---

The psalm contains two strophes or stanzas: the first consisting of five verses and the second of six. Each of these stanzas opens with an invitation. The first is an invitation to praise offered loudly with the voice. "O come, let us shout joyfully to the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the Rock of our salvation; let us go forth to meet Him with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to Him with hymns." And the second stanza begins with an invitation to something altogether different, — to worship, or as we had better render it, to adoration. "O come, let us prostrate ourselves, let us bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker." The word which is rendered "worship" means prostration, literally nothing less than prostration. The two Words which follow mean something less emphatic — the first, the bending of the body while the worshipper still stands, the second kneeling. Nothing changes in the East so far as habit is concerned, and you cannot to-day enter a mosque without seeing each of these three words literally acted on. Sometimes the worshipper bends his head and shoulders, then he kneels, then he prostrates himself entirely, touching the ground with his forehead. This, so far as the outward posture goes, is undoubtedly what the psalmist meant to invite the congregation of Israel to do, as being the outward expression of adoration. But adoration is an inward act of the soul which corresponds with those postures of the body which have just been described. It is the soul recognizing its nothingness before the magnificence of God, its sin before His purity, its ignorance before His omniscience, its feebleness before His power. It is the creature lying in the dust and understanding, as by a flash of light from heaven, what it is to have a Creator and to be alive in His presence. It is sinful man emptying himself of self-assertion before the Being who made him, knowing himself, or almost knowing, himself as he is known, crying: "Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord," etc. When we assemble and meet together in church, it is to "render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at God's bands, to set forth His most worthy praise, to hear His most holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul." Of these four objects of assembling together in church, that of hearing God's Word, whether read or preached, is not now in question. But what is the relation of the other three, thanksgiving, praise, and prayer for blessings, to adoration? They all three differ from adoration in this, that in each of them the soul is less prostrate, more able to bear the thought of self, than in pure and simple adoration. Certainly, in praise we seem to forget self more easily than in thanksgiving or prayer, since thanksgiving carries the mind back to something which we have received, and by which presumably we have profited, and prayer, in the narrower sense of the word, asks for new blessings, whether for the body or soul. Pure adoration has no heart for self; it lies there silent at the foot of the throne, conscious only of two things, the insignificance of self and the greatness of God. And yet adoration must be the basis, so to put it, of true thanksgiving, and praise, and prayer; it is the fitting acknowledgment of our real relations with God, which should precede them. It sometimes does, indeed, imply so paralyzing a sense of this our nothingness before God that left to itself it would make praise, thanksgiving, and prayer impossible. But here, as we lie in the dust, the one Mediator between God and man bids us take heart as He utters that most consoling sentence: "No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." He-bids us, as it were, take His hand, and thus, with Him and by Him, not merely adore God, but praise Him, thank Him, pray to Him. Let us, then, briefly remind ourselves of some leading benefits of worship, which explain the importance which is assigned to it by the Church of Christ. First of all, it places us, both as individuals and as a body of men, in our true place before God our Creator. Unless, or until, we believe that one Being exists to whom we stand in a relation utterly different from that in which we stand to any other — namely, that of owing our very existence to Him — worship is impossible. Worship only begins when faith acknowledges the Almighty Creator: it dies away as faith in Him decays; it dies away as He gives place in thought to some purely human imagination respecting how the universe came to be what it actually is. But even where there is no difficulty in believing in God the Creator, and no disposition to question His existence or His power, we sometimes observe that this great belief has no practical effect whatever upon life and thought. Many men practically live as though it were not true that it is God who has made us and not we ourselves. Now, the corrective to this — which is a practical failure, after all, rather than an intellectual mistake — the corrective to this is worship. Worship places us face to face with the greatness of the Creator. The very first effort of worship implies that God is resuming, has resumed, His true place in our thoughts, that He is no longer jostled out of our mental life by a hundred puny worthless rivals belonging to the world of sense. Worship, too, obliges us to think that we are ourselves. It is one thing to hold the immortality of man as an abstract tenet; it is another to be looking forward with a steady, practical aim to a life to come. Worship, depend upon it, is the great preparation for another life — a waste of time, no doubt, if the soul dies with the perishing body, if decay be succeeded by no resurrection, but a use of time than which none can be more sensible, more legitimate, if there be a most certain hereafter, and if, while "the things that are seen are temporal, the things that are not seen are eternal." And thus, lastly, worship is a stimulus to action when — and, of course, only when — it is sincere. If it be true that "to work is to pray," it is also true that to pray is to work. Prayer is, in fact, work, since it makes a large demand upon the energies of the soul, and it creates and trains in us capacity for other kinds of work than itself. It not only illuminates the understanding and kindles the affection, it braces, it invigorates the will. In worship we are in contact with the most real of all beings; with Him off whose will all else that is strictly depends, and in comparison with whom the most solid matter in His universe is but as an unsubstantial shadow. This contact with the highest reality cannot but brace us, and accordingly we find in all ages that the noblest resolves to act or to suffer have again and again been formed as though in obedience to what seems a sudden overpowering flash of light during worship. So it was with Isaiah when he saw the vision in the temple. "Then said I, Here am I; send me." So it has been with more than one enterprise of our own day; the original resolution to make the venture has dated from the half hour of sincere worship, in which the energies of a single character have been lifted altogether above their average level, so that it became natural and easy to remove the mountains of obstacles around that had before barred the way to action. In another world we shall probably look back upon the way in which we have spent much of our time here with deep, although unavailing, regret; but we may be sure that no such regret will ever be felt on account of any time that has been devoted to the worship of our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.

(Canon Liddon.)

---

---

KJV: O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.

WEB: Oh come, let's worship and bow down. Let's kneel before Yahweh, our Maker,