Let Everybody Praise the Lord

Psalm 107

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781845509866

LET EVERYBODY
PRAISE
THE LORD

‘O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy; and gathered them out of the lands, from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south.’ (Ps. 107:1-3)

Psalm 107 is obviously a hymn of praise, a song of thanksgiving, of worship and of adoration, and as we look in detail at these first three verses, we must also, at the same time, call attention to the entire psalm and to its message as a whole.

STRUCTURE

The structure of this psalm is quite clear; it divides itself up naturally. But here, in these first three verses, we have a kind of introduction. The Psalmist is, as it were, gathering together a great choir which he is going to conduct as they sing this anthem of praise unto God, so he assembles together the various members of his choir who are singing the different parts. He sends out a great invitation; he calls them to come together ‘from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south’; and he is asking them all to join together in giving thanks unto the Lord. He says, ‘Let the redeemed of the LORD say so’. And at once he provides us with the reasons why all these different people coming from different places should come together in this one great anthem.

But then, having done that, he goes on to details. He is not content with merely making a general statement; he wants now to prove that statement. He says that all the redeemed of the Lord will join together in this, even though their experiences, in certain senses, have been different; so he proceeds to give us four samples or illustrations of four different types of experience.

The first group are people who are to be seen wandering in a wilderness seeking ‘a city of habitation’. The second group are those who are ‘bound in affliction and iron’. The third are those who seem to be pining away in ill-health and on the point of starvation, and the fourth is a picture of those who are on the sea in great waters and in a terrible storm. He gives us detailed descriptions of these four types and of their varying experiences, but in each case, you notice, he uses the same language. He has something to say about every one of the groups, and he says the same thing each time: ‘Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble’; and each time he is able to say, ‘and he delivered them out of their distresses’ (v. 6). So he invites each group by saying, ‘Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!’ (v. 8).

Then, having dealt with his four types, his four illustrations, he goes on to show us God’s dealings with these people in general. And he concludes with a final word of challenge and of exhortation: ‘Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall understand the lovingkindness of the LORD’ (v. 43).

Now that is a general analysis of this great and most notable psalm. It is a typical example of Old Testament praise. It is, in a sense, a very characteristic psalm, and I am calling your attention to it because it does, at the same time, present us with a picture of what may be described as true religion. Not every religion is true. There is such a thing as false religion; and nothing is more important for us than that we should be able to differentiate between the two.

So as we study this psalm together, we shall, incidentally, be enabled to do that. Here the blessings that come upon those who are truly related to God are presented to us in this dramatic and pictorial manner. The whole theme is that we should come to know and understand the loving kindness of the Lord; and the man wrote his psalm in order that everybody might come to understand that. He invites all these people to sing this anthem of praise to God in order that those who are not praising God may be arrested and may ask the questions, ‘Why are these people praising God? What reason have they for doing this? What is it about them that makes them do so?’ They do not do it merely for their own enjoyment; they do it also in order that they may be the means of bringing others into a like knowledge of the loving kindness of the Lord.

So here is a typical statement of the praise of the godly people under the Old Testament dispensation. But, of course, it is not only that. It is also a picture of the same praise that goes up out of the minds and the hearts and the souls of the New Testament people. It is the same God in the Old Testament and in the New. The Old Testament saints are members of the same kingdom of God as the saints in the New. Our Lord Himself said that those who enter the kingdom of the new dispensation go into the same kingdom as Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (Matt. 8:11). The fathers, He says, belong to the same kingdom. We come into the kingdom under a new dispensation, but we come into the same kingdom. The blessings of the Old Testament, in a sense, are the same as the blessings of the New. It is the same covenant of grace; it is the same gracious God dealing with us. And that is why Christian people throughout the centuries have found that there is no better way of expressing their worship, and their praise especially, than to turn to the Book of Psalms and to read or to sing a psalm together. It is the same eternal and everlasting kingdom.

Now in this particular case there is no doubt that the Psalmist had very clearly in his mind the deliverance of the children of Israel from captivity. The message of the Old Testament can be summarized in this way. God’s people are in relationship to God, and as long as they live a life of obedience God will shower His blessings upon them. But He has warned them from the very beginning that if they fail to obey Him, if they fail to keep in touch with Him, He will turn His back upon them for the time being. They will be conquered by enemies; they will be carried away into captivity; they will be scattered out of their land, out of their home which He has given them; and they will be fugitives and wanderers; they will be strangers in a strange land.

He told them that at the beginning, and because, in their folly, they forgot Him and disobeyed Him and turned their backs upon Him, that very thing happened to them. They knew what it was to be strangers in captivity. But there they cried out unto the Lord and He heard them and He brought them back. They were taken captive, some of them by the Assyrians, others by the Chaldeans, and carried far away from Jerusalem into Assyria and into Babylon. But those who cried out were brought back, a remnant returned; and the Psalmist is undoubtedly thinking of this. ‘Let the redeemed of the LORD say so’, he says, ‘whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy; and hath gathered them out of the lands, from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south.’

Again, there is no question at all but that that Old Testament history is a perfect portrayal of the New Testament salvation and of that which happens to the Christian in the New Testament. The children of Israel have been brought into being by God, and He has used them as an illustration and an example to the whole world of His way of dealing with mankind. So it is in that way that I want to use this psalm now.

It is good for us to think of these things sometimes in the form of pictures. The doctrine is there very simply and plainly in many places in the New Testament, but let us take this picture. Let us have a look at the gospel in the Old Testament, for it is there everywhere if you have eyes to see it, and you can see it in this delightful pictorial manner that impresses it upon the mind and enables us to remember it.

PRAISE – THE PRIMARY NOTE

Now there are, it seems to me, certain great principles taught here. The first is this: the primary and the fundamental note of Christianity, and, therefore, the chief characteristic of the Christian, is the giving of thanks unto God: ‘O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so …’ Let them say so, says the Psalmist, and he exhorts them and urges them to do this because they have reasons for saying so, as I shall show you.

But first of all we must grasp clearly the primacy for the Christian of this sense of gratitude and of praise to God. This is obviously a very important statement. It is certainly one of the best and the briefest ways in which we can test ourselves in order that we may discover where we are.

Relationship

So let us do that! Are we conscious of that thanksgiving? What is a Christian? Well, obviously, a Christian must be a person who is conscious of a relationship to God. You cannot read the New Testament without at once coming to that conclusion. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, this stands out plainly and clearly in the Old Testament also. According to the Bible, there are only two divisions of men and women: we are all of us either godly or ungodly. It is either true of us at this moment that the biggest thing in our lives is our relationship to God, or else it is not.

If you go through the Bible you will find that this is always the way. What is the difference between Cain and Abel? What is the difference between Noah and his family and all the rest of the world? What is it that marks out Abraham? What is the thing that picked him out in that pagan atmosphere in which he was brought up? It was this relationship to God. He was a God-centred man, a man who relied upon God and depended upon him and who had a sense of dependence on and of gratitude to God. And I could take you in the same way right through those Old Testament patriarchs and saints and prophets and all the others. That is always the thing that differentiates them. They have this sense of God; it is what marks them out.

Now if that is true even of the Old Testament, how much more is it true of the New Testament! Christian men and women, by definition, are people who believe that they are in this relationship to God in a certain way and for a certain reason. It is not that they live a certain type of life and that they do not do certain things; the first thing about them is that they are concerned about God. And therefore the thing that is so obvious about all who are not Christian is that ultimately there is no thought of God in their minds, nor in their hearts, nor in their lives.

Gratitude

‘O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.’ Furthermore, Christians are not only concerned about this relationship to God; in their hearts there is a sense of gratitude, of thanksgiving, to God. They are anxious to praise Him. God is to them the Lord of their lives and they are conscious of this sense of dependence upon Him; they have a sense of the goodness of God. Listen to other psalmists saying, ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life’ (Ps. 23:6); ‘Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name’ (Ps. 103:1). That is Old Testament.

Now, if that is Old Testament, how much more is this true of the New Testament! And as you turn to it you find that that is its great characteristic. It has often been said, and said truly, that the book of the Acts of the Apostles is the most lyrical book in the world. The thing that characterized the first Christians was that joy which was quite irrepressible. It did not matter what you did with them; you could throw people like Paul and Silas into prison and put their feet fast in the stocks, but you will find that at midnight they ‘prayed, and sang praises unto God’ (Acts 16:25). It did not matter, I say, what happened to them, there was this joy within them. Their hearts were singing; they were praising God.

And as you read the Epistles you will find exactly the same note. The Epistles were all written, in a sense, just to tell God’s people that, whatever may be taking place, they must still go on praising God. They must realize that they are to look upon these adverse conditions in the light of their new relationship to Him. So the apostle Paul, in writing to the Philippians, constantly repeats the same thing. He says, ‘Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord’ (Phil. 3:1). And then he says it again, ‘Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice’ (Phil. 4:4).

And why was the book of Revelation ever written? It was not written primarily, let me assure you, in order that people might be able to work out the date of the end of the world! That is a very grievous misunderstanding of that book. The book of Revelation was written in order that God’s people who were passing through terrible persecutions and terrible adversity might still be able to go on rejoicing. It is a book that showed them the ultimate victory of the Lord over Satan and all the other forces. They were to rejoice. It was written for men and women who had been in trouble, and it was meant to help them, not some people who were to live about two thousand years later. And so it has been a help to Christian people in every age and in every generation, and if your understanding of the book of Revelation does not help you to rejoice, you are misunderstanding it.

So then, that is obviously the first, the chief and the most characteristic note of the Christian. Christian men and women not only know God and believe in Him, they want to thank God. They praise Him. They are conscious of God’s goodness.

A vital test

Now you see at once what a vital and a valuable test this is. Morality, good as it is, never leads to such a result. A moral man is a very good man. He may indeed be a very good man, but as long as he has nothing more than morality he will never be a man who praises God. He may be very correct; he will be. He may be most punctilious. You may not be able to point a finger at him. There may not be a single blot on the copybook of his life. But it is a characteristic of the moral man that he never warms your heart, and that is because his own heart is not warmed. There is no thankfulness there, and that is why an acute thinker like Matthew Arnold – who was not a Christian – was at any rate able to say this: he defined religion as ‘morality tinged with emotion’. He was absolutely right there, in a sense. He saw, at any rate, the difference between morality and Christianity. Morality is complete, perhaps; it is correct, yes, but it is cold. There is no emotion there. Even the unbeliever Matthew Arnold, as he read his Scriptures and as he read the history of the church and as he knew something about the lives of the saints, could see that, blind as he was. It is impossible to be a Christian without emotion. Now I am not advocating emotionalism; I am the last man in the world to do so. But I would reiterate again that if there is no emotion in your religion it is not Christian. It is morality.

And, in the same way exactly, the giving of thanks, the offering of praise differentiates Christianity from philosophy. There are many philosophic systems, and many of them are very noble and excellent. They have high ideals, wonderful thoughts. Yes, but philosophy remains in the intellect, and for that reason it, likewise, is always cold. Indeed, if a philosopher begins to display any emotion, his fellow philosophers will not be slow to criticize him. They will begin to say that something has gone wrong with him. The whole art of the philosopher is to be detached, to stand apart. He is the analyst; he looks on; he deals with categories, and he works out his concepts. He must never be lost in it; if he does, he ceases to be a good philosopher. It is this cold, scientific, intellectual detachment. That is philosophy.

So it is in that way essentially different from Christianity. The glory about Christianity is that it takes up the whole person. It is not merely the will, as in morality; it is not merely the intellect, as it is in philosophy; and it is not only and merely the emotion, as it is in certain cults and false religions. No, no; it is the whole man or woman.

An essential feature

But, above all, I want to emphasize that this element of praise is the absolute essential in Christianity. Chrisitans are men and women who, before everything else, are conscious that they owe everything to the grace of God. The apostle Paul has put it finally for us in these words: ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am’ (1 Cor. 15:10). He owes it all to God. And that is why he praises God.

O, let us examine ourselves! This is the one thing in life and in the world that we cannot afford to take for granted. It is possible for you and for me to have a religion in which we feel no sense of gratitude to God. My religion may be something that I, as it were, carry with me in a bag; it may be something which is nothing more than a kind of self-admiration society. I am glad that I do pay my respects to God and I think I am a good man or woman because I do it. I am really worshipping myself for being good, and not worshipping God.

Never let us confuse church membership with true Christianity. You can be a church member without being a Christian, and if your Christianity is merely a matter of membership of a church, or even your work in the church, if it lacks this sense of gratitude to God, if it is what you are doing and what you are, rather than your praise to him, then it is not true New Testament Christianity.

You cannot get away from this. Christians realize that they owe everything to the grace of God in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And, therefore, it is the first, the fundamental test. Is there praise to God in your heart? Do you feel like responding to the invitation and the appeal of this man: ‘O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so.’? Are you ready to say it? Is there any response in you? Do you find yourself regretting that you do not praise him more? Are you sorry about that? Can you say,

Lord, it is my chief complaint

That my love is weak and faint;

Yet I love Thee and adore;

O for grace to love Thee more!

William Cowper

Can you say even that much? If you cannot say positively that you are praising God, can you say that you want to? Can you say that you bemoan the fact that you are not doing so more? I think that even that brings you in, for that means that you are praising, that you even want to praise. It is the first and chief characteristic of true Christians. It is not a philosophy they have taken up; it is not a morality that they are practising; it is this sense that they owe everything, all, to God.

PRAISE – TRUE OF ALL CHRISTIANS

Then the second principle is that this is something that is true of all Christians. Now I want to emphasize this. ‘Let the redeemed of the LORD say so,’ says the Psalmist, ‘whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy; and gathered them out of the lands, from the east, and from the west, from the north and from the south.’

This is a very important point. Here is a man who is inviting people from different portions and parts of the world to come together; and in spite of all their differences, he is calling them to unite their voices in the one theme. Here is an invitation to all and sundry, as it were, to come together to sing this universal anthem.

I put it like that because of the modern idea about Christianity. We are all such great psychologists these days that we think we can explain away Christianity very simply and very easily. ‘Ah,’ we say, ‘of course there are certain people who are religious, who are Christians, and this is because they happen to have been born like that; they are made like that; they are the religious type. Or, if you like, they have the religious complex. There are these different types of temperament: some people are mercurial, others are pragmatic; some are punctilious – perhaps over-punctilious; others are careless and negligent, “come day, go day”. Some are interested in music, art, literature, politics, science and all those various things. So the human race is divided up like this, and amongst them there is this religious type. And the tragedy, of course, of the past was that the Church used to teach that everybody should be religious. They did not realize; they hadn’t the knowledge as we now have, which says that it is all right for some but is not meant for all; it is just for certain types of people.’ So the argument goes.

A universal invitation

But this man in sending out his invitation gives the lie direct to this modern theory. He invites them ‘from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south’. He says that all these divisions and distinctions are completely irrelevant. They make no difference at all. He is calling men and women who come from entirely different backgrounds to join in the same praise. And that is still the proud claim and boast of the Christian Church, as it has been throughout the centuries. It does not matter what country a man comes from; it does not matter what is the colour of his skin; it does not matter what his heredity is; it does not matter what his cultural background is; it does not matter what he is temperamentally, what he is psychologically; it does not matter what century he belongs to; it does not matter to the slightest extent what his actual experience may be. Still the invitation goes out to all to come together and to unite in the same words and in the same anthem of praise. ‘Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!’ (v. 8)

Now this is, to me, one of the most imp...

Table of contents

• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Foreword by Daniel Montgomery
• 1. Let Everybody Praise the Lord
• 2. The Wilderness
• 3. The Prison
• 4. The Dreadful Disease
• 5. The Terrible Storm
• 6. The God of the Bible
• 7. The Salvation of God
• 8. True Christianity
• Other Titles
• Christian Focus