation may conceal the wonder of it, for the courts are truly his, not ours, and his gates are shut to the unclean. Yet not only his outer courts but the Holy of Holies itself are thrown open ‘by the new and living way’, and we are welcome.”
We have unfiltered access to God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. As Tim Keller puts it, “The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 AM for a glass of water is a child. We have that kind of access.”
We come into the courts of God through the gates of God not on our own merit but through Christ’s. We are those at the Great Banquet who are poor, crippled, lame, and blind (Luke 14:15-24). We are blessed, and we cannot repay our Holy Host. All we can do is thank him. All we can do is enter in amazement that of all places we could be and should be, we are in the presence of God Almighty. More than that, he’s adopted us as his children. Our fate is sealed by Jesus’ blood, and his Holy Spirit is our guarantee. The Father himself loves us. And if we have the Father’s love, we have everything we’ll ever need because he’s a good Father. Don’t you want to thank him for this?
Conclusion
Let me close with C.S. Lewis. I love how he shows us this isn’t some holy chore but a pathway to joy.
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with…The catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
And so it is with thanksgiving. When we give thanks, we complete the joy.
Let’s be Psalm 100 people who see what God has done, and respond. Let’s enter his gates with thanksgiving—not because we’ve somehow worked up enough gratitude, but because we’ve seen so much of God that we can’t help it.
Let’s pray.
