Why Worship God
Psalm 95:1–7
Oh come, let us worship and bow down. Psalm 95:6
Psalm 95 gives two important reasons we should worship God.
1. Because God is such a great God (vv. 3–5). Appreciation can be shown to many people, praise to others. Worship belongs to God only. Yet we cannot worship God until we have a proper sense of who he is. Verses 4–5 begin by teaching that he is the Creator of all things: “In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.” This is the starting place. That God is the Creator of everything is the first reason for the call to worship in verses 1–2.
2. Because God is our own dear Shepherd (vv. 6–7). This stanza uses God’s relationship to his people as a second reason why we should worship God and as a reason for the psalm’s second call to worship in verse 6. Here the worship of God is made personal, for we are reminded that God not only made the caves and the mountains, the seas and the dry land; he made us too. What is more, he cares for us, if we are numbered among his people. Using a common but beautiful pastoral image, the psalm says that we are God’s sheep, “the sheep of his hand” (v. 7).
What Christian can read this without thinking of Jesus’s use of the same image in John 10: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. . . . I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. . . . My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:11, 14–15, 27–28).
We owe God worship because he is God and has created us. But even more, we owe him worship because he has given his life for us, has called us to faith, and now keeps and preserves us with a power that nothing either in heaven or earth can shake. We are the sheep of Jesus’s hand, and nothing will ever snatch us out of Jesus’s hand.
Taken from Come to the Waters by James Boice ISBN 9798887790954 used with permission from P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg NJ 08865
Scripture quotations are from the ESV (the Holy Bible English Standard Version) copyright 2001 by Crossway a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.