I Chronicles 16:8 Give thanks unto the LORD, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the people
As an evangelist, I am privileged to be in a number of churches in any given year. I have been in many just in the last month, and it is a joy to see God’s people in various places and from various churches serving the same God, giving the same gospel, doing the same thing. Now, I have also noticed in these churches that there is often quite a difference in the way churches do things. If a person has only been in one church their entire life, that is a great. That probably speaks well of a number of things. But he might be surprised to realize the differences between his church and a church across the country or even across town. That is not all bad, but a person might wonder, “How is God to be worshipped?”
How do we worship God, not just Sunday, but any given day? I Chronicles 16 gives us a clue to that as the Bible talks about King David bringing the Ark of the Covenant to its place. Verse 7 says, “Then on that day David delivered first this psalm to thank the LORD into the hand of Asaph and his brethren.” What follows is a psalm you find in other psalms in the book of Psalms, notably Psalm 96, 105, and 106. This wonderful psalm begins in verse 8 with these words, “Give thanks unto the LORD, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the people.”
The point is that when you are worshipping God, make God central in your worship. Whether it pleases you or fits the area in which you live, the first and main question is, “Is God central in my worship?” In I Chronicles 13:12 it says that David was afraid of God when they had done things the wrong way and he said, “How shall I bring the ark of God home to me?” He wasn’t questioning whether he should do it, but how to do it.
In I Chronicles 15:13 David says that they had not sought God “after the due order.” There was a due order to things. Due order is defined by who God is and how He should be acknowledged and presented to others. So, we don’t have specifics here on how to worship God other than there are three words here that I think are important: thanks, call, and make known. All these speak to acknowledging who God is.
First, “give thanks unto the LORD.” We are acknowledging God’s worth with thanks. Who is the one to whom we attribute our blessings, whether it is something like paying off our church building or having a new baby in our home? Whether it is something private or public, do we see God in our lives? Are we just going through life writing our own autobiography? Or do we acknowledge God in our story? Giving thanks is part of acknowledging who God is.
Second, “call upon His name.” In other words, they called for His help. In our parlance, they prayed. We should acknowledge God’s help because God is the one whom we need. Whatever church, family, or person gets to a point where they do not realize in their heart and bones that they need God, they are in trouble.
You may have money, friends, a college-education, whatever you think it takes to have a successful life, but if you fail to realize your utter need of God Himself, not just what He can give, you are in a bad place. So, give thanks and call upon His name. Ask Him for help. God does not consider you covetous because you ask Him for what He alone can provide. If you want something that you aren’t sure if you should want, how are you ever going to know if you should want it if you don’t first bring it to God? How do you ever have a will to surrender if you don’t first acknowledge that will to God in prayer? So, give thanks and pray.
Third, “make known his deeds among the people.” Do you seek God in your past? If you don’t, you are not going to seek Him in your future. So many times, God does things in our lives and we don’t even realize it is God. Or we know it is God, acknowledge it for a moment, and then forget it and fail to make it known. All of us have probably experienced our pastor say in a church service, “Does anyone have a testimony of what God has done in your life this week?” Even if God has done something in your life, you think, “Boy, what has God done this week?” It is easy to forget, to think something is too small, or just forget God in our daily life. We forget to acknowledge God’s place in our story.
So, what about worship? How are we acknowledging or attributing worth to God today? Give thanks, call on Him for help, and make known His presence in your story because it is His story-history. Make God central in your worship every day.