PRAISE GOD RIGHT INTO 2026
Isaiah 63: 7-9 & Psalm 148
JOHN 4: 21-26
DECEMBER 28, 2025
As I started to write today’s sermon, I typed the word PRAISE … P-R-A-I-S-E but then my I-Pad added the letter I before the word praise and my screen showed the phrase, “I PRAISE.” Out of nowhere … perhaps hidden within the autocorrect system of my computer there was a reminder that praise should begin with the letter I and then be connected with God. I had no intention of typing I PRAISE but my I-Pad certainly did. And on this Sunday after Christmas shouldn’t that phrase … I PRAISE … I PRAISE GOD be on our lips and in our mind … I PRAISE THE LORD GOD or as Psalm 148 declares, “PRAISE the Lord from heaven! Praise God on the heights! PRAISE GOD … all of you who are His messengers.”
We are God’s messengers, aren’t we? We are the ones with the responsibility to be the Light of Christ in the world we live in, right? Jesus told us to go into the world … share the GOOD NEWS. We are believers having taken up our crosses to follow Jesus … we accept the truth of the Christmas story not about the jolly old man in a red outfit whose sleigh is now carefully stowed away at the North Pole but we are the ones acknowledging the reflection of truth about a baby born in Bethlehem who grew up to fulfill prophesy and establish that He, Jesus, is the promised Messiah, IS our Savior, Immanuel God is with us! And, we each are actively sharing the story … the truth … of God because Jesus told us to do just that and therefore we are God’s messengers not just because we sat through another beautiful Christmas Eve service this Wednesday evening but because we live out God’s directives each day sharing our love for God and God’s love for others … with those we meet whose paths we cross for any other human being in the world … we are God’s messengers, the lights of Christ, and therefore we are called to PRAISE GOD!
We heard Wayne read from the prophet this morning … “I …” that means you and me by the way. “I will recount the LORD’s faithful acts. I will sing the LORD’s praises, BECAUSE …”.
Church listen to this again because it truly matters or should matter to each of us because we are claiming to be closing out the year 2025 as the faithful … as the believers … as being part of the group of people who hold tightly to the Christmas gift of God, Jesus Christ … “I will sing the LORD’s praises BECAUSE of all the LORD did for us!”
Christmas Eve should be fresh in our minds even though Christmas Day often does its best to put the candlelit service into our back memories. But it is on Christmas Eve that we focus on the joy of our faith … on God’s loving gift … on what the LORD GOD did for us through Jesus Christ and what are we called to do? Not sit back on our haunches and remain silent but we are to take God’s love .. God’s gift … we are to be focused on all that the Lord God has done and we’re to get up and PRAISE THE LORD with JOY … with SONG … with ENERGY … and I believe Scripture teaches us that when non-believers notice that believers or at least Christian-identifiers are full of joy and praise and energy and yes love for everyone when we refer to our connection to God and Christ they will be a little bit curious as to what’s going on …. And just maybe they may discover God and Christ through us because of our loving behavior … our words … our joy and praise and energy.
I PRAISE GOD … is an interesting concept in an era when some might wear the colors of their football teams or others a full suit and tie … some adorned in t-shirts and others just in comfortable clothing but as we withdraw from Christmas overload and quickly begin erasing the year 2025 … have we learned the closing lesson from not only our Christmas Eve service but those who were elsewhere from yours … “He rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove the glories of His righteousness and the wonders of His love. JOY TO THE WORLD”
Those were the last words sung in this Sanctuary on Christmas Eve … both a celebration of praise directly connected with JOY to the WORLD the LORD has come and underlying a more serious consideration even though those singing perhaps were not accepting in the moment that God rules … rules the world rather than humans and that Christ is the ultimate love gift from God and that praise is due God not humans.
Issac Watts, the song writer took into consideration Psalm 98 when he was writing the lyrics to Joy to the World. Now, the other Joy to the World most of us know was written by Hoyt Axton who was fixated on a bull frog but for a moment let’s skip that Hoyt confused the prophet Jeremiah with some frog who was a good friend of his that Three Dog Night turned into a hit song and return to focus in on the song we sang in church on Christmas Eve. “Joy to the World the Lord has come … let earth receive her King. Let every heart prepare Him room and heaven and nature sing.”
The words from Scripture that eventually were turned into this great Christmas carol written 306 years ago that you hear me singing throughout the year begin like this: “Sing to the Lord a new song because he has done wonderful things! The Lord has made His salvation widely known; He has revealed His righteousness in the eyes of all the nations. God has remembered His loyal love … every corner of the earth has seen God’s salvation. SHOUT triumphantly to the Lord all the earth!! Be happy! Rejoice out loud! SING YOUR PRAISES …. SING YOUR PRAISES to the LORD!”
There is Scripture’s interesting challenge as we head into 2026 and in a way it comes from my favorite carol … but the challenge also in my mind comes from Christmas and the joy and happiness Christmas brings to … as the psalmist wrote so many years ago and before Jesus was born in the manger … “God has remembered His loyal love AND every corner of the earth has seen God’s salvation!”
There can be no doubt that Christmas was celebrated in every nation of the world … in every corner of the earth this year … crèche’s have been created with their inhabitants looking like the local people … I have a manger from Inuit people in northern Canada where Mary and Joseph and Jesus look like those folks we refer to as Eskimos … I have a beautiful manger created by a Ugandan wood carver in which Jesus, Mary and Joseph look like every day Ugandans who live along the equator in Africa and I have manger scenes where Mary, Joseph and Jesus appear to have lived in Sweden or Norway not in the heart of the Middle East. Christ in us … God’s love for all of humanity … the familiar and the heart warming … rescuing ALL and loving ALL worthy of praise!
You would think wouldn’t you … especially coming out of the Christmas celebrations and here in our nation we had Thanksgiving in November and our Canadian friends had Thanksgiving in October … actually in October our German friends celebrate Erntedankfest and in November the Japanese celebrate the harvest with Thanksgiving with minor Kansha no Hi … Liberia has a Thanksgiving on the first Thursday in November … Brazil is celebrating thanksgiving in Portuguese with DIA de Acao de Gracas on the fourth Thursday in November and in Korea its Chuseok in late September … and other corners of the world celebrate thanks giving on their days so … one would think that with the celebration of Christmas and the connection to days of thanksgiving for food throughout the world that we would all be focused on praising God with an intense energy that would illuminate all of us messengers of God with the Light of Christ … to start every new year …
You would think … you would hope … but don’t you ever wonder why we don’t?
You heard Scripture’s directive this morning when Wayne read from the Psalms didn’t you? “PRAISE THE LORD from the earth! Every single person … every single ruler on earth! Do the same, you young men and young women too! You who are old together with you who are young! Let all of these praise the LORDS’s name because only God’s name is high over all! Only God’s majesty is over earth and heaven. PRAISE THE LORD!”
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Do you wonder? Are you focused on praising the LORD because only God’s name is high over all? Do others hear your praise? Experience your joy in knowing that God’s majesty is over earth and heaven? That God brought us Jesus Christ to teach us how to live and to rescue us from our sins through God’s love for every single human being?
When Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for water and then engaged her in conversation it was to reveal in a moment how we are to react to the acknowledgment that the Messiah is with us. Jesus said, “The time is coming AND IS HERE … when true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. The Father is looking for those who worship Hi in this way … it is necessary to worship God in spirit and the truth.”
That’s our call .. that’s our responsibility … to PRAISE GOD … now, I am not sure if any of you noticed but today, I am dressed differently than I usually am on a Sunday. I am wearing the colors of a football team. Including socks … now all of us realize that we are in the football season and this afternoon the vast majority of the peoples of the world will be cheering on a team represented by these colors. Men playing a game … not heroes because they play a game … just men. We will cheer for them today. I have heard rumors surprisingly that a few … a very few number of people will be wearing shirts that look like this … and for some reason cheering on men playing the game wearing similar shirts so if you find any of them be kind for them in their erroneous ways be kind to them as their team loses what is just a game not life itself.
But when the day is done … when tomorrow arrives … when the New Year begins … even though we find find enjoyment through our worldly activities it is through God that we find eternal life … God is the One we need to be aligned with … the woman said she “knew the Messiah was coming, the one who is called Christ and that when He comes He will teach everything to us.” But we know that He arrived … we have the answers to what He taught … we understand how much God loved humanity …and as the new year starts it is time for us to remember to PRAISE GOD in all that we do … Christmas is over but just as Jesus stated that day to that woman he is the ONE who is our Savior, Messiah, Immanuel … and God is with us. PRAISE THE LORD!!! AMEN