Why don't you come with me? We love a warm invitation to join in something special. Come with me to the concert at the open-air theatre. Come with me on our holiday. Maybe even, for some of you, the reason you're here this morning in church is because someone who comes here regularly said to you, "I'm going to church on Sunday – come with me."
If we're invited along to something, it makes us feel special; it makes us feel welcomed. And if you're slightly unsure about where it is that you're going, you feel reassured that someone who knows the ropes has taken you along as their friend – and that's why you're there.
Psalm 95 is an invitation along these lines. Psalm 95 says to us as we read it and as we hear, "Come along, let's do this together." We are being invited as the people of God by the person who wrote this psalm to come along with them.
Now, this was written a thousand years before the time of Jesus on Earth, but actually what we're going to see as we look at this together is that, as Christians living in the New Testament age, it is actually the voice of Jesus that is speaking through these words and inviting us to come along with him. We're hearing Jesus invite us this morning.
1. Come, let us sing to the Creator
So there are three invitations in this psalm. The first is: Come, let us sing to the Creator. Come, let us sing to the Creator.
And there are two halves to that sentence – there's come, let us sing, and there's grounding that in the fact that God is the Creator.
1a. Come, let us sing
So first, just the first two verses – the invitation: Come, let us sing. So here's what they say:
"Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Come, let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song."
Let's sing. Let's shout. Even in verse two, where it says extol him, that is actually the same word as the word in verse one translated let us shout aloud. Now, I can see why they changed it to extol, because let us shout aloud with music and song kind of sounds wrong, doesn't it? It sounds like a bit of a brawl, a bit tuneless to shout in song. But that's what it says. This is loud. This is full-throated. This is joyful.
If ever you've been to watch a live football game and you've got the fans singing on the terraces from the tops of their voices – this is that.
Occasionally, I meet men who say, "Well, I find the singing in church a bit awkward – I don't really sing." But then you look at what they're doing on Saturday afternoon, and you discover they are perfectly capable of singing. Have you ever been hoarse even after watching sport?
So let me take you back to 1998. It was the World Cup. I was however many years younger then than I am now, and some friends kindly invited me around to their house for a curry. A load of us gathered to watch – it was the round of 16 stage of the World Cup. It was England–Argentina. Now, I doubt any of you remember that match. It was a painful match, so you might remember it, actually. All the old names – your David Beckham, David Seaman in goal – and David Beckham actually got a red card and got sent off. So we had to fight with only ten men against Argentina, and we held them.
And at that point, it was extra time, and then it was golden goal. So it went on and on and on, and we held them off all of that time – and in the end crashed out, as is England's way, on penalties. Losing sport at penalties is an English pastime.
Anyway, I cycled home, bumped into one of my housemates and said hello, and they said to me, "You've been shouting at the telly, haven't you?" I had no idea I had been shouting at the telly, but I actually had virtually no voice left.
Let me ask you this question: when is the last time you went around to someone's house for lunch on a Sunday, having been at church, and they heard your voice croaking and said to you, "You've been to church, haven't you?"
In this regard, I'm thankful for some of our African brothers and sisters here, because I have to say, I think you guys get this in a way that we in the West don't. So one of the things that some of you have taught me is that being loud in your worship can bring glory to God. Is that true? Yes, sir – it is. So thank you for helping me learn that lesson.
See, this is not just joy in your heart – this is joy out loud for all the world to see, for all the world to hear. You can't contain the joy – it comes out, and it comes out with volume.
It's a warm day today, so what we've done just to ventilate a bit – we've opened the door. Now, we think carefully before we do that because there are people who live in these houses here, and we want them to be thrilled to know that there is a church that meets right on their doorstep and to be thrilled by that. But we also know that some people like a lie-in on Sunday mornings, and not everything that we do might thrill them.
So what we've actually been doing this morning – you won't have even noticed probably – is just, when we're singing the songs, we just shut the door so that we don't disturb them too much, because that's the noisiest bit. But when we're just people talking, then let's let some fresh air flow through. But actually, what this psalm makes you want to do is say, Let's just fling it open, because the whole point of this is that our God is so glorious – we want everyone to hear the volume. But we love our neighbours and we want them to not be put off by the things that they don't need to be put off by, so we kind of respect that.
But this is what's going on here. See, when you come on a Sunday morning and you're singing in one of these seats, what are you doing? Are you a mumbler or are you a roarer? Do you roar or do you mumble? Can your neighbour hear your voice?
A long time ago, someone gave me some advice: when you're in church singing, here's what they do – they said, "Sing softly enough so that you can hear the voices of the people around you."
Now, let me say, there is actually some really good wisdom in that, because church is a collective thing and there is a beauty in hearing voices that blend. And if everyone is too loud, actually you don't ever get the encouragement of hearing the other. So there is wisdom in that. But you risk missing the chance to be loud.
And sometimes, if it's, Can I be – let's – I'm going to try and outdo you, you're going to try and outdo me – let's see where we can take this, that is quite fun, and is the kind of thing that is being talked of here. Let's sing.
1b. … to the Creator
Let's sing to the Creator.
Here is why we sing loudly – verse three:
"For the Lord our God is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the Earth,
the mountain peaks belong to him.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land."
God made everything.
So let me ask you – what can you hold in your hands? Maybe a bit of soil. Or I remember going to a French market, and when you wanted to buy green beans, the quantity they were sold in was sort of by the handful. But this market stall guy had the most enormous... so one handful of beans was enough to feed a family for a week.
What does God hold in his hands? Only the depths of the Earth.
Or how about making things? What have you made recently? Maybe you've been on South Bay beach, where the sand is soft after the tide has gone out, and you've made a sandcastle. Maybe you've made some food. Maybe your job is fabrication and making things. Some people in this church make potato chips and hash browns for a living. If you buy frozen chips and hash browns from any brand, anywhere in the country, it is highly likely they originated here in Scarborough.
What does God make? Not the sandcastle on the beach. No – only the entire ocean and the dry land.
We went up on Oliver's Mount yesterday. It's lovely. If you've not been – go on a clear day. When there's a sea fret, I mean, you see nothing. But go on a lovely clear day, and you can see all the way up the coast towards Ravenscar, all the way down towards – well, certainly Filey. On a clear day you can see Flamborough. You can see the houses, the churches, the factories around Scarborough, the sea – and you can stand up there and look around and say, Every single thing I'm looking at was made by God.
Now, other religions at the time this was written – they all had what they thought of and called as the "great god". Ancient kings would call themselves the "great king". If you've read the book of Isaiah or Kings, you know that the king of Assyria says to the king of Judah, "Thus says the great king..."
Well, in this psalm it uses a figure of speech that you may have come across but maybe not known what it's called – called a merism. And a merism is a figure of speech where you take two extremes and you use that to indicate totality – everything in between as well. Things in the psalms like "As far as the east is from the west." OK, you meet this too.
So here we go – take the vertical dimension first: from the furthest reaches of the Earth's depths to the mountain peaks. Then take the horizontal dimension: God made the sea; God made the land. And the idea is quite clear – it's saying absolutely everything that there is in three-dimensional space is his. The world is not divided between different deities. There's not some competition for control. It is all his.
And the New Testament would add to that – it all belongs to Jesus, because he made it. So here is Colossians chapter 1:15–17:
"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on Earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
If the world was a place where different gods battled it out for control, it would be a really frightening world to live in. Instead, we have a world where our God is the great God – the great King. It is all his.
Which is why we must come along. We must sing. We must shout. As God's people, we know that we are secure. But it's not just what God's people need to do. We're not called to praise because he's redeemed us here – we're called to praise him because he's the one true God. Which means all people must worship him.
So: Come, let's sing to the Creator.
2. Come, let us bow to our shepherd
And then the second one: Come, let's bow to our Shepherd.
Come, let's bow to our Shepherd. And again, it's a sentence of two halves – there's what we have to do: Come, let's bow, and then there's why – because he's our Shepherd.
2a. Come, let us bow
So, verse six: Let us bow.
Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
Now, this talk of worship could make you think that we're still in the language of verses 1 and 2 – it's still talking about music. Because in the modern day, when we speak about Come, let's worship, we think about what we do when the band gets up and we sing. But this is different.
There are three verbs in verse five, and they're all to do with going low. So if I put it more literally: Come, let us bow low and bow down. Let us kneel...
For example, that first word, come. Let's bow low. It's quite a common word. We first meet it in — or one of the places we meet it, sorry — is in Genesis chapter 18, verse 2. Some visitors come to meet Abraham and Sarah, and we are told that Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. He didn't start to sing his favourite worship song — he bowed before them.
Genesis 37 — that, remember, is Joseph's dreams. Remember, Joseph dreamt of 12 sheaves of corn, and "your sheaves bowed down," he says, "to mine." This is about our posture as we approach God. Now, this is about more than just posture, but why would we assume it's about less than posture?
Now let me try and illustrate this, but let me try and be really careful. Over the past few weeks, the relationships between different ethnicities and religions in this country have been strained to breaking point and beyond. How do we respond to that?
Well, as Christians, I would say one of the things the Bible calls us to be is hospitable. So, as a nation that historically was a Christian nation, we would want to say, actually, we deeply respect people of other cultures, backgrounds and faiths, and we want to cherish you. And you're welcome to come to our country, and we want you to feel thoroughly at home here.
But we need to be able somehow to say that another faith is wrong and yet treat those who practise that religion with genuine respect and friendship. And that would be a Christian response. We don't pretend everything is the same, but neither do we treat anybody badly. We just respect and make friends.
So, Muslims now — okay, they worship the wrong God. But let's talk about posture for a moment. So, the way they worship — okay, now, kneeling is optional. Has to be. You don't need to recite specific words repetitively. You certainly don't need to synchronise your movements. But does that posture before God now never have its place? Why is slouching a more fitting posture for prayer — really?
Many of us, when we come to pray, embrace what I've heard nicknamed the shampoo position. Have you ever thought about kneeling — at home or at church?
At the start of our service, we always have a time where we confess our sin. That may be a particular point where, actually, a posture of kneeling before God brings our words in line with what we do with our bodies. At the very least, these verses describe a deep humility, a reverence, and a hushed awe.
God is here. We are speaking to the holy, holy, holy maker of the universe. The re-creator of his people. The king who loved you so much that he died to rescue you.
Now, some of us love the noise and forget the need for reverence. Others are people that love reverence and silence in our worship, but do not see that joyful, vibrant praise has its place. Whereas the reality is: we need both. And both are public responses to God, done with our bodies, that people can see — for all the world to see — that this is the God we have.
2b. … to our Shepherd
We bow. Why? We bow to our Shepherd.
Verse seven: For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.
We're told he's our maker. He did everything that needs to be done to make us into his redeemed people. He is our God, and we are his people. This is covenant language. The great Old Testament promise was: I will be your God, and you will be my people.
So we are devoted to him. He is our Lord. But he, in his turn, commits himself to us — to protect us, provide for us, shelter us, adopt us. And then we're told that we are his flock, and that makes him our Shepherd.
Now, when it says that we are the flock under his care, that is literally the flock in his hand. That's a pregnant phrase. So remember verse four: The God in whose hands are the depths of the earth is the God who holds you in his hands.
Or verse five: His hands formed the dry land. The God whose hands made North and South Bay is the God whose hands look after you.
But they don't just take us further back into the psalm — they take us into the New Testament as well, into John chapter 10, where Jesus said, I am the Good Shepherd. And in that context, Jesus said (John chapter 10:27–29):
My sheep listen to my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one.
Come, let's sing to the Creator.
Come, let's bow to our Shepherd.
3. Come, and listen
And third: come and listen.
As we've been invited into this psalm, we've gone on a journey — a journey from joy to reverence, and now the next step, which says: just stop talking completely. Just listen.
Today, if only you would hear his voice. Do not harden your hearts, as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness, where your ancestors tested me. They tried me, though they had seen what I did. For forty years I was angry with that generation; I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.” So I declared on oath in my anger, “They shall never enter my rest.”
He says, when you hear God speak — don't harden your hearts. That word for harden, that's the same word you meet repeatedly in Deuteronomy, where God calls his people stiff-necked. It's a vivid picture. It describes somebody whose course is made up. They are looking straight ahead, and they won't be diverted. Nothing will turn the way they're going, and the word of God will not turn their path — utterly rigid and inflexible.
And it's so easy to be like this. You hear a sermon at church. You open the Bible at home. You already know what you think. You already know how you want to live your life. So you only listen to the things God says that fit with what you've already decided really matters.
Cooking with Young Children – Lesson 43: Peppermint Creams
Now, there are all kinds of fancy BBC Good Food recipes for peppermint creams that start with weird ingredients you'd never thought could go into a peppermint cream. But here's the easy way: pre-bought fondant icing, peppermint essence, and green food colouring. Simply mix together.
What could go wrong? Well, plenty, as it turns out. But the most obvious thing to go wrong is you get your icing out of the fridge and you add the liquids to it, because it would just roll straight off. You need to warm and soften that icing so that it's supple and soft, and then your peppermint and your green will work its way in. A block that is hard from the fridge — it would just dribble straight off and do nothing.
Unless our hearts are soft and supple, unless our necks are flexible and warmed up and ready to receive the word of God, it will just roll straight off and won't go in. And so he gives them some great Old Testament examples in which the people refuse to listen to God and refuse to trust him.
At great cost, they left slavery in Egypt. God gave them water and then food in the middle of the desert. And then comes Exodus 17, when they won't trust God for water. That was a place called Rephidim, but it got nicknamed Meribah, which means quarrelling, and Massah, which means testing, because they wouldn't trust God. So God gave them water out of a rock.
Forty years later, Numbers chapter 20 — they doubt God will give them water. More water flows from a rock. That was a place called Kadesh, but it also got the nickname Meribah. In between, Numbers 14 — they send spies to explore the land that God's about to give them. They've just seen God obliterate the mighty Egyptian army, but they think he's incapable of giving them the vastly easier-to-conquer land before their eyes.
And God's response to all of this refusal to trust him? Well, it's two things.
Number one: he's disgusted. So it says here, "For forty years I was angry with that generation." Angry doesn't quite capture the loathing, the disgust, the repulsion in this word. It turned God's stomach that the people did that — that they would not listen to him.
We need to see really clearly, brothers and sisters, that when Christians ignore what God says in the Bible, it makes him angry. It is a stench in his nostrils. And tragically, there are churches today that make a principled point of saying that what God says in his word does not matter. God isn't just neutral about that. And if we — that temptation's in our hearts to say, I don't really want to listen to what's in here — God really hates that. It's awful.
Second thing he does: he bans them from the promised land. So, we had a reading from Hebrews 3 which points out this — the psalm was written for people who were already in the land. So when it warns its readers that they might not make it to Canaan — well, it means that Canaan doesn't exhaust the rest God has for his people.
We've seen this psalm invites us to come. Well, Jesus says, Come to me, and I will give you rest. And ultimately, the rest for the people of God is when Jesus returns and the new creation comes in.
So whenever we hear God speaking, it is today for us. Every Sunday, when we open the Bible in church, God says to us, Today, if only you would hear my voice. Every time you open the Bible, every time you choose not to open a Bible — the warning is clear.
This psalm actually has two different words for come. You get one in verse 1: Come, let us sing. A different one in verse 6: Come, let us bow. That one means more like, kind of, come in. Come in — let's bow. And you get that same verb in verse 11: I declared on oath in my anger, “They shall never come in to my rest.” The warning is unmissable. If we won't come into the presence of Jesus and bow to him now, we won't come into the presence of Jesus and rest with him at the end of time.
Let's just revisit Jesus the Good Shepherd — the very first verse I read a moment ago: My sheep listen to my voice, and they follow me.
Conclusion
Well, it's time to wrap up where this psalm's taken us. I want to adapt an illustration — a picture that I picked up from a book I read. He just tells it slightly differently. It's by a guy called John Goldingay.
Think back to the coronation of King Charles III — okay, it's recent enough, most — many of us — can remember that. First of all, imagine that you're amongst the crowds on The Mall in central London. You've got your little Union Jack flags, you're waving, you're cheering. Actually, you'd have your umbrella — it was a pretty wet day — but it didn't dampen the cheers.
But then, by some miracle, you are personally invited into a private audience with the new king — a moment of great solemnity and respect, as you are coached and rehearsed: how to bow from the neck, which way to face, how to leave the room without turning your back on your king. You are before your Sovereign, and this is a moment of real, careful respect.
But then it turns out that what it means to be a loyal subject is actually not to do with the amount of noise you made at all. It's not to do with getting your bow right. It's to do with how you live after that day as a loyal subject to your king.
This psalm is an invitation for us from Jesus — from Jesus our maker, from Jesus the maker of all. It's an invitation from Jesus our Shepherd, who laid down his life for his sheep. It's an invitation from Jesus, the Word of God incarnate.
And he calls us. He calls us to come — to come and sing. Let's lend our voices. He calls us to come and bow. Let's bend our knees. And he calls us to come and listen. Let's bend our wills to him.
So, come with me.