MONDAY 6th
Psalm 100
NIV (v4-5) ‘Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.’
ESV (v4-5) ‘Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.’
Another psalm today that calls us to make a joyful noise to the LORD, we know this short psalm so well, reminding us to ‘Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!’ And why? ‘For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.’ As I have already said, we know it so well, it is our joy and our pleasure every week to ‘Enter his gates with thanksgiving’ yes, we are not entering the same building that the psalmist was thinking about, but we enter into the place where we go to worship, for us at Emmanuel Pentecostal Church, it is in Caris Street, Gateshead, for others reading this devotion it will be the place where you attend for worship, and we go because we have thankfulness in our hearts for all that God has done for us, and for all that he will yet do for us. ‘The LORD is good, and his steadfast live does endure forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.’ God blesses us again and again.
There is so much that we can thank God for, and for those of us who are physically able to, we should do our utmost best to ensure that we attend the place of worship that we are connected with at every possible opportunity, especially on a Sunday morning to give thanks, to give praise and to be found in fellowship with one another, for as the psalm also says ‘we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture’, (we will look at this tomorrow) as the sheep of God’s pasture, we should desire more than anything else to be in fellowship with other sheep of the pasture! Perhaps we find it too easy to be somewhere else, mixing with others in different situations, and different places rather than in the house of the Lord, but I want to repeat what I have often mentioned, the words from Scripture that remind us of the importance of our meeting together especially as we see the day approaching. (Hebrews 10:24-25) We are living in dark days and days which are becoming increasingly more difficult, and we need to do all we can to ensure that we ‘enter his gates with thanksgiving’ to be in a place where we give thanks and praise but also in the place where we receive the strength that we need to live out our lives as the sheep of his pasture.