DUNCAN/The heartbeat of true piety
If you have your Bible, I’d invite you to turn with me to Psalm 111 as we continue our way through the fifth book of the Psalms. This psalm not only exhorts us to praise God, but it also shows us how to praise God. Additionally, it identifies to us what lies at the core of a Biblical piety. The heartbeat of a true — not a pretended piety, not some sort of sanctimonious presentation on the outside to the world so that people think that we’re godly when we’re really not — but what a true godliness and piety looks like. As we do this, I want to point your attention to five things that we learn about the praise of God and real piety in this psalm.
An Exhortation and Example for Praise
The first thing I want us to see is that the opening exhortation is for us to praise the Lord. That reminds us that when we gather to worship, the most important thing about our worship is the object of our worship. Everyone worships, but here’s the problem — we’re so tempted to worship idols of our own making. We set our affections on things other than and lower than God and worship them as the supreme thing. So, worship is really the battle of all our lives. Who will we worship? Christians, those who worship according to the Scriptures, worship God. He is the central point of our worship.
The second thing I want you to see here is how the psalmist joins precept and practice, exhortation and example. Here’s the grand exhortation to the congregation, “Praise the LORD.” You can see the psalmist leading the whole of the assembly of the people of God in worship, perhaps in Jerusalem at some great festival. And the exhortation goes out from the pulpit or from the lectern, “Praise the LORD!” and then immediately the psalmist who is leading in worship says, “I’m not just going to tell you to praise the Lord, I am going to praise the Lord myself.” We see a joining of precept and practice.
This has the utmost importance in a family. You pray for your children, you live a godly life before them, and you teach them the Word. When they see us tell them things to do that do not reflect the heart of our own concerns and living, they see it; they know the disconnect; and they know the contradiction. The psalmist knows the importance of this link. He doesn’t just say, “Okay, you people praise the Lord.” He says, “Let me praise the Lord with you. Let me show you how to praise the Lord.” He joins the precept with practice, the exhortation with his own example.
An Exhortation to Wholehearted Worship in the Congregation
The third thing I want you to see is how the psalmist describes the worship that both he, and the congregation will do. Look at verse 1. Worship is with the whole heart, and it is in the congregation. It is heart-felt, real, and congregational. He’s not simply going to go off into a corner somewhere to have an experience with God. He’s going to worship in the context of all the saints, the family of God. He longs to be in the fellowship of fellow believers in worship. That is not just an Old Testament ideal. That’s a New Testament ideal. The author of Hebrews exhorts us not to forsake the assembling together of the brethren. We need to be together in worship.
But notice the extent of his worship — he’s going to do it with his whole heart. The psalmist isn’t telling you how to express your emotional temperature in a way that it can be seen, but he is talking about real heart-felt worship. It’s very difficult to avoid cold affections in the worship of God. What is the secret to it? The secret is delighting in God Himself. If that is not our pursuit in public worship, then we may well give worship from cold affections. The praise that we’re going to give is both whole-hearted and congregational, it’s heart-felt but it’s publicly expressed.
The Heartbeat of True Piety
Fourth, in verses 4 and 5, the psalmist beckons us to treasure up of and the remember God’s works. Notice what he says. He has caused His wondrous works to be remembered — “The LORD is gracious and merciful. He provides food for those who fear Him; He remembers His covenant forever.” In the beginning of verse 4, end of verse 5, we are told two things. He causes His works to be remembered, and that He doesn’t let us forget them. Public worship is more important than ever, and so God has established it as a marker in our hearts and our lives — why? So that we do not forget His Word. We remember the works of the Lord. The supreme work that we remember is the work of God for us in Jesus Christ on the cross in His death, burial, and resurrection. The Gospel is at the center of what we remember in worship, and we work it deeper and deeper and deeper into our hearts, into our flesh, into our bones as we worship God.
Here’s the last thing I want you to see. The psalm closes with a quote that is very similar to one that you find in the book of Proverbs. And in this quote, the psalmist summarizes the heartbeat of true piety. Piety is the life of God in the soul of man. Piety is true godliness. And the sum of true religion is described in verse 10. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. All who practice it have a good understanding.” When you want to say that someone is truly a worshiper of God, what you say about her or him is that she or he fears the Lord. It’s a summarizing phrase that captures the essence of true piety.
It does not mean merely a dread of God’s wrath and judgment. That’s to misunderstand the Biblical phrase, “the fear of the Lord.” The fear of the Lord is a reverence joined to a love and adoration and affection for God that causes the soul to delight in God and tremble before Him. An awe and a trembling fear of God’s judgment may indeed be a part of the fear of the Lord, but the fear of the Lord is a reverence joined with an adoration and a love of God that delights in Him above everything else. The fear of the Lord animates everything in Christian experience. It’s what moves us in living the Christian life. And the psalmist here tells us that it’s the heartbeat of true piety. True godliness is animated by what the Bible calls the fear of the Lord — an adoration, a reverence, and an affection for God in which we delight in Him above everything else.
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III currently serves as Chancellor & CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) in Jackson.