J. Albrecht…Trinity 14…Sept. 6, 2026…Ps. 50:14-23…True Worship Which always Marks the Godly Life
14 Offer to God thanksgiving, And pay your vows to the Most High. 15 Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.” 16 But to the wicked God says: “What right have you to declare My statutes, Or take My covenant in your mouth, 17 Seeing you hate instruction And cast My words behind you? 18 When you saw a thief, you consented with him, And have been a partaker with adulterers. 19 You give your mouth to evil, And your tongue frames deceit. 20 You sit and speak against your brother; You slander your own mother’s son. 21 These things you have done, and I kept silent; You thought that I was altogether like you; But I will rebuke you, And set them in order before your eyes. 22 “Now consider this, you who forget God, Lest I tear you in pieces, And there be none to deliver: 23 Whoever offers praise glorifies Me; And to him who orders his conduct aright I will show the salvation of God.”
May the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
INJ who is at the heart of our worship for we need His salvation, DFR:
Matthew Henry was a late 17th century theologian who was best known for his extensive commentary on the entire Bible. One day, as Henry was walking, he was jumped and violently mugged by highwaymen who stole his purse. Henry was devastated. His immediate livelihood was whisked away with that purse. He was left shaken, empty-handed, and violated.
That evening, Henry sat down at his desk, opened his personal diary, and penned his thoughts on the matter. Instead of writing a scathing entry venting his anger or questioning why God allowed a minister to be targeted, he penned this prayer of thanksgiving: Let me be thankful. First, because I was never robbed before; Second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life; Third, because although they took all I possessed, it was not much; Fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.
Henry’s prayer aligns well with our text in Psalm 50. He recognized his great need for the Lord’s deliverance in the moment and the need for the Lord’s help in the future, and praised God in thanksgiving seeing how He answered. Henry resisted the pull of the flesh to be angry, and instead reflected godliness and obedience to God through His prayer. He glorified God for His preservation, but also for keeping Him on the path of righteousness.
Such is true worship which always marks the godly life. It consists of genuine praise and thanksgiving in full recognition of our great need, then having received the Lord’s salvation. And it consists of a reflection of God’s glory in godliness and obedience in our lives. May the Holy Spirit bless our study of His Word this morning, Amen.
Psalm 50 was written by Asaph, one of the chief musicians appointed by King David to lead the worship and songs in the Tabernacle. The general theme of our text is true worship, but Asaph leads us to a dramatic viewing of what makes for true worship in the courtroom of the Almighty. To get the immediate context of our text, let us read select verses preceding.
The Mighty One, God the LORD, Has spoken…He shall call…that He may judge His people: 5 “Gather My saints together to Me, Those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice.”…I will not rebuke you for your sacrifices Or your burnt offerings, Which are continually before Me. 9 I will not take a bull from your house, Nor goats out of your folds. 10 For every beast of the forest is Mine, And the cattle on a thousand hills…”If I were hungry, I would not tell you; For the world is Mine, and all its fullness. 13 Will I eat the flesh of bulls, Or drink the blood of goats?
What’s happening here is a picture of God testifying against Israel for the worship they have been offering Him. The people thought these sacrifices were for God, but the LORD declares He has no need for them, they are already His. The Israelites are foolish to think God is benefitted by such sacrifice.
Over and against this negative testimony is God’s positive testimony in our text. 14 Offer to God thanksgiving… God isn’t concerned about the animal sacrifice, that is the formal act of sacrificing; He wants their sacrifices to be filled with thanksgiving and praise for what God had done for them. And pay your vows to the Most High. God harkens their memories back to their fathers who had entered into the covenant with God. Their vow had been to worship the LORD their God in truth and offer Him praise and thanksgiving for His salvation. Israel had turned from this vow and in its place offered the mass of bloody sacrifice.
They cared more for the performative act than the substance behind that act. Elsewhere in Scripture, we see that this is the Lord’s will for our worship. Solomon writes in Proverbs 21, To do righteousness and justice Is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice. Paul in Romans 12:1, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. Jesus in John 4:23, But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.
Throughout the Scriptures, God reinforces His will that the forms of worship, be it animal sacrifice or a liturgical setting like ours today, are to serve the heart of worship, not be the heart of worship. In other words, the outward things we do to worship God are to be manifestations of our thankfulness and praise to the Most High for His salvation and grace.
God gave animal sacrifices to serve as a visual reminder of the high cost for the forgiveness of sin. The people were to look at these sacrifices with faith – seeing God’s promise attached to it. How He would send the Messiah, Jesus, to offer Himself as the one sacrifice for all sin and all people. Faith in that promise granted forgiveness of sins through the sacrifices made.
The very first part of our services is the confession and absolution which remind us of the great cost of forgiveness. From the very beginning to the end of our service, the focus is set on our great need for salvation and God’s great answer of grace through Jesus Christ. The hymns, prayers, confessions, are all responses of thanksgiving and praise for His love and His sacrifice made on the cross for you, the individual saying the words and praying along. Thus, true worship that is pleasing to God is borne in a heart which confesses, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.”
But it is more than that, isn’t it? 15 Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.” There is no sweeter music to God’s ear than to hear His people call out to Him for help whether that trouble is physical or spiritual, for it always indicates that now we are really ready to receive His help. In this prayer is God’s promise to help. Though in it, God remains supreme. That is, He will help, but not according to our faulty ideas. He in His own time and His own wonderful way, according to His love and wisdom, will effect this drawing of us out of trouble. And we, in response will glorify Him – not to add any glory to God, for He has all glory, but because we have seen His supreme, infinite attributes, His great, blessed, glorious acts, and His gifts, and acknowledge them “with heart and hand and voices.”
So may our hearts reflect the rays of God’s glory in true worship of Him – by crying out to Him in our great need, witnessing His glorious salvation and giving Him due praise and thanksgiving!
Verses 16-22 of our Psalm brings God’s judgment of the wicked. In the previous 9 verses, God spoke an indictment against those who offered forms of worship without the substance of heart. Here He is speaking against those who offer the forms of worship as a cloak for their wickedness.
The heart of the issue is not that the wicked do bad things, but that they view their sin as if it were perfectly okay and aligns with the worship of God. They take God’s covenant in their mouth – profess adherence to it and lay claim to its blessings, all the while their tongues are used to speak against their brother. It would be better for them to renounce the covenant of God rather than to pretend adherence to it, know its provisions, and all the while disregard the moral discipline connected to it.
To God, flagrant violation of His moral discipline is not just the one doing the sin, but also the one who doesn’t take any sin to be a great insult to the LORD and His statutes. The LORD is talking about moral bluntness and deadness. When this replaces true worship in the church, the one who commits the sin isn’t alone guilty, but also the one drawn away by approval or indifference to that sin.
And the Lord’s verdict is guilty! These things you have done. When God says, I kept silent, do not take this to mean God doesn’t speak to those drawn away into this moral corruption. He does through His Word in the church. His silence is in regard to allowing hypocritical worship to go on, with the desire for repentance and return to true worship. But the worst outcome, is that the sinner assume God’s “silence” is God’s approval. When man is easy in his sin, he lowers God down to be easy with it too. But God’s silence will be broken. He will rebuke man of his sin. It is an act of God’s grace if He does that while there is time to repent, but it will be done without fail on the day of the Last Judgment when God will break all the wicked with no one to save them.
Are the seeds of moral deadness planted in your life? Hear God’s mercy in the final verse: 23 Whoever offers praise glorifies Me; And to him who orders his conduct aright I will show the salvation of God.” It is true that we struggle with sin and ungodliness. Not one of us lives up to the moral standard that God demands. But the difference between you and the wicked, is the heart that cries out to God in desperate need. Yours is the heart that hears Jesus ask, “Do you want to be made well,” knowing that He alone can bring the healing your soul needs, and faith responds, “Yes, Lord!”.
How do we order our conduct aright so that we worship God truthfully? Paul writes in Ephesians 4, be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness; The writer to the Hebrews in chapter 10, And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works. And also David in Psalm 51, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
True worship can only come when the Lord Jesus Christ lives and reigns in your heart. Where He dwells, the sinful flesh that feeds moral deadness cannot live. Christ has broken the chains of sin and death so that godliness and obedience flows from Him. Your fellow Christians are given to you by God to stir up love and good works, not sin and decay. And even when sin takes root, it is pleasing to God and a sign of true worship when you cry out to Him and He renews the right spirit within you. True worship is found in godliness and obedience in our lives because, like good works, it shows our hearts have been changed by God’s grace and actively fights against sin.
Perhaps Martin Luther summarizes true worship the best when he closes the explanation to the 1st article with these words: For all of this it is our duty to thank, serve, praise and obey Him, this is most certainly true. May our worship flow out of thanks to God for His great love in Christ Jesus our Lord and be reflected in godly lives we live for Him, Amen.
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