Scriptural text: Psalm 100
A Call to Shout with Joy (Psalm 100:1).
The first part of verse 1 says, “Make a joyful shout to the Lord,” and then it says to, “Serve the Lord with gladness.” The word “shout” (“noise”KJV) involves “a glad shout” or a “shout of triumph,”such as might be associated with battle. From this, we learn we are to worship God, not just with thought but also with joyful utterance and gladness. Many passages associate joy with worship, Ps. 95:1. Identifying the basis of our joy, says, “Oh come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.” Psalm 27:6 reveals, “And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me: therefore I will offer sacrifices of joy in His tabernacle: I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord.”
It is essential to understand that joy in the context of worship involves respectfulness. Joy and respectfulness are not mutually exclusive attitudes: a person can be joyful in worship and respectful at the same time. Psalm 2:11 shows are necessary.
A call to be glad (Psalm 100:2).
“Serve the Lord with gladness.” “Glad homage pay with awful mirth.” He is our Lord, and therefore he is to be served; he is our gracious Lord, and therefore to be served with joy. The invitation to worship here given is not a melancholy one, as though were a funeral solemnity, but a cheery gladsome exhortation, as though we were bidden to a wedding feast. Singing as it is a joyful, and at the same time a devout, exercise, should be a constant form of approach to God. The measured, harmonious, hearty utterance of praise by a congregation of devout persons is not merely decorous but delightful, and is a fit anticipation of the worship of heaven, where praise has absorbed prayer, and become the sole mode of adoration.
A Call To Know The Lord (Psalm 100:3).
Know you what God is in himself and what he is to you. Note, Knowledge is the mother of devotion and of all obedience: blind sacrifice will never please a seeing God. “Know it, consider and apply it, and then you will be more close and constant, more inward and more serious, in the worship of him.” Two things to know concerning the Lord Jehovah, with whom we have to do in all the acts of religious worship:
1. That the Lord he is God; the only living and true God-that he is a Being infinitely perfect, self-existent, and self-sufficient, and the fountain of all being; he is God, and not a man as we are.
2. The he is our Creator: It is he that has made us, and not we ourselves
And it is the Lord Jehovah. He gave us this being; he is both the former of our bodies and the Father of our spirits. We did not, we could not, make ourselves.
References: Seeking Things Above