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First Corinthians 14:26 says that when we all come together everyone has something, and the first item is a psalm; therefore, the psalm is the primary function in the meeting. What is a psalm? A psalm refers to singing, to praising. By this we must realize that the first thing we must do in the meetings is to sing praises.
In our meetings we come far short in singing. We need to spend much time singing. While I am speaking in the meeting or while others are speaking, at a certain point you may just start to sing. At a certain point when your spirit is touched and you are in a kind of ecstasy, simply break forth into singing and the whole congregation will follow. In Revelation 5 we read that when Christ ascended to the heavens, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders sang a new song, saying, “You are worthy...” (v. 9). They did not give a sermon or listen to a message; they just praised, praised, praised! “To the Lamb be the blessing and the honor and the glory and the might forever and ever” (v. 13). And the four living creatures said, “Amen.” How good it would be if we could have a meeting just for praising. This kind of praising will simply bring you into an ecstasy; you will be in the third heavens with everything under your feet.
The main thing in 1 Corinthians 14 is to prophesy, and the first thing is to praise. The central matter in the meeting of the church is to prophesy, to speak something for Christ, that the church might be built up, but the first thing in the meetings of the church is to praise. When we come together, everyone has a mouth to praise and a psalm for praising. Do you see the contrast between God’s way and our present situation? We all must drop our background and linger no longer in the present, degraded situation. We must be brought back to the original way. We have not invented this; we have only discovered what has been here for nearly two thousand years.
Let us consider some of the verses in the Bible about praising. We have spent much time to discover these verses and put them together. They are gems from a mine.
“When they began to shout in song and to praise, Jehovah set ambushes for the children of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who were coming out against Judah; and they were struck.” There is no need for you to fight the battle; just praise the Lord, and the enemy will be defeated. How can you overcome your temper? Forget about your temper and praise the Lord. Just by praising Him, all your enemies will be under your feet. Just by praising Him, you will ascend to the heavens. Just by praising Him, all your besetting sins will be overcome. Hallelujah, Christ is Victor! Just praise the Lord; God will set ambushes for the enemy, and he will be struck. It is so simple.
“Let all who take refuge in You rejoice; / Let them shout for joy forever; / And may You spread a cover over them; / And those who love Your name / Will exult in You.” “Shout for joy forever” — not once a day or once in a while, but forever. You may say that this is a little too much, but this is a psalm. You may say it is wild, but David said it is poetic. Have you ever shouted? How about today? What does it mean to shout? To shout is not to call or to cry in a mild way, but more or less in a wild way. Sometimes, if not all the time, you must shout to your dear wife, “Hallelujah!” Sometimes in the meetings some of the brothers must shout, “Hallelujah” or “Amen!” Sometimes when you are saying, “O Lord, O Lord,” it seems that you are not getting through to touch the Lord. If you will raise your voice and shout from deep within, “O LORD! O LORD!” you will break right through and touch the Lord. Even the demons and the devil are afraid of our shouting. Do not be so cowardly. Sometimes when you say “O Lord” in a mild way, it really works, but sometimes it does not work, and you must shout, “O LORD, AMEN, HALLELUJAH!” The Old Testament saints experienced this. If they shouted, how much more must we shout!
Most of us are familiar with this psalm, but in order to help us realize its message, I must refer to the previous psalms. In Psalms 3 through 7, we see how sad was the situation of the psalmist. But suddenly in Psalm 8 the Spirit came in with this: “O Jehovah our Lord, / How excellent is Your name / In all the earth.” What a change! If we spend much time reading the newspapers, we will say, “How long? How long?” But if we turn to the spirit, we will say, “How excellent is Your name in all the earth!” We will not care for man; we will not care for the wars; we will not care for all the riots and disturbances. We will only say, “Hallelujah, how excellent is Your name in all the earth!”
Now note how the psalmist continues: You have set Your glory over the heavens, but You have established strength out of the mouths of babes and sucklings on this earth to silence all the enemies (our paraphrase). In the previous psalms the psalmist prayed that the Lord would deal with all the adversaries, all the enemies. In the Psalms the adversaries refer to the opposing ones among the Lord’s people: for example, in the time of David, Absalom, David’s own son, was an adversary. The enemies are the foes from without, like the heathen. The adversaries are within, and the enemies are without, and when they come against you, there is no need for you to smite them; just say, “O Lord, how excellent is Your name!” Your praising will silence them; your praising will frighten them away; your praising is the secret.
The second verse of Psalm 8 has these two meanings: out of the mouth of the babes, the little ones, the unweaned ones, God could (1) establish strength and (2) establish praise. What is the strength? The praise is the strength. The praise silences the enemy. You may say that you are weak as David said in Psalm 6:2. But even if you are a babe, even if you are a suckling, the weakest of the weak, God can establish from you the strength that will smite the enemies. But you must open your mouth to praise. If you simply praise Him, God will establish strength out of your mouth stronger than an army. Hallelujah, praise the Lord! Regardless of how weak you are, regardless of how weak I am, regardless of how weak we all are, if we will open our mouths and say, “O Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth,” God will establish the strength to shut the mouths of all the enemies. In what way? Just by praising Him, the power will break forth. It is not a small matter.
I am the same as many of you. In my youth I attended Christian meetings continually. I liked to hear messages, especially those from the mouths of famous speakers and spiritual giants. But, I tell you, simply doing this did not work so well. Could we not come to the meetings without a message, without a sermon, but just praising and singing? Have you ever seen the power released from the praises out of the mouths of babes and sucklings? Do you trust in the praising as much as in the message?
Let us come back to the Word, back to the beginning. When the Pharisees spoke with the Lord Jesus concerning marriage and divorce, the Lord Jesus told them, “From the beginning it has not been so” (Matt. 19:8). We all must go back to the beginning. In the beginning of the church in the early days, it was not as it is today with teaching upon teaching, message upon message, sermon upon sermon. It was not so in the beginning. The last verse of Acts 2 says that the church, the local church, was “praising God.” It was a praising church, not a sermon-listening church.
This psalm says, “Great is Jehovah, / And much to be praised” (v. 1). We cannot tell how great He is, but we must greatly praise Him. Our praise must match His greatness; we must have greatness in our praising. I say again, we must all forget our background. According to 1 Corinthians 14:26 the primary thing we must do is to sing a psalm. Singing and praising must be the first thing in our meetings.
Then what about the matter of noise? Some may not agree with the matter of making noise and consider it a kind of confusion, but the Psalms say seven times to make a joyful noise unto God (66:1; 81:1; 95:1-2; 98:4, 6; 100:1) and one time, “Break forth, and sing for joy, and sing psalms” (98:4). The Bible says to make a joyful noise unto God. Another version says, “Make a joyous shout unto God” — not only a joyful noise but a joyous shout. We must drop our backgrounds and come to the meetings in the spirit and make a joyful noise to praise the Lord.
We all know the story of how Paul and Silas sang praises to God at midnight in the prison. Their praising caused an earthquake which released all the prisoners and eventually brought the jailer and his family to the Lord. Do you see the power and strength of praising?
In Ephesians we are told not only to sing and psalm but also to speak one to another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. The psalms are the longest praises, the songs are the shortest ones, and the hymns are of medium length. There are three degrees of poetry. This means that we must use all kinds of praises — psalms, hymns, and songs. Some have said that the hymns we have written are too long. It is true that we have one hymn of twenty-six stanzas and others of fifteen and sixteen stanzas. But there is at least one psalm with one hundred seventy-six verses (Psa. 119). I do hope that someday we will have a hymn of a hundred seventy-six stanzas. Sometimes to express our praise we need a long psalm. Many times we need the shorter songs. It is so living and releasing to come out spontaneously with some of the shorter songs in our meetings. We must learn to praise the Lord with all kinds of poetry.
In Colossians 3:16 we have two things put together: dealing with the word and singing the hymns. When we have the word of Christ dwelling in us richly, we will be full of Christ, and we will have the outpouring of the inner fullness in singing and praising. If we could all learn how to praise and sing the hymns in our meetings, it would be much better than hearing a message.
Altogether, there are one hundred fifty psalms. The first psalm says, “Blessed is the man / Who does not walk / In the counsel of the wicked” (v. 1). But Psalm 150, the last psalm, says, “Hallelujah,” which means, Praise the Lord. In this psalm almost every sentence begins with the word praise. It says praise the Lord in this way, then praise the Lord in the second way, then praise the Lord in the third way, etc., etc. There are ten ways of praising the Lord. Eventually, it says, “Let everything that has breath praise Jehovah. / Hallelujah!” The book of Psalms is a condensation, a miniature picture, of the whole Bible. Such a book ends with praising, with hallelujahs. Why must the Psalms end with praising? Because by the end of the Psalms we have the city with the temple; we have God’s habitation on this earth in the universe.
Now let us come to the end of the Bible. The whole Bible ends also with hallelujahs. “I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunders, saying, Hallelujah!” (Rev. 19:6). Why at the end of the Bible is there such a universal Hallelujah? Because of the bride, the New Jerusalem, the mingling of divinity with humanity. In the entire universe there is something marvelous. It is rather difficult to give this marvelous thing a title; we have nothing to say but Hallelujah!
I long to see the day when in the local churches there will be nothing but “Hallelujah, Amen, Praise the Lord” all the day. Do you expect to have more teachings? Then you are still in Psalm 1. You may say that you appreciate Psalm 1 so much. But that proves that you have never grown; you are still in the first stage of the Psalms. You must go on from Psalm 1. In the first psalm there is no praising; there is only the blessing for him who keeps the law. God is not satisfied with this; God comes in and says that he who kisses the Son is blessed; he who takes refuge in the Son is blessed (Psa. 2). It is not a matter of keeping the law, but of kissing Christ. Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration foolishly said, “Let us make three tents, one for You and one for Moses [the law] and one for Elijah [the prophets]” (Mark 9:15). Then suddenly a voice from heaven said, “This is My Son, the Beloved. Hear Him!” (v. 7). Immediately Moses and Elijah disappeared, and they saw no one but Jesus only. On the day of Pentecost Peter spoke again. But this time he did not tell the people that Jesus was good and Moses was good too. On that day he declared the second Psalm: “Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you have crucified” (Acts 2:36). It is not a matter of how much you love the law, but how much you kiss the Son. We have already considered Psalm 8: there is nothing in this psalm about keeping the law, but even in Psalm 8 we do not have the maturity. We must go on until we hit Psalm 150. Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah! This psalm starts with Hallelujah and ends with Hallelujah, and eleven times throughout it says “Praise God,” “Praise Him,” or “Praise Jehovah.” Praise Him in this way, and praise Him in that way — this is maturity. There is no more exhortation, no teaching, but praising the Lord. “Let everything that has breath praise Jehovah.” This is the highest and the best.
John in Revelation at the end of the Bible does not say, “I want you all to know that you must love the Lord, consecrate yourself, and build up one another.” No. At the end of the Bible all we have is praising, praising upon praising, Hallelujah, Amen, Hallelujah! The less we praise, the younger we are. The less we sing to the Lord, the more childish we are. We all must learn to sing the praises in the meetings of the church. So we have the verse, “Whenever you come together, each one has a psalm” (1 Cor. 14:26). Do you have a psalm? Amen, Hallelujah!
