“For he is our God, we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand” (Psalm 95.7)
Psalm 95 has been building to this point and we could and should linger here. Through the Psalm we call ourselves and one another and the whole world to rejoice in the LORD, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are called to worship God first as the creator of heaven and earth, the beauty around us. We are called to worship in the heights and depths, in chaos and in order.
Then once again we are summoned to praise, magnifying the LORD and bowing down before him.
And now comes this deeper, most profound reason for praise and joy. The words need to be spoken with wonder and awe even though they are very familiar: “For he is our God, we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand”.
The Psalm is claiming a special relationship between the congregation who gather to worship and the God we adore. We are not reaching out in praise to a God who is at a distance. We are kneeling in adoration of the LORD who has called us, who has come near to us, who has made himself known, who has made us a people who were no people, who nurtures and sustains us. This is the LORD who has called us into a relationship of faithful, covenant love.
Again there is an echo of the Psalm in the first line of Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven”. The words claim immediately a relationship with God which is not of our making but his. They place us immediately in a relationship with a community for we say our Father, not my Father. They carry a sense of both closeness and intimacy yet of the majesty and greatness of God.
Worship in wonder and in joy: “For he is our God”
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
John’s gospel tells the story of a conversation between John the Baptist and his disciples. The crowds are discovering Jesus. Everyone is going to him. They think that John will be deeply concerned about this.
John’s answer is a model for any Christian who has ever been jealous of time and attention given to others. It also has something profound to say about our worship and prayer. John can speak only of his joy in Jesus:
“The friend of the bridegroom….rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled” (John 20.29-30). He must increase but I must decrease”.
Praise and worship are dynamic acts. When we practice them regularly, they form and shape us in certain ways. You can see that very clearly with the opposite of praise, the criticism of others. When a person allows a habit of criticism to grow within them, it shapes and shrinks them within. Praise and worship have the opposite effect.
One of the ways in which praise changes us is that it helps us to remove ourselves, daily, from the centre of our own lives and recognize that God is much greater than we are. The only and proper response to God’s greatness is to bow down, to kneel in humility. We recognize our own place in the universe is not at the centre but at the edge, held firmly in the love of God. Finding humility (or decreasing) is not to negate ourselves or our character or become invisible to others or ourselves. It is to find our proper place and destiny and be freed from the continual stress of trying to be what we are not.
Christians are people who say to God and to themselves every day: “I am not the most important being in the universe. God is. I will kneel and bow down in worship”.
https://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/iStock_000009378803Large.jpg16001068Steven Crofthttps://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019-blog-logo-300x117.pngSteven Croft2014-01-15 06:00:002016-08-08 13:29:24To worship is to be changed
We’re about to move on from the beautiful section on the Psalm about taking joy in God because of the glories of creation. We’re called to sing for joy to the Lord because of the depths of the earth, the heights of the mountains, the vastness of the sea and the dry land which his hands have formed.
As we’ve seen, all of these elements in creation can be images and pictures in our spiritual journey and in the landscape of our life with God.
But we are also reflecting on the wonders of the actual creation: the oceans teeming with life, the beauty of the mountain tops, the sculpting of the hills, the deep wooded valleys and the life which fills them.
This seeing and reflection take time. More than any other generation, many of us can live our lives separated from the creation. The call to delight in God and praise him in creation is a call to spend time in the fresh air, walking the hills, standing on the beach, gazing and the stars and simply pondering the greatness of our creator who shaped all of this. Celebrating the centenary of this diocese means celebrating the beauty of the rivers and the hills, the natural landscape in which we are set.
And as we ponder so we must also reflect, in our generation more than any other, on the call of the fifth mark of mission: to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
This is an important year for Churches and environmental groups to seek to place environmental concerns back on the agenda of the politicians and those who make decisions about the care of the earth. General Synod is to have a major debate on the environment in a few weeks time.
In this area as in every other, worship and praise draw us into God’s mission and into action.
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
We like to think our lives are stable and steady (and sometimes there are). But there are also ups and downs, twists and turns, good days and bad. We live in a changing and often difficult world. The peace we need will come from within, from our relationship with God, not from outside us. That is why we need to grow a strong core of prayer at the very centre of our being, founded on the appreciation and understanding of who God is. This is what it means to worship. Strength flows from that true centre. We learn to navigate from that true north.
The psalms recognize over and over again the movement in our lives. They give us words for when life is stable and good. They also give us prayers of lament, when we are disorientated, when we need to put into words our fears, our pain, our disappointment and anger. Finally they give us words for those moments when we are re-orientated again, when we find our still centre, when there is a time of calm again.
Psalm 95 has these movements in the background with its language of the depths and the mountain tops, the sea and the dry land. We were summoned to joy at the beginning of the psalm with four calls to praise. The psalm has then given us a reason to be joyful across three verses which open our eyes wide to the glory of God in creation.
Now that structure is repeated in a shorter form: there is a threefold call to worship (let us worship….let us bow down…..let us kneel) then a final reason for our joy: for the LORD is our God and we are his people.
The movement in this psalm is not away from God and back towards him but moving deeper into God, from the threshold of the temple, through the doors and approaching the inner sanctuary. There is a movement too as God draws near to us from the glories of creation to the call to know God, to be one with him, to be his.
Seek God’s grace today to draw into his presence and to be more deeply aware of his presence in your life.
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
https://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/iStock_000014101254Medium.jpg16001066Steven Crofthttps://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019-blog-logo-300x117.pngSteven Croft2014-01-13 06:00:002016-08-08 13:26:46Deeper into God
“The sea is his and he made it, and the dry land which his hands have formed”
There are some times and moments in life when everything feels to be falling apart. Our carefully ordered and constructed world seems to be giving way. Chaos is breaking in. It happens when someone we love betrays us; or our lives are disturbed by illness; or we lose income; or floods or some other crisis strikes us.
In those moments we need to remember: the sea is his. The sea in the bible is not the benign, happy symbol it is to many people in Britain. The sea is the great symbol of chaos, darkness and disorder breaking in. The recent floods and tidal surges have brought this kind of chaos to many in our country.
At the beginning of the Book of Genesis in the first story of creation, the earth is without form and void, chaos reigns, and the waters are everywhere. God creates the world by holding back the waters so that the dry land can appear and be formed. God’s work of creation is, essentially, bringing order out of chaos. The sea remains throughout the Old Testament a symbol of chaos breaking in to the settled order of our lives.
Other religions in the Ancient Near East saw the universe as a battle ground between equally balanced forces of good and order on the one hand and chaos and evil on the other. But Israel’s faith in God went much further.
Israel’s faith came to the place where even chaos was held in God’s hand, even the sea was his creation, even the great sea monsters were his delight and his playthings.
In moments of crisis when chaos rules, the last thing we feel like doing is praising God. Yet praise restores our perspective. As we remember who God is, we move back to the place where we can say in faith, the sea is his and he made it. In that place we find the calm we need to make good decisions, the solid ground for action and the confidence to begin to move forward again.
“O you of little faith” Jesus once said to the disciples in the boat. “Who is this?” they said in reply. The sea is his
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
“In his hands are the depths of the earth and the heights of the mountains are his also”
Sometimes we praise God by appreciating who he is. We might sing “Immortal, invisible, God only wise”. Sometimes we praise God by singing out what the LORD has done for us or for all the world. Sometimes we bring God’s greatness to mind by recalling the wonder and scope of creation.
At first reading, this is where we are in verses 4 and 5. We have praised God’s greatness and now we go on to see that greatness laid out in creation. If the depths of the earth are in his hands, how great must God be?
Take a moment to appreciate God’s greatness in creation. Imagine the deepest valleys and the highest mountain ranges and remember that nothing and nowhere is outside of God’s creation. But don’t stop there.
For this verse of the psalm and the next are not just about creation. The picture of depths and mountain tops are also symbols of the highs and lows in our lives. There is more than just geography here.
The psalms frequently use this kind of symbolism. Zion (or Jerusalem) is called a mountain. Jerusalem is indeed built on a series of hills but not very big ones. The point is that it is spiritually a high and important place where God dwells. Psalm 23 talks about spiritual experiences in relation to the landscape – the valley of the shadow of death is a hard and difficult place but the psalmist finds God’s love and strength even there.
The New Testament picks up these pictures. Jesus leads the disciples to a mountain top experience at the transfiguration and then back down into the valley to deal with the daily reality of life. Paul writes in Romans that “height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” (8.39). In Ephesians Paul prays that we might be able to comprehend “the breadth, length, height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (3.18).
Our Christian faith and the joy God brings is not just for sunny days and mountaintop experiences. In his hands are the depths of the earth. His love is with us in the depths of human desolation. The LORD has been there and is there with us.
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
There are some points of connection between the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 95. The first is the great stress on today in verse 7, connected with the theme of listening to the word of God. I’m reminded of the petition, Give us this day our daily bread, with the parallels between bread and the scriptures.
The second is the connection between praising God as the great king in this verse and the great petition in the Lord’s Prayer: your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.
Many of the psalms in this part of the psalter praise God as king. Several of them have within them a cry of praise: The LORD has become king. Proclaiming God’s kingship, God’s reign over the earth, was a profound and central part of the worship of Israel when God’s people gathered in the temple.
What is happening when God is proclaimed as king above all gods? We are proclaiming that God reigns despite the way it feels. We are restoring God to the very centre of our faith.
The idea of kingship breaks down further into two closely related ideas. A ideal king in the ancient world was both a might warrior, able to save and protect his people and keep them secure and a righteous judge, able to administer the kingdom internally and especially to protect the poor.
As we proclaim God as king in this psalm, we proclaim these two truths: that God is a mighty savior able to save us from our enemies; that he is a righteous judge, defending the rights of the weak and powerless.
Like those who prayed the psalm in the temple, we proclaim God’s reign as king in times when the world seems all too imperfect and unjust. It is all the more important in those times to look forward to the day when the kingdom will come in all its fullness, when God will reign, and when the whole world will see that God is a king above all gods. Psalm 95 is a song of faith and anticipation.
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
https://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/p6.jpg11781600Steven Crofthttps://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019-blog-logo-300x117.pngSteven Croft2014-01-09 06:00:002016-08-08 13:23:23The Lord is King!
“For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods” (Psalm 95.3 NIV)
In the first word of verse 3 we change gear. So far the psalm has been inviting and encouraging us to praise God. It’s a common form in the psalms. The word “Alleluia” comes from the Hebrew and means, literally, Praise the LORD!
In verses 3, 4 and 5 , the psalm gives us the reason or the grounds for our praise. We return to a double call to praise again in verse 6 and another reason to praise God in verse 7 before we move into the second half of the psalm, a prophetic oracle, in verses 8-10.
How does the psalm help us appreciate God and what reasons are we given in our summons back to joy?
The first is rooted in God’s greatness and majesty and is a proclamation of God’s might. The language is very simple. The truth the words convey is profound.
The God we worship, the God who revealed himself to Moses as the LORD, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the great God, the one true God, above all gods. His is the author and prime mover and agent in creation.
We need to listen and understand that perspective at so many different levels. We need to be aware as we come into God’s presence that the LORD is not a projection of ourselves, an idol made with human hands. It is God who made us not the other way round. We are part of the universe God created, not the other way round.
God is a God of strength and power and majesty (we will look at the implications of calling God king tomorrow). It is this God who invites us to know him, to love him, to follow him, to serve him. It is this God we are called to praise and worship.
Spend some moments today imagining the size of the universe. God is greater. Spend some moments reflecting on the age of the universe. God is greater. Spend some time reflecting on the greatest human powers you can imagine. God is greater still.
Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song.
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
https://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019-blog-logo-300x117.png00Steven Crofthttps://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019-blog-logo-300x117.pngSteven Croft2014-01-08 06:00:002016-08-08 13:21:55The LORD is the great God
The first four verbs in Psalm 95 all summon us to joy: let us sing….let us heartily rejoice….let us come with thanksgiving….let us be glad in him with psalms.
But what if we don’t feel like rejoicing? It’s raining and cold outside. It’s Tuesday and we have to go to work. The problems we are dealing with are just too many. Or else there is a great grief and sadness in our lives at present. How then are we to hear this call to rejoice?
The psalms as a whole carry the whole range of human emotions. If you read them from 1 to 150 you will sense a tension between the major key of praise and the minor key of lament. Both are given space. By the end of the psalter, the major key prevails. But there are many psalms too which give us space to mourn, to wrestle with God, to express our anger and pain and grief. Jesus picks up and affirms all of them in the most tender of the beatitudes: “Blessed are those who mourn”
So we know from the rest of the Psalms that we are meant to take our own pain and the pain of other seriously. How then are we to hear the call to joy in the midst of a suffering world?
The key is learning (and relearning through life) a very simple distinction. It’s a kind of Christian joy 101. The distinction is between rejoicing for all circumstances (which is a massive distortion) and rejoicing in the LORD in all circumstances (which is the path of grace).
Occasionally we get the two mixed up. Christians find themselves twisting their emotions to give thanks for difficult things in their lives. We should lament and grieve and cry out in pain and anger. Jesus did these things.
But when we have grieved (and sometimes even in the midst of our grieving) we are also encouraged to look for the threads of joy not in the bad circumstances but in the constant presence and love of God, whose mercy endures for ever.
“Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say: Rejoice” writes St. Paul. He wrote those words from prison, on the brink of losing his life. He wrote them to a church which was tearing itself apart through needless quarrels.
His words have deep roots in Psalm 95. Let us be glad and rejoice today not for the bad things but in the LORD.
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year. The first of five clergy conferences on Evangelism begins today. Please pray for us.
https://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/iCOL_000015267335Medium.jpg283425Steven Crofthttps://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019-blog-logo-300x117.pngSteven Croft2014-01-07 06:00:002016-08-08 13:20:24In all circumstances not for all circumstances
Let us come into his presences with thanksgiving(Psalm 95.2)
In her Christmas Day message this year the Queen spoke of the vital importance of reflection in human life. Standing back and thinking about what has been and what is to come is a vital part of what it means to be human.
Thanksgiving is the simplest form of reflection. We look back. We think about what has been good in our lives, about those who love us, about all we have received and we say thank you to God our creator and redeemer.
Thanksgiving is a vital antidote to the consumer society. Advertising and business spends millions of pounds each year to convince us that we are not content with life as it is: we need to spend more to be happy. To live a balanced and contented life in such a world we need to be spending as much time saying thank you as we spend watching adverts. Thanksgiving is a powerful antidote to the pervasive spirit of grumbling which takes hold of the lives of many Christians (and many ministers). We focus more on what is wrong than what is right.
According to Psalm 95.2, thanksgiving is a most precious way to come into the presence of the LORD. That might be when we are with others. But giving thanks to God is also the best possible way to begin our private prayers at the beginning of the day or at its end.
“Be thankful” says Paul in Colossians (3.15). The original words mean “live eucharistically (eucharist is the Greek word for thanksgiving). It is no accident that the central act of Christian worship, the eucharist, is a profound act of thanksgiving. Saying thank you is more a way of living than an action to be performed but this way of life has its roots in daily disciplines. If you’ve not used it for a while, take some time to rediscover the General Thanksgiving, one of the treasures of Anglican worship (p.405 in Common Worship Daily Prayer and here: General Thanksgiving)
Today is Epiphany. We see God’s glory revealed in Christ and we give thanks. It is a remarkable thing to come into the presence of the living God. Come today, with thanksgiving.
Let us come into his presences with thanksgiving(Psalm 95.2)
In her Christmas Day message this year the Queen spoke of the vital importance of reflection in human life. Standing back and thinking about what has been and what is to come is a vital part of what it means to be human.
Thanksgiving is the simplest form of reflection. We look back. We think about what has been good in our lives, about those who love us, about all we have received and we say thank you to God our creator and redeemer.
Thanksgiving is a vital antidote to the consumer society. Advertising and business spends millions of pounds each year to convince us that we are not content with life as it is: we need to spend more to be happy. To live a balanced and contented life in such a world we need to be spending as much time saying thank you as we spend watching adverts. Thanksgiving is a powerful antidote to the pervasive spirit of grumbling which takes hold of the lives of many Christians (and many ministers). We focus more on what is wrong than what is right.
According to Psalm 95.2, thanksgiving is a most precious way to come into the presence of the LORD. That might be when we are with others. But giving thanks to God is also the best possible way to begin our private prayers at the beginning of the day or at its end.
“Be thankful” says Paul in Colossians (3.15). The original words mean “live eucharistically (eucharist is the Greek word for thanksgiving). It is no accident that the central act of Christian worship, the eucharist, is a profound act of thanksgiving. Saying thank you is more a way of living than an action to be performed but this way of life has its roots in daily disciplines. If you’ve not used it for a while, take some time to rediscover the General Thanksgiving, one of the treasures of Anglican worship (p.405 in Common Worship Daily Prayer and here: …..)
Today is Epiphany. We see God’s glory revealed in Christ and we give thanks. It is a remarkable thing to come into the presence of the living God. Come today, with thanksgiving.
This post is one of a series of daily reflections on Psalm 95 in January, at the start of the Diocese of Sheffield Centenary Year
https://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/iStock_000017431694Medium.jpg309388Steven Crofthttps://blogs.oxford.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019-blog-logo-300x117.pngSteven Croft2014-01-06 06:00:002016-08-08 13:19:00The power of thanksgiving
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