Psalm 95

Bringing the sermon home:

Verses 1-7a are a call to worship God, regardless of our circumstances. This is not merely a call for the descendants of the wilderness generation who rebelled against God during the Exodus, but for all who have found God to be “the rock of their salvation”. Worship is presented as a response, not to our circumstances, but to our God – to who He is, to what He has already done, and to what He has promised to do.

May we be a people who look past our ever-changing circumstances in order to rightly worship our unchanging God. Furthermore, as we consider the visions of heaven revealed to us in God’s Word (i.e. Rev 4–5; 7:9-17), with the great multitude singing with loud voices, may the singing in our Sunday morning gatherings increasingly be a satisfying foretaste of what awaits us in eternity.

Verses 7b-11 are a call to believe and obey what God has spoken in His Word. Each one of the nearly two million freed Israelites heard the Word of God spoken through Moses, but only a handful of them listened, despite having seen God’s miraculous works, and so they were prevented from entering the promised land. May we not fail to enter God’s eternal rest by ignoring the voice of our Shepherd speaking to us through His written Word.