The one hundred and forty-fifth Psalm beginning at verse one. I will extol thee, my God, O King, and I will bless thy name forever and ever. Now shall we have another brief word of prayer? Let's all pray. Our Father, it is because we believe with all of our hearts that thou art anxious in spite of these remarkable things that we've read about thee, and thy majesty and power to meet with us, and if we will listen to thy voice or listen for it, to speak to us. What a wonderful thing it would be this morning. If as thy voice is uttered among us, our heart should hear it and respond to it. Because our lives would be so affected, we would never be the same again. Help us to realize that God is here. Help us to recognize that God is here because he wants to bless us, each one of us, each individual life. And the God who is here and so anxious to bless us is the one who is conscious of our needs, even those that we hide from everybody else. And more than that, he is able and willing and ready to meet them. If only we will come his way and reach him through the person of the Lord Jesus who said, No man cometh unto the Father but by me. We commend ourselves to the anxious our Father to hear thee speaking to our hearts. May it be so. For Christ's sake. Amen. It must be apparent to you, as the Psalm opens here, I will extol thee, my God, O King. I will bless thy name forever and ever. Every day will I bless thee, and I will praise thy name forever and ever. That this is the language of enthusiasm. Now I don't know how enthusiastic a person you are. I don't know just how much you bubble over. Or maybe you've lost all your, I was going to say gas, or whatever it is that makes you bubble, and you feel that your life is almost gone, and therefore your bubbling days are done. I used to stay with a doctor on Merseyside, just outside, not very far, from the port of Liverpool, and he was a man who never got old because he never ceased to bubble. Somehow he had found the source of... of energy and although he was quite an old man as far as years ago when I first stayed in his home, I was always sure he was never really going to become an old man because he bubbled. Now we've no old people here at Park of the Palms. How many times does Mr. Willie remind us of that, just those that are older? Well, if you're older but you don't want to get old, you've got to keep on bubbling. You really have got to retain somehow that enthusiasm that makes you glad you're still alive and conscious that you're alive for some reason and that God has really got something in mind for you. Says the psalmist, I will extol God. Says the psalmist, every day will I praise Him. and says, see, I'll go on praising him forever and ever. Now there's a reason for this. Why is it that the psalmist is so bubbly? Why is it that he's so enthusiastic? Why is it that he declares so positively, I'm going to praise and praise and praise and keep on praising because he says, first of all, in verse three, great is the Lord. Now that's a statement of fact. Then he says, and greatly to be praised, and that's the outcome of the great fact, and he says his greatness is unsearchable. No wonder we get to the point in our praising where we are suddenly speechless and almost breathless. And yet that's the God who has deigned to come among us this morning. We cannot see him as we see one another, but he is among us, for he made us that promise. the one who is great and greatly to be praised and whose greatness is unsearchable. Now we are surrounded by evidences of the greatness of the God that is here this morning. I wonder how many of you have ever looked through a telescope. Would you put up your hands please if you've ever looked through a telescope? You can't wait for the next time, can you? Looking through a telescope is a very remarkable exercise. And, you know, they keep on making bigger and more wonderful telescopes so that where the sky once seemed to be empty, it's now filled with myriads of stars. How many of you have ever looked up into the sky and seen the Milky Way? Come on, let me see. Yes, it's very, very observable here at the park where we don't have to compete with the likes of the big cities. The Milky Way. Do you know what the Milky Way is? It is actually the edge of our universe end on. So that what we are looking at is a band that runs all the way around our universe, actually it's part of our universe, and it's made up of such millions of stars that we cannot distinguish the one from the other, and they simply look like a white mist that encircles the whole of the universe. And some of them are so far away that even the greatest of our telescopes cannot discern them. But you know, scientists have discovered that our universe is only one of many, many universes, many of them much larger than ours. Ours is among the smallest of the universes that make up the world that this great God created. How many of you have ever looked through a microscope? Would you put your hands up? Oh, now I'm surprised. I thought we'd have a smaller number had looked through a microscope than had looked through a telescope. But I find that you, I was going to say microscopic, but that isn't really the right word. Those of you acquainted with the microscope, I used to have one when I was a boy. I came eventually to England, to America, and I suppose it had disappeared among my effects over there. But I was reading the clay electric paper. this current one when I got home on Friday. Friday night I was scanning it and I see somebody has a microscope for sale. I'm very, very tempted because I'm interested, don't you tell him, else his price will go up. But I'm very interested in the microscope because we are surrounded by not only a huge world that we cannot fathom because of its immensity, but by a world that is so microscopic that It's hard to imagine. You want to know why a mosquito can really do a good job on you. Take a microscope and see what a proboscis he has. It's amazing what you'll discover about life around you. And the God who made these vast universes is the one who created these microscopic creatures. I know that you gasp and I gasp, so we just cannot understand it. We cannot enter into it. It's much too wonderful for us. Who's going to deny that great is the Lord and greatly to be praised and his greatness is unsearchable? I look to see if I could find in this psalm where these statements are made some summing up of all of this and I think I found it in the verses five. and six and seven. Now, if you're using your own Bible, you can mark it. If you borrowed one, please don't. But in verse five, there is an expression, Thy wondrous works. You see that there? And in that same verse, these three words are linked with another word, and it is the word majesty. And of course, God's wondrous works bespeak His majesty. Then look at verse six, it says, And men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts. Now there is another three-word expression, thy terrible acts. And this is associated in the same verse with another word, and it is the word might. So we have His works associated with His majesty, and His act. associated with his might. And then you look at verse seven it says, They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness. Now the third expression is a three-word expression also, thy great goodness, and it is associated with the word memory. And it's interesting to notice that while his works are associated with majesty, and his acts are associated with might, it is his goodness that is associated with memory. The thing that we are going to remember all through the countless ages of eternity and find ourselves unable to forget is what is described as God's great goodness. You know, the Bible says it's of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed because his compassion spail not. And there's no doubt about it. Even the best of us in this congregation, if we got our just desserts, we'd find ourselves in hell and we'd be there already. But most of us know that it's never going to happen. Because a moment came in our lives when we got right with God, when we accepted the Son that he gave to die on the cross for us, as our own Saviour and our sins were washed away and heaven was opened up for us and this morning we are as sure of heaven as if we had already arrived there. But let's think about these three things even though we are going to remember one out of the three more than the other two and go on remembering it for the countless ages of eternity. In verse five, where it speaks of thy wondrous works, we have the thought of God in creation. When we come to verse six, which speaks of thy terrible acts, we have the thought of God in action. And when we come to verse seven, where his great goodness is mentioned, we have the thought of God in salvation. So with God in creation and God in action, and God in salvation. Let's think about the first. I'll read the verse to you again. I will speak of the glorious honour, of thy majesty, and of thy wondrous works. Now there were five things that occurred to me as I thought about God in creation. I'm sure that there are many more. Five things that occurred to me as I thought of God's wondrous works. And the first was the majesty of the mountains. Now I'm looking into the faces of some folk who just a few months traveled with me from New York to Tel Aviv and who in the course of that journey put down in Switzerland and we found ourselves as the plane was flying on a very, very clear day looking over the Alps. And there we were looking for these peaks that we knew so well from pictures, and even though some of them were difficult to pick out, I was fortunate. I found a man who told me just where Jung-Fra was, and there from the air I looked down upon it, I had no problem discerning the Matterhorn, that pointed, really the point is gone, twisted mountain. But you know, in flying over that massive panorama of tall mountains, I couldn't but think and we couldn't but speak of God's wondrous works. These are seen in the majesty of the mountains. I remember flying in a much smaller plane years ago over South America and holding my breath as we flew across the Andes because the plane seemed as though it couldn't quite make it. And instead of going over the tops of some of them, we actually had to fly around. That was a kind of scary experience. But I remember again having the same overwhelming sense of the majesty of God. in his wondrous works. The mountains declare this. But along with the majesty of the mountains goes the might of the sea. We all of us know, because we've read in our newspapers, about what can happen in a hurricane and the damage for which a tornado can be responsible. But you know there only has to be a ten or twelve foot rise in the times. and you see demonstrated the might of the seas. And there's no doubt about it those who've had to endure them recognize they're part of God's wondrous works. Why, this past week I was standing talking to a man who's getting like some of us here older and we chatted about the first time I was ever in Miami and I traveled from Miami to Miami Beach across what was then the newest of the bridges. And this gentleman told me, do you know what they call this bridge down here? Because it goes from Miami to Miami Beach. I said, no, what do they call it? He said, the Jews pass over. I'm talking about August Van Rine. And you know, as I stood and talked to him, I thought about his experience with the might of the sea, how following a hurricane in one of the islands he sought in vain as a tidal swept across the island to hang on to his child. But the child was swept out of his arms and he never saw that child again. The might of the seas. Again, these wondrous works are seen in the marvel of animal instinct. How do the fishes know where to return to? That's the wrong word because they've never been there before. How do they know to go to this place or that place to find their spawning grounds, where their eggs will be taken care of in the right temperature? How do the birds know to fly to the different lands which they've never visited before and arrive at the same places that their parents birds went to and their parents before them and their parents before them How do these birds know? It's always an amazement to me who was brought up to realize that the robin, while it's a very tame bird, is also a very possessive bird and it takes out its territory. And if you have a robin around your property, you have a robin because he isn't going to let any robins approach his territory. I say it was always an astounding thing to me when I used to visit Cape Canaveral to see these robins, sixty and seventy and eighty of them together. And there they were under new circumstances. They'd come from so many different places. And this is where they congregated. They'd none of them ever been before. But lo and behold, their instincts took them in the right direction at the right time for the right purpose. And so it is. It's demonstrated in the fishes. It's demonstrated in the birds. It's demonstrated in the animals. They know things that you and I have to be informed about. You watch your dog if you have one when there's a storm coming up and you have no indication of it at all. He knows. Now, how does he know? He has an instinct. He has a sixth sense. And you know, it is marvelous to read what instinct can do for the lower creation. Sometimes I think they ought not to be called the lower creation because we don't compare with them in many, many ways. So we have the majesty of the mountains, and we have the might of the seas, and we have the marvel of animal instincts. We also have the multitude of the heavens, and I've mentioned that to you already. You know, when God said to Abraham, your seed shall be as the sand upon the seashore, and as the stars up in the sky, There were those who would say, well, God must have been a little mistaken here because if his feet is going to be like the sand on the seashore, which has so many myriads of tiny grains, how could that compare to the stars in the sky that are not that many stars up there? But do you know that scientists have arrived at a scientific determination that there are as many stars in the sky as there are grains of sand upon all the beaches in the world? Now think about that, and if that doesn't flabbergast you, I'll give up trying to. The multitude of the heavens. Here's another thought, and this is number seven. Now number five, the mystery of life itself. Scientists are such wonderful people. They have learned, I was reading in the newspaper while I was away, about a girl whose arm was severed in an accident and they gathered it up in a pail and they rushed her seventy-five miles to a hospital. They sewed on that arm and today it has every likelihood of functioning absolutely normally. I read about a man who lost five fingers and every one of them was separately sown on and eventually worked almost normally, not quite, but almost. Marvelous what the scientists do. Now they've gone to the test tube and there they are producing babies. But do you know that they haven't yet found out how to put the one spark that makes the animate out of the inanimate. Because life is God's prerogative. God is the only one who can give life, and the mystery of life itself lies with God, and it's one of his wondrous works. This then is God in creation. Now suppose that all we knew about God was what we saw in this marvelous creation. We know that great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. We would know that the God of heaven was a majestic and marvelous God. But don't you see that this would serve to place distance between us and Him? He is so mighty and we are so mean, He is so majestic and we are so insignificant and so unimportant. If all that we knew about God... was what we saw in creation we wouldn't really know God at all. Let's think about what are called his terrible acts. Now here we have God in action. Now please do not be afraid of the adjective. They are called his terrible acts. But let me give you the thought of this word. You don't have to turn to it. I'll read to you from Psalm sixty-six verses five and six. Come and see the works of God. He is terrible in his doing toward the children of men. He turned the sea into dry land. They went through the flood on foot. There did we rejoice in him. God's terrible act are only terrible to those who oppose him. That's how Pharaoh found them to be. That's how his soldiers and chariots and horses found them to be. Terrible acts. But they were acts that his people rejoiced him. Because they were brought through dry shod. And the waves stood up like mountains to protect them. and then closed in and swallowed up their enemies. If God in action is a fearful thought to you, it could well be because you're not numbered among those who are intimate with him, those who know him, those who love him, those who serve him and have been saved by his grace. Think about some of these acts of deliverance, will you? We just read about Israel. We can bring that into more modern days. I will remember in England when King George VI came to the microphone. And you know, whenever the King came to the microphone or Winston Churchill came to the microphone, everything in Britain came to a standstill. I can still hear those deep tones of Winston Churchill stating that we will fight in every town, we will fight in every street, we will fight from house to house and so on. But I also remember the time when the king came to the microphone and told the country that they had never faced a more grave situation. He didn't go into detail, but although we didn't realize it, the whole of the British army, almost in total, was in France. and surrounded by an enemy that was absolutely determined to annihilate it, not just defeat it, but annihilate it. The king called the nation to its knees, told the people that he with them must now, we must humble ourselves, we must get down on our faces before God, and we must pray to God for his hand of deliverance. and the nation prayed. The sea, and you know I've crossed that channel more than once, and it's always been a rough channel, twenty-two miles of water, very, very rough perpetually, but it became like a mill pond. so that cockle shells of boats that could only carry three people made their way along with the bigger ones over those twenty-two miles of water not knowing what would happen on the other side and they would pick out one soldier from the water or maybe two soldiers, maybe three soldiers. Other ships were there that could pick up the scores or even the hundreds. But the enemy was wavering. The enemy around that perimeter had pressed the army into a small space, and their planes were out to strafe them and to kill them on the beaches. And do you know what happened? A fog came down over the Dunkirk beach that hovered only just above the heads of those thousands upon thousands of soldiers that were literally plastered all over that beach. And the plains couldn't find them, they strafed, but they didn't know where they were. And the nation that was prepared to be encouraged, if it brought home sixty thousand men, brought home three hundred and sixty thousand men, because God in answer to prayer intervened. I once talked to one man and he said, you may find this difficult to believe because I do, and I don't know how it happened. He said, I lay spread-eagled on that beach, and the planes came through, and when I got up, I could make out my shape on the beach, and not a bullet struck me. God's acts of deliverance are not confined to Israel centuries ago. They happen today. They've happened to individuals. Think about Daniel. You know what happened to Daniel, don't you? He was put in the lion's den. Everybody tells us that. Of course, that's not accurate. He was put into a den of lions. The Bible says so. And there's a difference between a lion's den and a den of lions, you know. You can have a lion's den with no lions. But this was a den of lions, and they were ferocious ones. And it was fully expected they would devour him. But what was his testimony? When the king asked, is your God great enough to deliver you? It was the voice of Daniel and the king was surprised because he didn't think that Daniel's God was able to do it. God had shut the lion's mouths. You want to know whether they were really ferocious? You asked the men that were cast to them after Daniel was taken out. God can deliver the individual as he can deliver the nation. I don't know what you may need deliverance from this morning. but God can do it. There are people that are bound by fears, and God can deliver them. There are people who are bound by habits, but God can deliver them. There are people who are bound by circumstances. God can deliver them. He is able to do it. These are part of His terrible acts. Here we have a demonstration of His might, God in action, to a nation, to an individual. God has demonstrated this not only in deliverance but also in conquest. All of you know the story of David and Goliath, how this young man having put off Saul's armor, the king's armor which was too big for him, and in any case he wasn't used to it, and without any armor he sallied forth, he didn't even have a sword. And when he wanted eventually to chop off the giant's head he had to borrow one. He went out with a sling and five stones. He was afraid he'd miss with the first stone. No, he wasn't. Why did he take five stones? Do you know why? Because Goliath had four brothers. And David was quite sure that when Goliath was disposed of, his four brothers would come too. And so David was well equipped with one sling and five smooth stones. But his brothers must have been scared because they never turned up. David swung his sling and let go unerringly and hit the giant in the forehead. Somebody said such a thing never ended his head before. I'm sure it didn't. But you know God was responsible for that conquest. God was responsible for that victory. That little stone was certainly swung and flung unerringly. But God saw to it that the vitals spot that was struck. was enough to bring about the giant's death. God can give victory to the individual. He can give victory to the community. You watch Israel marching around Jericho, and again, I'm reviving some memories for these folk who took a trip on November. We climbed up on the mound there to look down at the ancient walls of Jericho or the foundation of some of those old walls. I understand that archaeologists have found sections that we were not permitted to see that indicate that the wall fell down at once, all at once except one section. That must have been the section where the house of Rahab stood, of course. God kept his word. He not only can give victory to the individual, he can give victory to the community, he can give victory to the nation. Read about Israel and the Amalekites and see how God's terrible acts bring about victory for his people. You know, when you're saved, you're not on the winning side. You're on the side that has already won. The Bible says we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. And you think about that, to be a conqueror, is to take a weapon and to plunge into the fray and to win. To be more than a conqueror is to follow in the train of the triumph of the victor, share all the spoiled, and never have to lift a finger in the fight. If you want to be on the winning side, you've got to be personally acquainted with the God of deliverance and the God of conquest. You know, he's also the God of judgment. Among his terrible acts are the judgments that were poured out upon Egypt, which in the end culminated with the destruction of all of the firstborn. I wouldn't want to trifle with such a mighty God. I wouldn't want to be found fighting against such a God whose wondrous works leave us breathless, and whose terrible acts are an indication of... of his might. Yet I believe that possibly some in my congregation this morning are lined up against the God of heaven. If it is true that one with God is in the majority, then it must be true that one opposed to God can never stand. You find an army couldn't stand, a nation couldn't stand when they pitted themselves against God. I have tragically watched Britain go down and down and down from the leading power in the world and then from a first-class power to a second-class power. And Britain has declined because God no longer has a place in that nation. And America is already on the way down because although she acknowledges God in her head, Her heart is far and getting farther and farther from Him. We can't afford to fight against God. On our coinage as a nation, we read the words in God we trust. But we have to ask ourselves increasingly, is it really true? The nation isn't going to be able to put its trust in God if the individuals in the nation don't put their trust in God. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Do you know that for your nation's sake, as well as for your own soul's sake, you should get right with God. You should put your faith and trust in the Lord Jesus. Because the God of wondrous works is also the God of terrible acts. Acts of deliverance, acts of conquest, and acts of judgment. And if we are not on His side, then one day that judgment will fall upon us. Do you realize that hell was never meant for us? It was never meant for human beings. Hell was made for the devil and his angels. And men and women go there by choice because God has provided a way of escape. And that way of escape is in the person of his son. Look at verse seven. Thy great goodness. And it says, They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness and shall sing of thy righteousness. The memory of God's greatness is to be uttered. It is to be abundantly uttered. And it is to be eternally abundantly uttered. Because God's great goodness dwarfs both his wondrous works and his terrible acts. Yet his wondrous works are dwarfed by his work of redemption, and his terrible acts are overshadowed by one act of sacrifice. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. His great goodness, you see, is centered in a cross, the cross upon which the darling of his heart the Lord Jesus yielded up his life that's the reason why eternally and abundantly we're going to utter the memory of his great goodness we'll never get over the realization that God loved us so much as to yield up the darling of his heart that the Lord Jesus loved us so much as to give himself and to give himself to shame and to spitting and to scoffing and finally to death. The Son of God, said one, the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. The poet has asked, Is it nothing to you that a Savior has died? Is it nothing to you? Can you carelessly glance at your Lord crucified? Is it nothing to you? Can you gaze on the dying one sad and forlorn, on the brow of the royal one crown of a thorn, on the hands that are nailed marked and feet that are torn? I say, is it nothing to you? In a coming day, God is not going to ask you, what do you know about my wondrous works? He is not going to ask you, what do you know about my terrible acts? He is going to ask you, what do you know about my great goodness? The goodness that made a place for you, the love that provided for you a way of escape, the mercy that was abundantly shed upon you. I spared you day after day. I spared you week after week. I spared you month after month and year after year so that the story of my love for you and my mercy toward you might be poured into your ear and you've heard it and you've heard it and you've heard it but you haven't yet responded to it. Can I take another moment and will you look back again at Psalm After having said these three remarkable things about God, I read in verse eight, the Lord is gracious. And I read in verse nine, the Lord is good. And I read in verse seventeen, the Lord is righteous. And finally in verse eighteen, the Lord is nigh. There's another beautiful progression. We noticed one earlier on this morning. Here's another one. The Lord is gracious. If he was not gracious, you wouldn't be here today. The Lord is good. If he wasn't good, you wouldn't be here with an opportunity of being saved. The Lord is righteous. If he wasn't righteous, he wouldn't be demanding of you that you turn from your sin and take advantage of his grace and his goodness and receive the remedy for your sin. But because he's gracious and good, this righteous one, he's also very close to you. He's nigh. So we've come a perfect circle. Here is the God of heaven, the mighty one, as deigned to come among us this morning. And that's the note upon which we began our service. Do you know why he's here? Not only in our midst. but sitting right at your side. And he's pleading with you. And he's saying, I love you so much. I went to the cross and I died for you. My care for you is demonstrated in that I'm here again this morning and pleading with you to let me into your life. Because if you receive me, you'll become a child of God. If you let me into your heart, I'll wash away your sin. How many times have I told the boys and girls, If you'll let Jesus come into your heart at the front door, sin will have to go out of your heart at the back door, because sin and the Lord Jesus can't live together. Wouldn't you like to be rid of your sin and its bondage, its threats? You can. If you'll accept the Lord Jesus, who's verily nigh, so close to you, don't let him go his way without taking advantage of his proximity. and trusting Him while you can. Shall we pray? Lord Jesus, we want to realize the truth of this word that you're here. We want to believe with all of our hearts that the reason why you're here is because we have a need. We pray that you'll make us realize that that need now can be met. Oh, Lord Jesus, we ask that someone will come this morning and say, Lord Jesus, I'm going to trust you as my Savior. I'm going to make you my Lord Jesus this morning. I want you to wash away my sin and make me right with God and ready for heaven. Lord Jesus, we commend this congregation to thee. to this end. Now in a quiet moment while our heads are bowed do you realize that sitting where you are if you're not saved you could say Lord Jesus I really believe it. I really believe you love me and that you've died for me. I really believe that you're seeking an entrance into my life. Please Lord Jesus Come in, come in now and save me. Will you do that? And will you please tell me before you leave that you've done it? Or if you feel you cannot do it but you're troubled about that fact, will you stay behind and let's talk together over the word of God about these things, shall we? Now, Father, dismiss us with thy blessing. We claim thy promise not to let this word fall to the ground, but to follow it until it brings forth fruit unto everlasting life. Dismiss us with thy blessing. We pray for thy namesake. Amen.