For those who may wish to ‘study’ this chapter, the following simple resources are provided for you. Each passage has a four-Part approach to help you take in and think further about what you have read.

Passage: Psalm 95

1 Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
    let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
    and extol him with music and song.

3 For the Lord is the great God,
    the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,
    and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
    and his hands formed the dry land.

6 Come, let us bow down in worship,
    let us kneel before the Lord our Maker;
7 for he is our God
    and we are the people of his pasture,
    the flock under his care.

Today, if only you would hear his voice,
8 ‘Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
    as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 where your ancestors tested me;
    they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;
    I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray,
    and they have not known my ways.”
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,
    “They shall never enter my rest.”’

A. Find Out:

1. What does the psalmist exhort us to do? v.1,2
2. Why? v.3
3. How is that explained? v.4,5
4. So what are we called to do and why? v.6,7
5. What are we warned against? v.7c,8,9
6. What had happened to that people? v.10,11

B. Think:

1. What is the psalmist motivating us to do?
2. How does he use the Lord to do that?
3. How does he encourage us otherwise?

C. Comment:

This is a psalm of motivation – positive and negative. It is primarily a call to worship. Different expressions of that are singing (v.1a), shouting (v,.1b), bringing thanks (v.2a), and lifting God’s name with music and song (v.2b).

But then he adds content to our worship. It’s not just to be mindless emotion. We are to worship God because He is great (v.3), our Creator (v.4,5). With this in mind he encourages us to kneel before God (v.6) to bow down, for that is at the heart of worship – a lesser being acknowledging the greater being. But there is more to worship; it is acknowledging that He is our God, and we are His people (v.7) and we bow before our king.

But then comes a serious warning to heed God, to listen to Him (v.7c). The warning refers back to the time when Israel were in the desert after the Exodus and before they entered the Promised Land. There they heard God’s word but disputed it. They had seen what God could do, but their faith failed and as a result they stayed in the desert for forty years until that whole generation died off. It is a most sombre warning to heed the Lord, for if we don’t we will miss His purposes for us and just spend our lives waiting for the time to pass.

D. Application:

1. Worship on its own is insufficient; it must be accompanied by obedience.
2. Obedience without worship is cold orthodoxy.