“Hand me another cable-tie” is the strange expression you will often hear in our garden. We have a small plot, so much of our gardening is of the vertical variety. Anne is an expert in all things trailing and climbing clematis, wisteria, rambling rose, and even a grapevine. Wall trailers, of course, need a trellis to support and guide their growth. That’s where me and my cable-ties come in. These are applied and tied copiously to secure branches and direct flowers. All to get the desired cascading effect – it works.
We are born worshippers, created by God to grow up into our ultimate purpose to display his glory. However, scripture diagnoses our human condition to be rooted in a failure to worship God and a tendency to value and foreground anything but God in our lives. Sin is a gravitational pull down and away from the glory of God. Even when we encounter new life in Jesus, our heads are turned, and our hearts are drawn by the pleasures and problems that preoccupy our daily lives.
The Psalms offer us a God-inspired praise book. They form a trellis to train our hearts Godward in worship. Each Psalm in multiple ways invites us to bring all of our lives, from grief to gladness, before God as a sacrifice of praise. Many are the people who have found in this sacred song book words to vocalise their hopes and fears and to rediscover that he is the “great God above gods” and we are the blessed and cherished sheep of his pasture.
We are going to be in the Psalms for a few weeks over the summer, hearing the invitation of God to bring our lives before him as an act of worship.
It’s Psalm 95 this Sunday. I would love for you to read and reflect on it if you get a chance. As you read, you will hear its summons directed to you and me to “come, let us sing for joy”. This Psalm reminds us of the priceless privilege of drawing near to God. An honour won at the cost of the life of Jesus. He gave himself even to death on a cross that we might respond in joyful confidence to his invitation.
Worship has God as the audience of one, and we are all on the worship team. In fact, we are all worship leaders according to this psalm. “Let us” is the cry that reverberates around this summons to worship. Psalm 95 reminds us that our lives should be lived godward and each of us should call and encourage one another to exalt the king; our voices and actions calling each other upwards and onwards to the praise of the one who is worthy.
So, come with me – let’s shout aloud to the rock, let’s put our whole selves into this, let us magnify his name together.
Iain