Psalm 33v1-3
Sing Joyfully to the Lord
26th July 2024
Over the next few weeks, we’ll study Psalm 33. It's a song of praise, and it also reminds us of some important doctrines. Its overall message is that God is in control. Thank God He is! This Psalm begins with an encouragement to worship, the middle of the Psalm praises God for His character and the things He's done, and the end of the Psalm is a short prayer. The first section says:
Psalm 33v1-3
Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous;
it is fitting for the upright to praise him.
Praise the Lord with the harp;
make music to him on the ten-stringed lyre.
Sing to him a new song;
play skilfully, and shout for joy.
I don’t know how righteous you feel as you read this. I don’t know if you consider yourself to be upright in character. But we know that, through faith in Jesus’s redeeming sacrifice on the cross, God has made all of us who truly believe in Him righteous. If you're a Christian, you're righteous whether you feel like it or not. As to uprightness of character, well, we're all sinners, but we Christians confess our sins to God, and we all want to be people of good character. We all, I hope, go to church regularly to worship God with other Christians, and to listen to the word of God in the hope that it will change us. We all pray to God, asking Him to continue His work of sanctification in us.
All the righteous – that is, all Christians everywhere – are called to sing… to the Lord. It's fitting for us to do so. Worship is the correct, the appropriate, response of the created to the Creator, and of the redeemed to the Redeemer. It's the right thing to do. You might not feel like singing to the Lord, but we don’t sing to the Lord because we feel like it. We sing to the Lord because He’s the Lord. He's God almighty. It would be wrong not to sing to the Lord.
We sang a song in my church recently which included the words, "I can’t help but sing". This troubled me. May I confess to you that I can help but sing? Sometimes, it would be very easy for me not to sing to the Lord. I sing anyway, because He’s God. It would be inappropriate for me to stay away from church, or to just stand there and stare at my feet. But sometimes, for me, singing to God is truly a sacrifice of praise.
Hebrews 13v15
Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise
— the fruit of lips that openly profess his name.
We’re called to sing joyfully. You might not feel joyful but, if we begin to sing to God out of a right sense of duty, we will come to a place of joy. Often, that takes just a few minutes, but sometimes it can take a really long time. I know Christians for whom it's taken months. It's still the right thing to do. As Christians, we should do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because we feel like it.
Now, a short tangential discussion. This passage gives us an exercise in how literally we should take the Bible. I’ve heard it said that we should generally accept the most straightforward interpretation of any passage of scripture, and then obey it. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? It’s good advice, but it can be taken too far. I don’t believe God requires your church worship team to include a harp and a ten-stringed lyre. The Psalmist is just giving us examples of instruments that can be used. It's OK to use a guitar or a keyboard.
The Psalmist tells us to sing… a new song. This doesn’t mean we can’t ever sing an old song. If that were true, we’d never use the Psalms, so we wouldn’t know that Psalms tell us to sing a new song! But it’s good to sing new songs as well as old ones, although we should be careful that the words of any new song we sing are true and glorify God. Some new songs are better than others but it's also true that some old songs are also better than others. We’ve just forgotten the bad ones and kept the good ones. But the Psalms are perfect.
There can be a freshness in a new song. Some Christian songs seem to be given by God for a specific period, and then become stale. Others, we’ve been singing for 200 years or more.
And the Psalm tells us to play skilfully. This doesn’t mean churches whose musicians aren’t very good should give up worshipping. It does mean that every musician who plays in church should do his best.
So we should worship God in song, however we feel, and make it the best song we can. It’s fitting that we do. It’s our right response to God.