Happy New Year. How are you today? Good. Good. Man, so excited to be here. I do love you. I love this church. I love being a part of what God's doing. And, man, I'm excited to open the book of Psalms for us today. Psalm 145 is where we're going to be hanging out for just a few minutes before we take communion. We're going to get to administer and participate in communion as a church today,

and I'm super excited about that. Psalm 145 is an incredibly special Psalm in my life. God gave it to me this time last year,

around this week. This week every year is a really interesting time. If you take a few minutes and pause,

and it's a great opportunity for

reflection to look back over a year's events, and I don't know how 2018 has been for you, but for

me, man, it's been one of the hardest and one of the most blessed years of my life. Both of those

things are simultaneously. True, there are some things that are in the rearview of I'm pretty pumped are in the rear view and I'd like to get some distance

from them. And then there's some things that God started in 2018 or maybe even years before that

I know he's going to continue to build on in 2019. And it was this time last year when I was in a

pretty tough season, man. And I had this, a lot of

discouragement in my soul. I had some dissatisfaction and discontentment that was rising up and that

was competing for my attention and for my affections. And God gave me Psalm 145 at just the right

time. And this Psalm has been an anchor for me throughout the year. It really has been a prescription

for my soul. And the prescription is simply this. It's the power of praise in the life of the

believer. Psalm 145 is called the Song of Praise. Praise has power in our life. And Psalm 145 helps us

realize what it means to unlock that power. So if you will,

dive in with me. Psalm 145, verse 1. The psalmist writes, I will extol you, my God and king,

and bless your name forever and ever. Here's the first thing to note about the power of praise in your life and unlocking its reality,

is that praise only accomplishes its intended result when it's pointed in the right direction.

Praise only accomplishes its intended result when it's pointed in the right direction.

That's why the psalmist starts with addressing the person that he's pointing his praise out,

which is God Almighty.

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