Undignified Worship | Psalm 47
This morning, we are continuing our series in Psalms called Melodies of Encouragement. Psalm 47, where we will find our encouragement today, is a Psalm about our response to God reigning over all nations and situations. We live in a chaotic world. I have been a serial news checker over the past few years and lately I’ve been trying to avoid it more consistently because it seems like each day brings a new set of terror, war, destruction and chaos. Believers and skeptics alike go through their lives seeing the atrocities of the world played out on the screens in the palms of our hands — wars in Iran, earthquakes in Venezuela, fires in Bangladesh. The list goes on. I only get on X anymore for sports news and spacex. But even when I am trying to avoid it, it’s like the evil and chaos seeks me out and I still end up seeing it.
So what is our response? Is the right response to avoid it? Let it depress us? Stay connected with the headlines so we can understand it and speak about it with others? I believe Psalm 47, as does the rest of the Bible, gives us the answer.
We will see Psalm 47 establishes God as the King in control and reigning over all things and nations and the command we are given seems foolish. It seems lackadaisical.
The command we are given is to worship.
But not just any kind of worship — undignified worship.
What is undignified worship?
Let’s turn to Psalm 47 and get into it. You can find Psalms in the middle of the bible, we’ll be in Psalm 47, about a third of the way through the book.
The title of today’s message is Undignified Worship and the big idea is: We can worship God fully undignified because God is reigning on the throne.
Pray.
Context: Like many of the preceding Psalms that we’ve been in this Summer (42, 44, 45, 46…), Psalm 47 is referred to as a Psalm of the Sons of Korah and it is for the choir director. We don’t have a choir at City Awakening (yet…) so the leadership team figured this is a great Psalm for the Worship Pastor to take a stab at! The Sons of Korah were descendants of a man named Korah who had rebelled against Moses in Numbers 16. Chapter 16 describes a scene where the earth opens up and swallows those who were aligned with Korah in this rebellion. However, in chapter 26, we find out that Korah’s sons did not die, most likely because they weren’t a part of the rebellion, or they quickly repented of their actions against God. Rather than being erased from God’s story, by the time King David comes around, they were an established group of Levitical musicians/singers in the temple. Grace didn’t just spare the sons of Korah, it repurposed them. The Sons of Korah understood their place and standing before God because He had saved them from such a traumatic event.
While some scholars tie Psalm 47 to the ark ascending to Jerusalem — we will talk more about this later, it is less about coinciding with one specific event and more of a regular festival hymn which applies more directly to us who are gathered here together today. This is less about a specific celebration or commemoration like Easter or Christmas and more a Psalm for everyday worship and Sunday gatherings.
Alex did this a few weeks ago and I liked the context it gave so I’m going to read the whole Psalm and then we will break it down verse by verse.
Psalm 47.
Let’s begin in verse 1: “Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with a jubilant cry.”
I will spend the most time on this first verse as far as breaking it down because practically, it gives us specific instruction on how we respond to God. The rest of the Psalm has to do with God, this first verse gives us instruction.
Psalm 47 opens with a command: “Clap your hands all you peoples! Shout to God with a jubilant cry.” I want to break verse 1 into what is being commanded and who is being commanded.
Before I go any further, I’d like to make a covenant with you all this morning. Too often on Sunday mornings, and I am guilty of this too, we sing some songs, we clap at the end of those songs, we pray so the pastor can make his way onto stage without feeling the awkwardness of the silence and transition of the instruments, and then the pastor gives us a 40-ish minute sermon from the Bible and we jot down some notes, high five each other on the way out, go to lunch, and then FOR THE MOST PART, forget all about it until we do the same thing again in 7 days.
Now, I am not saying that Psalm 47 or what I believe God has given me to say this morning is any more important than what has been preached in previous weeks. But Pastor Louis did ask me as the worship pastor to drive this text home and use it as an opportunity to continue to grow the culture of being a “singing church” here at City Awakening. And the timing of this message couldn’t be better. I am coming off the heels of a great week leading worship at Fuge Camps out in Oregon. The week before I did that, our students were at Fuge Camps in Lakeland. 2 weeks before that, our kids ministry was at Centrikid at Lake Yale.
So I am fired up right now! I am like Tim Tebow giving the famous “The Promise” speech to his team after an embarrassing loss to Ole Miss. “You will never see any worship pastor in the entire country lead as hard as I will lead the rest of the season, and you will never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season, and you will never see a worship team worship harder that we will the rest of the season.”
Here’s my covenant to you all, and yes, this is two-sided: I am gonna preach my butt off this morning. Louis got mad at me a couple weeks ago saying he wants to get a glimpse of Fuge Robbie. Well, here ya go Louis! This is Fuge Robbie. I might jump around. I may yell a little bit. My southern Baptist roots may show a little bit more this morning.
But here is your end of the covenant. Let’s clap our hands. If the Spirit moves you this morning, get excited about it! Shout out to God. If you’re taking notes, and I hope you are taking notes, if something resonates with you, let me know! “Come on Pastor, Hallelujah, Praise God” or even a subdued, introverted “Amen” will work. And clap and shout with a jubilant cry. Jubilant is defined as feeling or expressing great happiness and triumph, usually because of a success.
And we gather here this morning week after week because of the success Jesus displayed not only on the cross 2000 years ago but because every day is resurrection Sunday as believers!
So let’s be jubilant! Let’s shout to the Lord! Let’s clap our hands and get excited this morning.
Can we do that?
CAN WE DO THAT?
Excellent. If we can’t, I’m just gonna keep preaching until someone gets pumped up or you all stage a coup and go to lunch together.
First, what is the command? There are 3 given: Clap your hands, shout to God, and shout with a jubilant cry.
Now let’s chat about who the command is for: “All you peoples.”
Going through Revelation a couple years ago, there were a few verses we discussed that may not have been recorded as literal events.
I’ve got bad news for some of you this morning: every word in Psalm 47 is literal. Including and especially “ALL YOU PEOPLES.” Which means whether you are skeptic, believer, black, white, Hispanic, American, Chinese, Taiwanese, Persian, Canadian, or Martian — you are included in “all you peoples.”
So, when the command is given to all peoples to clap your hands and shout to God, the expectation is that all of us participate in the command.
And here’s why: obedience breeds heart change.
Sometimes, as we are obeying when we are in a tough season and we don’t want to or don’t feel like it, that is precisely when God, as the King who reigns over all and the Creator of our being, actually changes our hearts to align with him.
JD Greear says, “Obedience keeps you on the rails precisely when your heart feels like doing something else.”
If you’re here this morning and you’re tired, or stressed, or frustrated, or doubting, or questioning, or skeptical… Good! WORSHIP. Clap your hands. Sing unashamed of how off pitch you might be or how loud you are. Obey. Submit yourself and your feelings to the King of the universe and watch your heart change.
You know who some of the best lead worshippers in our church are? The girls in kids ministry who sit right up here in the front row week after week. Sometimes they’re singing on key or clapping on time, sometimes they’re not. NEVER, do they care. There is an undignified jubilance in their worship. I think Jesus may have been onto something when he talked about the faith of a child being pretty special, City Awakening.
Verse 2: “For the Lord, the Most High, is awe-inspiring, a great King over the whole earth. He subdues peoples under us and nations under our feet. He chooses for us our inheritance – the pride of Jacob, whom he loves.”
Verse 2 gives us this title for God, “the Most High.” In the original Hebrew, it comes from the word “Elyon” which means “highest.” This title is what brackets this whole Psalm together. God is sovereign over all things, all peoples, and all nations. All throughout this Psalm, the writer is talking about God’s ascendancy and we get an image of it in verse 3. He subdues peoples under us and nations under our feet. The “us” referred to here is the nation of Israel. How this applies to us today is “the Church.” After Christ’s finish work on the cross, we’ve been grafted into God’s chosen people/nation (Romans 11) and fall into this inheritance with the nation of Israel from the Old testament.
As we will see throughout the rest of this Psalm, God’s status as the ‘awe-inspiring’ King who reigns over all things, the Most High, is the reason our worship can and should be (since it is commanded) undignified.
As I mentioned earlier, while this Psalm is most likely not referencing a specific historical event, many scholars believe it could have been written in connection to the Ark of the Covenant being brought into Jerusalem and ascending to the high place in 2 Samuel 6. Again, we will talk more about this specific event in the coming verses, but the use of the “Most High” reminds us of the “Holiest of Holies” in the temple. And the ark ascending into Jerusalem mirrors not only Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem but his ascension into Heaven to sit at the right hand of God and rule with him.
This image is what inspires our awe. In his book “Vertical Church” James McDonald talks about the transcendence of God and how our only objective on Sunday mornings as pastors and worship leaders is to try and help our congregation get a glimpse of God’s glory. James says “I experience transcendence when what God has made reminds me how little I am.” I love this! And without getting too much in the weeds of what transcendence is, I want to give a simple definition: It is God’s greatness, holiness, and majesty that place Him infinitely above and beyond His creation. In other words: HIS MOST HIGHNESS.
I love the beach and the rest I find sitting on the sand and listening to the waves and there is something about the beach that inspires awe. Next time you’re there, try to count the grains of sand. Or just listen to the power of the ocean. Or stand in the waves and let the water smack into you. Let’s get even closer! Look at each other. Look at the differences in our skin, the differences in our facial features and our personalities.
Everything that God has made reminds has the capability to remind us of how little we are. But we must let go of ourselves first.
We must be willing to become undignified.
Verse 5 continues: “God ascends among shouts of joy, the Lord, with sound of a ram’s horn.”
I love this part of the Psalm because the Psalm is actually doing what God is doing here. It is ascending. It is preparing for take off. God ascends among our shouts of joy.
In the New Living Translation, the end of this verse says: “The Lord has ascended with trumpets blaring.” I want to tie this to something back in verse 1 and that is the word “Clap.”
I don’t know Hebrew. So I try to be careful about explaining it much when I preach but I love what I discovered while studying this week. The first word in the Hebrew phrase for clap your hands is “taqa” which means to strike. What it is inferring here is a dramatic striking of the palm. More of a blast than a polite golf clap. “Clap your hands” in Psalm 47 is a percussive proclamation. You are the instrument and your hands are the trumpet.
Which means, in verse 5, when the Lord ascends with a trumpet blast, he ascends when we clap our hands!
Now, what’s important to understand here is that we do not confuse our role in God’s glory. God will receive His glory whether we clap or not, whether we sing and shout or not. However, this percussive clapping and acting as a trumpet is meant to displace our pride. When we humble ourselves and clap and shout, we become undignified.
C.S. Lewis says this: “Because God and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any touch with him at all, you will, in fact, be humble—delightedly humble, feeling infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy your whole life. God’s trying to make you humble in order to make that moment possible: trying to get you to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up in and are strutting about like the little idiots that we are.”
C.S. Lewis wasn’t known for pulling punches. As an atheist who converted to Christianity, he recognized that he didn’t have time to pull punches or be soft.
Strutting about like the little idiots we are…
Getting rid of that silly nonsense about our own dignity…
Think about when we are restless and unhappy church…
When we didn’t get that promotion we felt like we deserved.
When that guy or girl turned us down and we can’t imagine how they could do such a thing?
When our 9 year old yet again puts us in our place and reminds us of that thing which we’d forgotten.
All humbling experiences that hurt our dignity.
But if we are voluntarily willing to humble ourselves or even better, let God humble us and become undignified, we will experience Him in a deeper and more powerful way.
Isn’t that a frustrating thought? More than anything else, our pride is what separates us from experiencing that deeper relationship and intimacy with God that we so long for.
Even more reason to become undignified.
It’s about to get even more intense.
Verse 6: “Sing praise to God, sing praise; sing praise to our King, sing praise! Sing a song of wisdom, for God is King of the whole earth. God reigns over the nations; God is seated on his holy throne.”
Again, here we are commanded to respond in worship by singing praise. And when the Israelites were reading this section of Psalm 47 in a tabernacle meeting, it would’ve been read as less of a traditional reading of scripture and more of a chant.
I love this! I love a good chant. I played rugby in college. Before every game, as a team, we would face the other team and perform a Haka, which is a ceremonial dance that originated in New Zealand. It pairs stomping your feet, slapping your thighs and chest with rhythmic shouting. It is as undignified as it sounds. I wish I remembered what we said and what it meant because I’d practice some undignity and perform it for you all, but I still get chills thinking about it. It was a war cry, an intimidation tactic, and a promise to our opponents that we were going to destroy them.
And there’s nothing worse than performing a haka chant and then losing by 90 to Tennessee Tech.
The praise we sing not only recognizes our God as being the Most High and ruler over all, but it is our battle cry when we face the enemy. When we gather here to sing, we are doing so in order to celebrate and magnify the name of Jesus but also to wage war against our enemy. The sin and trials and burdens that we’ve faced throughout the week, we bring those back to the foot of the cross on Sunday morning and we proclaim and sing that they have no power over our lives.
This chant to sing praise, sing praise, sing praise… is humble submission to almighty Most High but also an obstinate battle cry to the power that our enemy thinks he has over us.
A couple of years ago, I was having a conversation with a friend and he was complaining about how much he dislikes modern, repetitive worship. He prefers the hymns which tell the story of the Gospel and are more theologically grounded. And while I agree with the second half of that (I love hymns too and often times prefer the more wordy/theologically sound worship songs of the Gettys, Matt Boswell, and City Alight), I absolutely believe that worship songs that are more repetitive have not only a necessary place but a biblical place in our worship services. Think about phrases like “Sing praise” in Psalm 47 or the fact that the phrase “His love endures forever” is repeated 26 times in Psalm 136, or all the instances throughout the Bible where we shout “Holy, holy, holy” and we sing that chorus forever and ever and ever for eternity! Repetition is healthy because for us, this chant like, telling ourselves over and over again, helps us believe it. But also, God never tires of hearing his creation praise him.
G.K. Chesterton says: “A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony… It may be that He has the eternal appetite for infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
Anyone else feel kicked in the teeth by that quote?
Write this down church: It’s not cool, to be cool.
Here’s what I mean by that.
As we get older, we think it more professional and polished to not dance or make a fool of ourselves. Maybe it’s because we are trying to impress someone of the opposite sex, or a prospective employer, or even our friends but it seems like the older we get, the harder we try to keep ourselves put together. But then something interesting happens at a certain point as we age. My dad calls it our “give a rip meter.”
And it breaks.
Like when we were infants and young children, we begin again to stop caring what other people think of us and how we are perceived.
Bible stories about people being foolish in the face of oppression or chaos
You know who has absolutely zero care in the world how they are being perceived? Students and kids at camp.
I actually want to speak to our students for a moment.
I have a theory about camp.
And I think I have a little bit of street cred to speak into this. I have attended camp as a student, I have chaperoned camp as a leader, I have worked camp as a Bible study leader, I’ve led worship for camp as a worship leader and I have preached at youth weekends and retreats as the “Pastor.” I have seen all sides of camp.
And for over 2 decades, on the final night or the bus back home, I have heard this statement: “I just want to experience this camp high all the time…”
First of all, me too.
Second of all, you can.
Students, guess who is directly in control of you experiencing that camp high, that worship, that closeness to God, every Sunday?
You are.
It has nothing to do with how passionate Louis gets while he’s preaching or how hype the band is, or our welcome team volunteers jumping and high fiving you blowing whistles in your face while the Church Clap thumps inside while you come in.
It has everything to do with how undignified you are willing to become on Sunday mornings.
Now, I’m not encouraging you to be disrespectful.
But we read from the same Bible and sing the same songs you do at camp. I know because I lead at camp and I often pick my Sunday morning setlist from my Fuge setlist.
I’ll make a deal with you guys. If you all can sit up front and be lead worshippers like you are at Fuge and get your parents to become even a little undignified, we will start doing songs like “I Thank God”, “Washed”, and “Goodbye Yesterday.” Deal?
Parents and adults? You have an even greater responsibility to support, encourage, and JOIN your students in that. Don’t make them feel stupid or irresponsible or foolish for the way they worship on Sunday mornings because they may be embarrassing you. To be embarrassed is to be humbled. We could all use a little bit more embarrassment. Amen?
The same setting Psalm 46 might be referring to of the Ark of the covenant ascending into Jerusalem is the same setting we get this description of David – KING David, mind you – dancing before the Lord with ALL HIS MIGHT.
I’m not dumb enough to think most of you have ever been to a metal concert before… but if you ever want the opportunity, Zach and I are regulars. You want to see people – grown adults – reliving their glory days and dancing with all their might? Go to a metal show at House of Blues.
Let’s dance and clap and sing and chant to our King with all our might on Sunday mornings and let that be the battle cry of our hearts as we face the coming days.
The Psalmist finishes in verse 9 and 10: “The nobles of the peoples have assembled with the people of the God of Abraham. For the leaders of the earth belong to God; he is greatly exalted.”
These final two verses echo everything we’ve talked about thus far but pack a larger punch. There’s two ways to read verse 9. First of all, the nobles of the peoples – or the leaders of the peoples, have assembled with the people of God. This image gives us the image from the end of the Bible where it talks about “at the name of Jesus, EVERY knee will bow and confess that He is Lord.” The Bible doesn’t pull punches about who will be assembled together at the end. Believers and skeptics. Americans and Iranians. Russians and Ukrainians. We will all be assembled together and the Lord will reign over all of us. Verse 10 ties the bow on it – the leaders of the earth belong to God and he is greatly exalted.
This word, greatly exalted, is the same root as Elyon in verse 3 meaning Most High. At this point, on our journey following God’s ascendancy in Psalm 47, we have humbled ourselves, we have become undignified, and we now have a clear picture of God at the height of his power. It is here, we can encounter the things we face in life; the oppressive rulers, the marital trials, the sins we face and fall to over and over again, the wayward children, the lost job, the terminal diagnosis and we can look at all of that and say: God is on the throne. He is exalted and I will worship him like a fool. And the rest of the world will look at us like fools.
The big idea of the message is We can worship God fully undignified because God is reigning on the throne.
Church, what if the world looked at believers and instead of seeing a bunch of cultish, sticks in the mud who get together on Sunday mornings to sing and listen to someone give a TED talk, they saw a group of maniacs, hell-bent on carrying each other’s burdens, loving one another, praying without ceasing, and worshipping like absolute fools? What if they saw us and instead of seeing us worry about all the issues the world is facing, they saw us exalting the risen Savior and dancing on the graves that they once lived in with all of their might? We begin to worry and focus on the things we face in life when we are worried and focused on ourselves.
It is only when we humble ourselves and focus on the fact that God reigns over everything that we can begin to lose ourselves in worship and see his glory.
James McDonald says “The highest and most powerful human experience is to express our love to the most worthy object of that affection. In the elevation of Christ’s worthiness, our greatest joy is discovered.”
He continues with this: “When you worship, you are saying, ‘This one is worth more.’ At the same time, you are implying, ‘I am worth less.’ Worship is the magnification of God and the minimization of self.”
He must increase. I must decrease.
People get that tattooed on them before they really understand what it means.
Are you willing to let go?
Are you willing to look foolish?
Are you willing to reject what culture is telling us to do and be the only one running the opposite way?
Are you willing to become undignified?
Pray.