Discipleship in the Psalms: Responding in Joy
Author: Daniel Owens, PhD
May 29, 2025
Eleventh in a series.
Psalm 100:1–5
1 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
2 Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!
3 Know that the Lord, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him; bless his name!
5 For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.
How has it taken so long in this series to get to joy in the Psalms? If you are like me, you associate worship with joy and praise. But the Psalms give us a more holistic view of life on God’s way than much of our contemporary worship. That is why this series has covered so many other things first. But as Walter Brueggemann correctly observes, praise is the destination for anyone who makes the journey through the Psalter. And in fact, praise brings us into the end-time hope of the New Jerusalem.
In the Psalms, the invitation to praise God is almost always given with reasons. Psalm 117 has only two verses, the first being an invitation to praise and the second being the reason for praise (identified by the word, “for,” emphasis mine):
1 Praise the Lord, all nations!
Extol him, all peoples!
2 For great is his steadfast love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord!
Discipleship is relational, and so is praise. We praise God because he is glorious, mighty, faithful, and has done great things for us. That means cultivating joy in God is about meditating on who God is, what he has done, and who we are in him.
Psalm 100 does this in two cycles:
A – Invitation to praise (vv. 1–2)
B – Reason: We belong to God (v. 3)
A’ – Invitation to praise (v. 4).
B’ – Reason: God is good (v. 5)
The invitations to praise in verses 1–2 and 4 closely resemble each other. As to the place of praise, verse 2 mentions God’s presence, and verse 4 mentions his courts. For biblical Israel, that place was his temple. For us today, there is no longer a physical temple to represent the heavenly throne room (Heb. 8:5). Instead, we gather with the church, which is the temple of his Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16–17; Eph. 2:19–22). And when we do, we look forward to the New Jerusalem in which all of God’s people will enjoy fellowship with him, without any distance separating us (Ezek. 48:35; Rev. 21:22; 22:3). To say all of this is to say that praise today anticipates our future enjoyment of the unmediated, unfiltered, glorious presence of God. It is an act that cultivates hope for that future.
But that act of hope is founded on past and present realities. Psalm 100:3 grounds our praise in our identity as God’s creatures and as God’s people. There is a sense in which all peoples on the earth belong to God because he made us (Exod. 19:5; Deut. 10:14; Ps. 24:2). But this psalm identifies the special relationship that believers enjoy as the people of God, as those of God’s flock. God describes biblical Israel as his “treasured possession among all peoples” (Exod. 19:5; see also Deut. 7:6). God’s choice of Israel as his special people is certainly a reason to praise God. God’s choice of us in Christ is precisely the reason that Paul gives to praise God in Ephesians 1:4–6. This election is for “the praise of his glorious grace” (Eph. 1:6). We are chosen for the purpose of praise!
Psalm 100:5 then grounds our praise in the character of God. Having chosen us as his people, he proves faithful. God’s goodness is not merely an abstract quality. It has feet. God demonstrates his goodness in his faithful acts, whether to rescue Israel from the army of Pharoah chasing them toward the sea (Exodus 14) or to rescue us from Satan’s accusing grasp (Rev. 12:10–11).
We were made and saved for praise. In light of God’s grace, we praise him. And when we do, we anticipate the glorious future we will enjoy when our bodies are raised and glorified and we gather in the New Jerusalem.
Daniel Owens, PhD, is NCC’s Pastor of Discipleship. Go to the NCC Blog for the previous posts in this series.
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