So I’m going to take a text for this post: “Bless the LORD, O my soul…” (Ps. 103:1 NASB) This opening repeats in succeeding verses, and the Psalm concludes with more exhortations to bless the Lord. And there is good reason to do so.

 

I. His name is holy, as it says in verse 1. We may at times, by grace, exhibit holiness in our lives, and certainly as Christians we have the obligation to be holy as our Lord is holy. (1 Pet. 1:16) But only God is inherently holy. He is holy by nature; He cannot be anything other than holy. His very name is holy – we sometimes say “God” very lightly, but we should never do so. I don’t say that we must do as the Jews have done for centuries, and substitute some other word rather than say His name (for instance, a Jew will say ha-Shem, “the Name,” rather than utter the name of God), but we certainly should avoid taking His name in vain.

 

He is holy. His very name is holy. No matter what people may think or say, there is only one God. Some may speak of the Horned God, but he is not a god. Some may hold that the vengeful, unitary God of Islam is God, but that’s not the case. The ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped a plethora of gods, all of whom were figments of the human imagination. “Is there any God besides Me,/Or is there any other Rock? I know of none.” (Is. 44:8) There is one God, and only one, and His holiness extends to His name, which we should therefore bless.

 

II. Then we should bless God because of the benefits we derive from Him. I can’t resist being just a tiny bit political, for I remember what the Declaration of Independence says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration, may have been a Deist (that is, he believed that God, having created the world, left it to go on without Him), but he recognized that our rights, our life, our liberty, and the happiness that we pursue, are gifts from God. Psalm 68:19 says, in the KJV, that God “daily loadeth us with benefits,” and that’s true.

 

My wife is a gift from God. Though I wasn’t a Christian when I met her, I have no doubt whatsoever that God ordained our meeting and our marriage. He has given me the one woman on earth who could and would put up with me – and she’s done it for 29 years.

 

My children are blessings from God, as is my granddaughter.

 

I have reasonably good health – another blessing.

 

I have so much to thank God for. I’m not a big fan of the hymn “Count Your Blessings,” but it has a good point. If we count our many blessings, and see what God has done, we’ll find that we don’t have the ability to catalog all that God has given us. And so we ought to bless the Lord for His goodness to us.

 

III. We should bless the Lord because of His pardoning grace. Obviously not everyone has received pardon for sins, but everyone who comes to Christ He will receive: “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” (John 6:37) Salvation is available to everyone who will receive it, and receiving it is easy: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…” (Acts 16:31)

 

Those who are beneficiaries of the atonement have an enormous amount to be grateful for; they have abundant reason to bless the Lord. Without His hand outstretched to us, we would be in grave danger. Jonathan Edwards’ depictions – in his sermon “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God” – of the torment that awaits those who reject God may be, by the standards of some modern churches, overly dramatic, but anyone who has looked into the future and seen that sort of thing awaiting him is eternally grateful for rescue from such a fate. I myself did so; I saw ahead of me nothing but despair and destruction, and then Christ came to me and lifted me up out of that miry clay and sinking sand – and I am so grateful to Him that it is nothing but pleasure to serve Him.

 

IV. And finally, we should bless the Lord because He satisfies us. There is no longing that He does not meet, no empty space He does not fill. Augustine said that we’re restless until we rest in Christ, and that’s true; Blaise Pascal said that within each of us there’s a God-shaped blank that only He can fill, and that’s also true. Human beings search and search and search, trying this religion and that “spirituality” and the other philosophy, all in vain. Charles Spurgeon was in agony, knowing that he had sinned, knowing that the punishment for sin is death, yet unable to see a way out – until at the urging of an uneducated preacher he looked to Christ, and ever after was satisfied in his soul.

 

I’m not saying that there is no sorrow for Christian, or that there is no trouble or pain. I’m not unrealistic, nor do I wish to contradict the Bible. But a Christian’s satisfaction is higher, greater, than the troubles this world brings upon us. When my wife is sick, I suffer – but God is greater than either of us, and greater than her illness, and we rest in Him. When the absolutely tyrannical management at work drives me nearly to walking out in the middle of my shift, I may not remember God – but when I do, as I ought always to do, He is greater than my troubles, greater than the mere human beings who have so angered me, and I find rest for my soul.

 

Therefore I say, bless the Lord. Bless Him wherever you are, bless Him at work or at home, in sorrow or joy, in sickness or in health. But bless the Lord, praise His name for who He is and what He does. Bless the Lord!