Welcome to Gospel and Life. The Psalms can be extremely helpful in showing us how we can practically and authentically experience God in our lives.

Today on Gospel and Life, Tim Keller explains how the Psalms can help us grow in our desire for God and deepen our experience of God.

Tonight's scripture reading comes from the Book of Psalm chapter 96. Sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth, sing to the Lord, praise his name, proclaim his salvation day after day.

Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples, for great is the Lord and most worthy of praise. He has to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.

Splendor and majesty are before him. Strength and glory are in his sanctuary.

Ascribe to the Lord all you families of nations, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory, do his name, bring an offering and come into his courts.

Worship the Lord and the splendor of his holiness, tremble before him all the earth. Same among the nations, the Lord reigns.

The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity. Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad, let the sea resound and all that is in it. Let the fields be jubilant and everything in them. Let all the trees of the forest sing for joy. Let all creation rejoice before the Lord, for he comes. He comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness.

The Lord of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Now this summer we've been looking at the Psalms and this Psalm, 96, very famous and is an astonishingly happy song.

You see it's just positive from beginning to end. It's talking about nothing but singing and rejoicing. It's saying that not only that everyone should sing and rejoice, you know, when it talks about the nations, in the Old Testament the nations means the entire human race.

The nations are the people out beyond the children of Israel. It's the whole human race. And so this Psalm is depicting joy and rejoicing for the whole human race, the nations and not just for every one but for everything.

Because even the trees and the fields and the mountains and the earth and the sea are praising and are filled with joy and rejoicing. So it's an incredibly astonishingly happy Psalm.

But that actually raises a question. This isn't the world the way we know it.

Not only is it not everybody is filled with joy and praise, but the world itself is a broken place. There's hurricanes and natural disasters and there's disease and death.

The earth is not filled with just joy and singing. Nor is the human race.

And so the world as we know it is not the world that's described here. Question, how do we get from where we are to here?

I mean, why would this even be put out in front of us when it seems so inaccessible, you know, something we can never get to?

How can we get from where we are to here? Well, the answer actually is in here and in the links that this passage, this psalm gives to the rest of the Bible.

So in order to find out the answer to that question, we need to look at the Psalm itself. And the Psalm is a series of invitations, summonses, sing, you see, a scribe, say, let worship in other words, it's a series of calls.

Invitational calls or summonses. And I would say there's three basic ones that are being given to us here. The call to see, the call to sing, and the call to rejoice in judgment.

It's called a sing, the call to see, excuse me, the call to sing, and the call to rejoice in judgment. Now let's look at those three.

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