The Bible Study Hour

Announcer: While there are many psalms of thanks in the Bible, there is none quite like the old 100th, the classic Psalm of Thanksgiving. Charles Spurgeon said that nothing can be more sublime this side of heaven than the singing of this noble song and that a cheerful spirit is in keeping with the gratitude we should cherish to a loving God.

Announcer: Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

Announcer: Dr. Boice asks the question, if it's hard for us to find words to express appreciation to another human being, how can we possibly express adequate thanks to our God for the things he has done?

Announcer: Let's join Dr. Boice as we study Psalm 100 and discover the reasons we are to be thankful and three ways in which we can express our thanks to a wonderful God.

Dr. James Boice: It's a striking fact about the 100th Psalm that it's the only Psalm in the Psalter that's explicitly identified as a Psalm for giving thanks. It's right there in the title, Psalm 100, a Psalm for giving thanks. That doesn't mean it's the only Psalm in the Psalter that encourages us to give thanks or does give thanks, of course, because many of them do. Expressions of thanksgiving, inducements, encouragements to give thanks occur throughout the entire Psalter.

Dr. James Boice: We can think of some of the great Psalms that do that. Psalm 107 is one of my favorites. It's been called the Pilgrim's Psalm because it meant a great deal to our pilgrim forefathers and foremothers.

Dr. James Boice: It describes, as they believed, their deliverance from homeless wanderings, imprisonment, persecutions, the kind of things that they had endured in Europe before coming to this country, and then also describes their perils at sea, their starvation, the death of family and friends, the kind of things they experienced on the way to get here and then also after they had arrived.

Dr. James Boice: I can imagine without any great stretch of thought that this Psalm must have been read with great Thanksgiving, with tears of Thanksgiving at the first Thanksgiving. They would have read things like this. It concluded, whoever is wise, let him heed these things and consider the great love of the Lord.

Dr. James Boice: Or there's Psalm 118. I mentioned that because this is the Psalm that uses the word thanks more than any other Psalm in the Psalter. It begins and it ends the same way. It has a challenge, "Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever."

Dr. James Boice: Lots of Psalms talk about thanks, but as I say, Psalm 100 is the only one in the Psalter that is explicitly identified this way. And what a Psalm of Thanksgiving it is. It's a very quintessence of Thanksgiving.

Dr. James Boice: Christians have seen this and known it down through the centuries. As a result, numerous poets have set it into English verse, and others have cast it into various hymn tunes. We know some of them very well. We know it best as 'Old Hundredth'. Many hymn books, including our own, it's the very first. The words that we sing are by William Keith, written in 1561. The tune is by Louis Bourgeois. It appeared first in the Genevan Psalter. "All people that on Earth do dwell, sing to the Lord with cheerful voice. Him serve with fear, His praise forth tell. Come ye before Him and rejoice." We sing that a lot.

Dr. James Boice: Or there's the metrical version given to us by Isaac Watts, one of the great poets and hymn writers of the English language. It begins, "Before Jehovah's awful throne, ye nations, bow with sacred joy. Know that the Lord is God alone, He can create and He destroy."

Dr. James Boice: Charles Haddon Spurgeon loved it. He was a great Baptist preacher of the 19th century. He liked people to sing the hymns and sing them loud. He said, "Nothing can be more sublime this side of heaven than the singing of this noble Psalm by a vast congregation."

Dr. James Boice: It's not hard to outline it or analyze it. It contains seven great imperatives, plus two explanations of why we should give thanks. The first explanation comes halfway through the Psalm, and the second explanation comes at the end.

Dr. James Boice: So if you follow that kind of an outline, you get something like this. First, a statement of how to give thanks. Then an explanation of why we should give thanks. Then an invitation to give thanks. And finally, a great expression of praise or Thanksgiving. You see why it holds together so well as a Psalm of Thanksgiving.

Dr. James Boice: Let's think of the first part. Occasionally when somebody does something for us, we find ourselves saying, "How in the world can I ever properly express my appreciation of such a person?" That's not always easy to do. Some people seem to have a knack for it. They're very expressive of thanks and appreciation to other people. Most of us have trouble thinking about that. But listen, if it's difficult for us sometimes to know how properly to express our appreciation or thanks for another human being, how can we possibly express our thanks to God adequately?

Dr. James Boice: What can we do? How can we show God that we actually are grateful for what he's done for us in salvation? The Psalm suggests three things at the beginning. The first one's a little bit surprising. It says, first, we can shout.

Dr. James Boice: Now, I ask, is that really what we're supposed to do? The Psalm's going on to say that the people of God should come together at his temple and worship, so it's talking about corporate worship. Does that mean that you and I should really come together to church to shout?

Dr. James Boice: I'm not sure it means exactly that, but let me suggest that if that's what it does mean, it's a lot better than what a lot of other people sometimes come to church to do. It's a little bit helpful perhaps to know that the Hebrew verb there has to do with making a glad shout, that is the kind of shout subjects might have for a king when a king arrives in splendor, something like that. But however you look at it, it still says shouting. What it really means is that we are to do it loudly.

Dr. James Boice: We also are to do it joyfully. Notice that that word joy or the idea joy appears three times just in the first verse. There's the word joy and there's gladness and joyful. So it's probably accurate to say that the Psalm is saying that we should express our praise and Thanksgiving to God with great gladness and enthusiasm.

Dr. James Boice: Spurgeon, whom I mentioned, said of this verse, "Our happy God should be worshipped by a happy people." A cheerful spirit is in keeping with his nature, his acts and the gratitude which we should cherish for his mercy.

Dr. James Boice: When we come to church, do we really come with joy in our hearts? Are we really thankful? If we are, something of that's going to communicate to other people. They're going to say, "Look, those people have something to be thankful about. I wonder what it is." And as they come to find out what it is, God is praised even more.

Dr. James Boice: The second thing is that we can serve. Notice the word, serve the Lord with gladness. Now if we ask how we are to do that, the Psalm is chiefly thinking of coming together and serving God in worship, so the worship itself becomes his service.

Dr. James Boice: And yet, when we say that, we can't help but think of the way the Lord Jesus Christ talked about it toward the end of Matthew. Remember he's talking about people appearing before God at the day of judgment and the separation of the sheep and the goats, the sheep being those who are to be saved and the goats the lost.

Dr. James Boice: And he says that the reason those who are being saved are being saved is because God has worked in them in such a way that when the Lord was hungry, they gave him something to eat, and when he was thirsty, they gave him something to drink.

Dr. James Boice: When he was a stranger, they invited him in. When he needed clothes, they clothed him. When he was sick, they looked after him. When he was in prison, they visited him. And the lost say on their part, "When did we ever see you in those conditions? We would certainly have done it."

Dr. James Boice: And those who are saved also say, "Lord, we didn't see you doing that, did we?" And Jesus replies very clearly, "It's when you do it to these who are the least of my brethren that you've done it unto me." The Lord himself wasn't actually in prison. But you see when you visit the prisoners, you're serving him. Now, that service, we have to bear that in mind.

Dr. James Boice: What he's really saying is that we give thanks to God when we meet the needs of others.

Dr. James Boice: Let's be practical here for a moment. Let's think about it. One of the things Jesus said was feeding the hungry. How can we do that? Well, we do that here at Tenth Presbyterian Church through our Acts Community Dinner program, among other things.

Dr. James Boice: And we can and should do it also by inviting people into our homes that are needy and need our help and can be helped in this way.

Dr. James Boice: How about welcoming strangers? Our Lord mentions that. There are people who are utterly alone. They have no relatives. They don't have friends. The city is filled with people like that. How can we thank God by ministering to them? We can by including them in the kind of things we do.

Dr. James Boice: The Bible says, "God sets the lonely in families." You say, "Well, how does he do that?" It's by setting them in Christian families. And some Christian families have the opportunity of including those who have nowhere to go.

Dr. James Boice: How about clothing those who lack adequate clothing and caring for those who are sick and lack adequate care?

Dr. James Boice: Well, we do that by working through the deacons in an official way and also by helping in other ways to minister to those who are needy. As far as those who are sick and dying are concerned, one way we do this is through our ministry to people who have AIDS. That's serving God.

Dr. James Boice: How about visiting those who are in prison? Recent years, thanks to the work of prison fellowship, Christians have rediscovered this as a ministry. We should have had it all along, but we have rediscovered it. It's a very important thing. Some of us are involved in that as well.

Dr. James Boice: So we are to shout and we are to serve.

Dr. James Boice: Here's the third thing. Notice we are to come. Come before him with joyful songs. Now that does refer to formal worship.

Dr. James Boice: And what it really is is an invitation. We are to serve God by serving others, yes, but we are to worship God too. In other words, it's a way of saying that faith and works go together.

Dr. James Boice: We express our faith to God when we praise him for what he's done, but at the same time, we're supposed to be reaching out and helping other people. It's a way of saying that a social gospel alone is not enough. As a matter of fact, silent belief is not enough. All of that has to go together.

Dr. James Boice: I'm very struck just thinking about these three words, how well rounded this first section of the Psalm is. We're told to shout, serve, and come, and these three words, if you think about them, embrace number one, our verbal witness, number two, our humanitarian activity, and number three, our worship. Three necessary parts of Christianity.

Dr. James Boice: Now the fourth imperative in the Psalm is know, but it really leads us to a new section, which is why we should give thanks. You see, it's very important to know that.

Dr. James Boice: It's one thing for a Psalm to say, "Look, you ought to give thanks to God and here's what you should do, the way you should do it." But we're never going to do it unless we really know why, unless we have a sense deep in our hearts of true thanksgiving for the one who has been so gracious to us. And in order to do that, we have to know God.

Dr. James Boice: You remember what Paul said when he was talking to the Greeks in Athens? He had spent some time wandering through the city before they gave him an opportunity to speak for Mars Hill. And as he had done that, he saw an altar there and it had an inscription on it to the unknown God.

Dr. James Boice: There were all kinds of gods in Athens, all kinds of idols. They said there were more idols or gods in Athens than there were people. And yet they were afraid they might have missed one. And so there was this idol said to the unknown God, the one whose name we didn't quite get yet, that was the idea.

Dr. James Boice: And Paul, when he began his speech, referred to that. It was a wonderful point of contact with his listeners. And he said, "Now, the one whom you worship as unknown, I'm going to declare to you." And so he began to talk about God.

Dr. James Boice: What is it that we should know about God? We should know all sorts of things about God, but this Psalm talks about two things. It presents God as our creator, number one, and as our redeemer, number two. That's the meaning of this verse.

Dr. James Boice: It is he who made us and we are his, that is, he's our creator, and we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. We become his sheep, the sheep of his pasture by redemption. That's the way the Bible talks about that. Now, those two go together.

Dr. James Boice: It's worth pointing that out. You see, it's knowing God as our creator, which enables us to know ourselves as his creatures. It's knowing God as our redeemer, by which we know ourselves as those who are redeemed.

Dr. James Boice: It's the kind of thing that John Calvin pointed out at the beginning of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, where he's talking about true knowledge. And he says, "True knowledge, real knowledge, consists of two things: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves." And these always go together.

Dr. James Boice: So you don't really know who you are unless you know that you've been made by God. That's probably the most important thing that can be said about you.

Dr. James Boice: And you don't really ever come to know God without learning something new about yourself. So if you learn about his holiness, you learn that you're not holy, but how you can become holy through Christ. If you learn about his omniscience, that he knows everything, you come to know how ignorant you are, but the truth is to be found in the Bible and so on. Those two always go together.

Dr. James Boice: Having said that, let's look at these two things. We're to know that God is our creator and we are to thank him for that.

Dr. James Boice: People don't. They're very unthankful. And there are reasons for that. One reason is that we imagine in our unregenerate state that somehow we're our own creators.

Dr. James Boice: We have a scientific version of that that says that things have come about to be the way they are by mechanical means, and the name generally given to that is evolution. It doesn't really require God. The survival of the fittest is simply a principle that has been operating for many millions of years. We're here the way we are right now because of those impersonal biological forces.

Dr. James Boice: So we kind of push God out that way. Sometimes Christians do it. We know that God is there. We kind of believe he's our creator, but somehow we think we've gotten to be where we are entirely apart from him. And so we're not thankful for these things.

Dr. James Boice: Sometimes we do it in a very personal way when we have an inordinate admiration of our own abilities and achievements. You know, it was a humorist who said of the Englishman, defining who he is, that he's a self-made man who worships his creator.

Dr. James Boice: And that, of course, is the way many of us think. We achieve certain things in a very secular way. We say, "I've achieved it."

Dr. James Boice: There's a sense in which that's true, but we achieve it with the gifts and the opportunities that God has given. You see, it's not very profound or sophisticated or insightful to say, "I did it," unless you say, "Yes, but it was with the powers God provided."

Dr. James Boice: You see, it's very important to realize that God is our creator. Every good and perfect gift comes down from heaven from the Father of lights in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

Dr. James Boice: And when we begin to realize that, and we turn to all of the blessings we enjoy as his creatures, we become thankful.

Dr. James Boice: Secondly, it talks about God as redeemer. I said a moment ago that's what these words, "His people, the sheep of his pasture," ultimately refer to.

Dr. James Boice: When we come to a Psalm like this and find that kind of reference, it's hard not to think of Psalm 23, David's great Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." God, who has a savior, provides for him, and who will see as he gets to the end of the Psalm that he will spend all of his days in the presence of God forever.

Dr. James Boice: Or we think of what Jesus did with that image, recorded for us in John 10. He said, "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." Talking about his death on the cross for our salvation. We become saved. We become his by his death on the cross.

Dr. James Boice: He said, "I'm the good shepherd. I know my sheep and my sheep know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this pen." He was speaking to Jews. He was saying there, "I have Gentiles that I'm going to bring. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice and there will be one flock and one shepherd."

Dr. James Boice: That's what the Church of Jesus Christ is today. One flock composed of Jew and Gentile. People from all walks of life. People from all nationalities. That's Jesus doing. And he did it because he is our redeemer.

Dr. James Boice: If there is no other reason why we should be thankful to God, this Psalm is saying we should be thankful because God made us and because God saved us from our sin. It would take a longer life than I have to exhaust that theme. And we ought to be thankful.

Dr. James Boice: Let me notice one other thing about this before we go on. That's these words, "He made us."

Dr. James Boice: If God really made us, if he made us and not we ourselves, and if we're his because he made us, then we are his to do with as he seems best to him. Let's think about our lives.

Dr. James Boice: Has God given us days of unusual prosperity? If so, it's pleased him to do it, and we ought to be thankful to him because he has given us prosperity. Has, on the other hand, he given us troublesome days or trials or sorrow? If that's the case, we need to thank him for that.

Dr. James Boice: Because he is an all-wise God and he's gracious even in allowing such hard times. Remember what the Apostle Paul said? He said, "I've learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who strengthens me."

Dr. James Boice: Where do those verses come from? They come from the book of Philippians. You know the background of that book. Paul's in prison when he writes that. It isn't the case of God intervening some way miraculously in his life to free him from prison. He's in prison.

Dr. James Boice: And it's there in prison that he praises God and thanks him. He says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."

Dr. James Boice: One more point about this verse, the phrase, "We are his." And it's this, regardless of what may happen to us, we are still his.

Dr. James Boice: Troubles may come. Sooner or later they'll inevitably come, but it's no matter. We are his. Sickness may come. We are his. We may lose our job. We are his. Suppose death should come into our immediate family. Suppose those who are very close to us should get sick and be snatched away. We are still his. They are still his. We will always be his.

Dr. James Boice: God the Father says, you read it in Hebrews 13, "Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you." Likewise, Jesus Christ the Son said, "I am with you always to the end of the age."

Dr. James Boice: Paul wrote, "Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord."

Dr. James Boice: You see, you think your way through that and if you're not thankful now, you have a very hard heart indeed.

Dr. James Boice: The third part of this Psalm is an invitation to thank God. And once again, there are three strong imperatives: enter, give thanks, and praise. Now I said earlier, I emphasize that one way in which we give thanks is by what we do for others. But when we get to verse four, the emphasis really is upon the gathering of God's people to the temple, we would say to church, to thank and praise God together.

Dr. James Boice: Now that's not just a way of saying that it's good to go to church. We have an approach to church life today that says, "Well, you go for what you individually can get out of it." But that's not quite saying that. You see, it teaches that there's a special aspect of thanksgiving that involves the whole group of the people of God, the whole congregation of God together, and the prayers of God together, not just the individual prayers of isolated Christians.

Dr. James Boice: Now that's what we should expect, of course, because when God called us to faith in Jesus Christ, he didn't just call us to an isolated salvation. He always calls us to membership in the church, as we together participate in that which is our common heritage. This means that those among whom, for whom, and with whom we should give thanks are other believers.

Dr. James Boice: And what is more, we should exercise part of our responsibility in this matter by encouraging them to give thanks. There's a great invitation to come and give thanks to God. I can imagine that this was used in Jewish worship as an invitation from one believer to another. One would say to the other, "Come, let's go up to the temple and worship God. Come, let's go, let's let's let's go up together and do it."

Dr. James Boice: Do you do that? Do you praise God by inviting other people to come and worship him? Somebody's going to stay home, watch a basketball game on television or something like that. As a Christian, you ought to say, "You shouldn't be doing that. You have an opportunity to worship God. Come on, let that go. Let's go worship God together."

Dr. James Boice: One way we thank God is by inviting others to join us in the thanksgiving. I notice that the Psalm begins this way. You see, it begins, "Shout for joy to the Lord, all the Earth." That's as if the Psalmist is saying, "I'm not going to be satisfied until everybody everywhere joins me and the others in praising God."

Dr. James Boice: The final verse of the Psalm, like verse three, explains why you and I should thank God. It's another reason. It's not just a repetition of the first explanation. You see, the third verse said we should thank God because of what he's done. He's created us and he's redeemed us. This verse teaches that we should thank God, quite apart from that, because of who he is.

Dr. James Boice: It tells us three things about him. First of all, it tells us that God is good. The gods of the heathen weren't good. They were selfish and capricious. Sometimes you could get them to do something to help you out or to leave you alone. But you never knew when the gods of the heathen were going to get at you, knock you down when you least expected it. God isn't like that. Our God is good.

Dr. James Boice: When he created the world and all that was in it, he saw it, and he said, "That's good." When he gave us the law, he said, "The law is good." When he reveals his will to us, he tells us that it's his good, pleasing, and perfect will. The word gospel itself means good news. The very word God is a shortened form of the word good. God is good.

Dr. James Boice: No wonder the Psalmist cried out, "Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him." Psalm 34, verse 8.

Dr. James Boice: Secondly, God is love. Psalm 100 says this love endures forever.

Dr. James Boice: God is many things. He has many different attributes, but nothing lies so much at the very heart of God as we think of it as love.

Dr. James Boice: And that love does not vacillate. Human loves change. But the love of God is forever. Nothing so endures him to his people.

Dr. James Boice: And then number three, God is faithful. We live in a world of change, and not only is the world changing, even change is changing because it gets changing faster and faster. It's what Alvin Toffler was talking about in Future Shock. It's one of the problems of living in the contemporary age.

Dr. James Boice: In the midst of a rapidly changing world, it's a great comfort to know that God himself is unchanging. He is today for us what he was to our fathers, and their fathers and mothers before them, and back through all the history of the Old Testament, through the patriarchs to our very first parents.

Dr. James Boice: Not only that, not only is God the same today, he will always be the same. Has God been good in the past? Yes, of course he has. Well, then he'll always be good. You don't have to worry that he'll cease being good at some future date.

Dr. James Boice: Has God been loving? Of course. Then he'll always be loving. His very nature is love. You need never worry that he will cease to love you.

Dr. James Boice: Have you been through difficult times? Very few Christians have avoided difficult times altogether, yet those who have gone through them can testify that God has kept them in those times securely. Well, if he's done it in the past, he's going to do it again.

Dr. James Boice: Here's the final question. Has anyone greater reasons to thank God than we who are his redeemed people, who know him not only as our creator, but also as our loving shepherd and our Lord, the one who is good and faithful and who never changes?

Dr. James Boice: Your answer to that is yes. Then we say with gladness, "Enter his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Be thankful unto him and bless his name. For the Lord is good, and his love endures forever, and his faithfulness continues throughout all generations." Indeed it does.

Dr. James Boice: Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you that you're like this. We don't deserve to have a God like this, but you are what you are apart from anything we deserve. And the wonder, the wonder of the gospel is that you have revealed yourself as good and faithful and loving to us, and have acted toward us actually to save us from our sin.

Dr. James Boice: Our Father, grant that we might recover a new sense of what it really is to be a thankful people, and so infuse our lives with thanksgiving. That our gloom and our bitterness and our disappointment and our frustration, all those things that mar our testimony might begin to melt away.

Dr. James Boice: And we might draw so close to you in gratitude that the world looking on will say, "Those people must really have a good God." We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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