"Great Is the Lord, and Greatly to Be Praised" (Sermon for the Holy Trinity)

“Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.” So goes the Gradual for today, from Psalm 145. Yes, the Lord is “greatly to be praised.” But what does that mean? How do we do it? How do we “greatly praise” the Lord? Let’s explore that a little bit.

It’s certainly fitting that we consider this theme today, on this day when we dedicate new hymnals for the praise and worship of God. How do we greatly praise the Lord? Maybe part of it is that we use great materials. And Lutheran Service Book does offer a lot of great resources for us to use. We have here the traditional Divine Service that developed in Christendom over many centuries. We have the great hymns of the church, texts and tunes that have stood the test of time--most all the hymns you know and love from TLH, as well as some fine new ones, written during our own lifetime. There are psalms and prayers and devotional orders, Matins and Vespers--even the Catechism is in here. Truly there is a wealth of excellent worship resources, both for church and for home, found in this book and in the companion materials that go with it. I think you’re going to enjoy getting to know LSB and using it over the months and years to come. Great materials, great resources, help us to greatly praise the Lord.

But is that all there is to it, having a good book to use? Surely there must be more. What else do we need to greatly praise the Lord? What about us? Don’t we need to be great “praisers,” great worshipers? We need to worship the Lord with great intensity, great fervor, don’t we, in order to greatly praise him? That must be it.

Well, yes and no. There is a grain of truth there. To be sure, it is not fitting--it is truly not “meet, right and salutary”--to worship the great God with dull and listless spirits, with a lifeless, lazy, lackluster effort. We ought to work at our worship and give it the best we’ve got. We ought to be attentive in our worship, paying attention to the words we’re praying and singing. Anything less is not worthy of the great privilege we have of coming into the presence of the living God. This is holy ground, sacred, and we ought to be setting apart our minds, our hearts, our ears, and our tongues, for the holy worship of the God whom we serve.

Have you been doing this? Have I been doing this? It’s so easy for us to slip into a merely mechanical mode and go through the motions. Our bodies are here, but our minds and hearts are elsewhere. Our ears become sieves, with the words going out as fast as they come in. Our tongues go on autopilot, uttering sounds more familiar than heartfelt. For these sins of lackluster worship, we need to repent. We ought to be better worshipers than we are. “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.” And there are lots of times we don’t praise him all that greatly.

But great intensity, great fervor--that alone does not equal great worship. Because our intensity and our fervor, as a measuring stick for what makes great worship, puts the emphasis on us. And that’s the wrong place for it to be. Worship is not about us. We do it, we are the ones who worship, and we should do it in a heartfelt manner. But worship is not about us and our feelings and our experience of a “worship high.”

Been there, done that. And I even got a few t-shirts out of it, as I recall. As some of you know, I spent a bunch of years in the charismatic movement, and I’ve gotta tell ya, they can “out-intense” and “out-fervor” the best of us. The experience of worship, the intensity of it, was a very big deal in charismatic circles. But there was a danger there. If you didn’t get that “worship high,” you tended to feel like there was something wrong with you, like you were a deficient, second-class Christian. On the other hand, if the group did work itself up into a splendid fervor, then you felt--well, there was a temptation toward a pride and superiority, like we were really more mature, victorious Christians. Either way, the emphasis tended to fall on you, on how you were performing in worship, and there was an unspoken pressure to measure up.

Well, the charismatic movement kind of petered out in the 1980s, but its place has been taken by so-called “contemporary worship,” praise bands and the like. This is really the same thing as charismatic worship, just without the spooky stuff. Contemporary worship is charismatic worship mainstreamed. It appeals to the same spirit. It’s just another form of pietism, appealing to man’s desire to make himself appear more religious and spiritual. And again, contemporary worship, as it is commonly practiced, puts a lot of emphasis on us, on our intensity and fervor, on our feelings, and getting to that “worship high.”

But you know what? It’s largely fluff, without a lot of substance. The typical praise chorus consists of “Lord, we just wanna praise you,” repeated 17 times. “We have come to praise you today, Lord.” “We just wanna worship you.” One of my fellow pastors has described it as “Three Little Pigs” worship: “We, we, we,” all the way home.

So there’s a lot of “we,” but not a lot of “why.” Why do we want to praise the Lord with such intensity and fervor? That’s often the missing element in much of contemporary worship. I once did a study of the content of contemporary worship services. I took the bulletins from a series of several weeks of contemporary services at a large church-growth congregation in St. Louis--LCMS, I’m sorry to say. I looked at the texts of all of the songs sang there over a couple of months. Most were praise choruses simply addressed to a “Lord,” but without identifying him any further. They could have just as well been sung by a Muslim or a Mormon. You couldn’t tell that the songs were addressed to the only true God, the triune God. And out of a couple dozen songs total, only a few even mentioned the name of Jesus Christ. Fewer still said anything specific about what God has done, that we should worship him. Hardly any said anything about Christ crucified for the forgiveness of our sins. No, the emphasis overall was just on the fact that we want to worship God a whole, whole bunch.

You see, by way of this negative example, now we’re getting at what really does make for great worship. It’s not about us; it’s not primarily about our feelings or fervor or intensity. Hooray if that comes as a byproduct, but that’s not the main thing. No, the Lord is “greatly to be praised” most of all by focusing on who God is and what he has done for us.

“Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised.” And notice, that’s “LORD” with capital letters. That identifies this God whom we’re praising as the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the God who makes himself known to his people, the God who makes covenant with them, who remembers his covenant and acts to save them. This is the God whom we worship. This is God with a name, “Yahweh,” in the Hebrew of the Old Testament.

And now in the New Testament, he has revealed himself even more clearly as the triune God, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” One name, three persons. Three persons, one God. A profound mystery, beyond our finite reason, but not beyond the faith that this same God gives us. The amazing thing is that we know and believe in and can truly worship this triune God. Imagine that, blind and lost sinners like us, worshiping the Holy Trinity! But that’s what’s happening here today. Great praise, great worship, not because of how great we are, but because of how great God is, and the great things he has done to make its so.

This one true God, the triune God, has created us--indeed, he has created all the heavens and the earth and all that dwell therein. He is the God Almighty, the maker of all things, visible and invisible. That’s who made you and formed you to be his own.

But you and I, we rebelled against this good God, just like our father and mother did, and their fathers and mothers before them, going back all the way to the garden. Each of us made a god in our own image, and that god looks a lot like us. We like to be our own god, and make our own decisions about what’s right and wrong. That is the essence of sin. It is our original sin, it afflicts us all and infects us all, and it brings the curse of death down upon our heads.

God is good, though, he really is. He is the God of all mercy. He has compassion on his fallen creatures, and he acts to save us, save us when we never could. That is just what God has done. The loving Father sent his beloved Son to be our one-and-only Savior. The problem was sin, man’s sin, our sin, and the eternal death that goes with it. Who will “man up” and live right and fly straight and worship God with true obedience? The Son will do that, the Son of God come in the flesh as a man, the man Jesus Christ, who lives the life of worship we should live. He then offers himself as the perfect sacrifice on the cross, the perfect sin-offering, the perfect once-and-for-all act of worship that truly pleases God. Christ is only perfect “praiser” and worshiper, and our feeble praise and worship finds acceptance in God’s sight only through him.

“This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” this Jesus won the forgiveness of sins for you on that cross! And because he did this, fulfilling the will of his Father, “this Jesus God raised up” on Easter morning, showing his victory over death and Hades. This Jesus is your Savior, in whom you have eternal life!

“Being therefore exalted at the right hand of the God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit,” this same Lord Jesus Christ has poured out on his church now--he has poured out on you now--the Spirit he gave you in your baptism. You, dear Christian, you are baptized in that saving name, “the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The one true God has put his name on you and claimed you for his own. The Father is now your dear Father, and we are his dear children. The Son, Jesus Christ, is now your Savior, who has washed away all your sins. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, dwells within you, keeping you in the one true faith through the means of Word and Sacrament.

What a great thing it is, on God’s part, that you and I have come to know and believe in and worship the only true God, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! That, ultimately, is what makes for great worship: who God is, and what he has done for us! Excellent worship resources are great; they’re a blessing from God. Intensity and fervor and feeling are great, and thank God that he lets us experience that. But most of all, great worship is about the great God, and his wondrous works. “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised.” “Let us give glory to him because he has shown his mercy to us.”

The typical praise chorus consists of “Lord, we just wanna praise you,” repeated 17 times. “We have come to praise you today, Lord.” “We just wanna worship you.” One of my fellow pastors has described it as “Three Little Pigs” worship: “We, we, we,” all the way home.

I call them 7-11 songs: 7 words repeated 11 time.

On the Difference between Praise Choruses and Hymns

Ole, accustomed to a mainline church went to a seekers' service on Sunday. He came home and his wife, Lena asked him how it was.

"Well," he said, "it was interesting. They did something different. They sang praise choruses instead of hymns."

"Praise choruses?" said Lena. "What are those?"

"Oh, they're Okay, I guess. They're sort of like hymns, only different," said Ole.

"What's the difference?" asked Lena.

He replied, "Well, it's like this. If I were to say to you, 'Lena the cows are in the corn,' that would be a hymn.'

Suppose, on the other hand, I were to say to you: 'Lena, Lena, Lean, oh, Lena, Lena, Lena, the cows, the big cows, the brown cows, the black cows, the white cows, the black and white cows, the COWS, COWS, COWS are in the corn, are in the corn, are in the corn, are in the corn, the CORN, CORN CORN.' Then if I were to repeat the whole thing five or six times, that would be a praise chorus."

I should add that, starting TODAY, our congregation (St. Matthew-Bonne Terre MO) is starting a radio/Internet broadcast of our services. Each Sunday morning, 8:15-8:45 (Central), 30 minutes from the previous Sunday’s service will be carried on radio station KREI, AM 800, in the Farmington-Bonne Terre area, and streaming online at:
http://www.krei.com

Click there for the streaming audio, or go directly to:
mms://64.82.197.82/krei

That’s Sundays, 8:15-8:45 a.m. (Central).

It could be very beneficial for parishioners who missed the previous Sunday to get "caught up" on the lessons and Sermon as the frequently build on each other from one week to the next.

It could be very beneficial for parishioners who missed the previous Sunday to get "caught up" on the lessons and Sermon as the frequently build on each other from one week to the next.

Yes, and what's nice is that our radio broadcast of the previous service is Sunday 8:15-8:45, and then, 15 minutes later, at 9:00 is our live in-person service for that Sunday.

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