We can worship God with great joy or harden our hearts and perish…
Praise to the Lord [and a warning against Unbelief]
1 O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord…
Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving, let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.
3 For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods,
4 In whose hand are the depths of the earth, the peaks of the mountains are also His.
5 The sea is His, for it was He who made it, and His hands formed the dry land.
6 Come, let us worship and bow down…
Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
7 For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand.
Today, if you would hear His voice—
8 Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah (unbelief), as in the day of Massah in the wilderness,
9 “When your fathers tested Me, they tried Me, though they had seen My work.
10 “For forty years I loathed that generation, and said they are a people who err in their heart, and they do not know My ways.
11 “Therefore I swore in My anger... they shall not enter into My rest.”
Hear God’s voice and not harden our hearts…
The natural will of every person, because of the fall of man, is basically bent towards evil.
God’s mercy will not excuse us from the responsibility He places on us to worship Him with tender hearts. Soft hearts are worshiping hearts. Soft hearts submit to God’s rightful lordship us and we submit to God’s discipline. We trust Him for His care as the Good Shepherd.
If Christ is the rock of your salvation, whom has given you living water for your soul, shouldn’t you come before Him with great joy and thanksgiving?
God is present everywhere, He is especially present when His people gather to worship Him
Moses told the Lord in Exodus 33:15, “If Your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here…” He knew how vital it was to have God’s presence with them because it was humanly impossible to lead two million people through a barren wilderness. We ourselves are basically wasting precious time if we are not inviting God into our lives to guide us in our decisions each day. If we have not read or understand what His word says, we are stepping out in our own strength. The Holy Spirit of God living in us allows for God to be present with us at all times--whether we knowingly acknowledge Him or not.
“If you would hear His voice” (95:7b), God has spoken to us through His Son and that message is in His written word. Jesus often said to the crowds who heard Him, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mark 4:23 ). He warned of those who “while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Matthew 13:13 ). He said (Luke 8:18 ), “Take care how you listen.” We must think about how to apply it to our lives. It is all heart-related: “Do not harden your hearts” (95:8a). This meant they would never enter the Promised Land.
This serious stuff. As the author of Hebrews applies it to us, not entering God’s rest means that we will not be saved. We remain under His wrath (see Hebrews 3:10 , 11, 17, 18; 4:3). Because of unbelief, expressed through grumbling about our trials, we do not experience the “rest” that comes through trusting Christ for eternal life. We may be associated with God’s people (as the grumblers were a part of Israel), we still remain under God’s judgment because of evil, unbelieving, hardened hearts that come short of faith and trust in the one true God’s, which gives us eternal life.
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