Please stand as we recite the Shema and read the Word of The Lord together.
The Shema
Shema Israel,
Adonai elohenu-Adonai echad
Ve’ahavta et Adonai eloeikah,
B’khol levavkah,
Uve’khol naphshekah,
Uve’khol m’odekah,
Ve’ahavta I’re’aca comocha. Amen.

Hear O Israel!
The Lord is our God – the Lord Alone.
Love the Lord your God
With all your heart,
With all your soul,
And with all your might,
And love your neighbor as yourself. Amen.
Thank You, Lord, for Your Word and Your Spirit making it very much the course of our walk on this earth together. Amen. Please be seated. 

1 Kings 1:48, The king has also said thus, 'Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who has granted one to sit on my throne today while my own eyes see it.'" 
	We are continuing our consideration of the fact that God deserves to be blessed by His creation because of Who He is and all that He has done. Every time we read the call to so bless Jehovah in His Word, we need to take the time to do so. We need to pause and deliberate and reflect on His so great and awesome work – Selah - as we are so often told in the Psalms.
	This brings us to our first passage of contemplation this morning. Please open in your Bibles to Ps 72:18+19. Listen to what the Psalmist proclaims in the deliberation upon the fact that Yahweh, Alone is to be blessed for the great wonders of His power and might.
	Ps 72:18+19, Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, Who alone works wonders. And blessed be His glorious name forever; And may the whole earth be filled with His glory. Amen, and Amen. 
	There is that urgent and adamant instruction to bless the Lord for the reason of His marvelous and wondrous deeds upon the whole of His creation. We, as His people, are so very privileged to see His hand of love and grace and mercy working so miraculously throughout the entirety of that which He has brought forth by His Word. 
In the Bible, we watch the unfolding measure of His divine plan of the salvation and the edification of His people. This amazingly details the opening of that great gift of the Love of God unto the entirety of humankind. His name is to be blessed forever and forever because it is only by His name that any can be saved from an eternity of damnation and fiery tribulation. 
	The call to this bringing all blessing forth from our beings unto the praise of Jehovah continues throughout the Psalms. Please reflect on that which we read in Ps 103, verses 1-5.
	Ps 103:1-5, Bless the Lord, O my soul; And all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, And forget none of His benefits; Who pardons all your iniquities; Who heals all your diseases; Who redeems your life from the pit; Who crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion; Who satisfies your years with good things, So that your youth is renewed like the eagle.
	Notice that this is not just a casual call to bring blessing and praise to God sometime in the future when it is more convenient to do so. This requires every fiber of our being, every commitment of our heart and mind, every dedication of our hands and our efforts. Nothing is withheld and nothing is repressed or saved for a later moment. It is earnestly incumbent upon us to bring everything that we are with all the words of our mouths and all the thoughts of our minds fully focused and consecrated unto the blessing that God, Alone, deserves!
	This is an area of immense proportion within the walk that we have on this earth! So often, with all the distractions and the allurements of this age, with all the time pressures and the other things that tug at our heart strings, with all our timidity and our devices after solitude, there is not that complete and absolute dedication and determination that we will serve to the blessing of God and Him only every moment and will do so with every bit of energy that is within these human bodies. 
	This is utterly challenging and absolutely intended to shake to the core the every manner of our being part of the Body of Christ Jesus on this earth. If there is something within us that does not bless The Lord, it needs to be dealt with by the power of God!
	We need to pause, right here, right now! If we truly belong to God as His redeemed people, if we are sincerely believers upon the Lord Jesus Christ as Our Savior and as Our Everything, if we are considering ourselves to be part of the Body of Christ Jesus, made so by the power of the Holy Spirit, then we are in absolute need of a complete realignment of the priorities of our hearts and minds unto God. We need to absolutely join ourselves together as the community of believers, the family of God’s beth ab into His immediate presence.
To bless Him means that we want to live our lives in complete obedience and utter dedication to His will being accomplished on earth as it is in heaven! That necessitates that we set aside the every distraction, the every enticement, the every other element of this age which is tugging our hearts and whispering in our ears. It means that we forcefully abandon that which is uselessly gobbling up the limited resources of our energy, our time and our monies for that which is of no eternal value! Our every step, our every thought, our every action, our every word is to bring God the glory that He, Alone, solely and single-mindedly is due! 
Are we willing to have the Holy Spirit exaine manifestly and forcefully those elements of our daily desires, our long-term and short-term goals and wishes, those activities which take priority over anything else in the walk of our feet on this earth? Is He free to fundamentally rewire our minds and our thoughts and our focal energies to that which will only serve The Lord to His honor and His praise and His adoration? 
Every single one of us, and I put myself at the front of this line, needs to ask God to search and to eliminate that which holds any place in us above the love of Jehovah and His being blessed in the course of how we live before Him and before others as a reflection of His so great love. This is a deadly prayer to utter because it will effectively root out those areas which we hold so intimately in our hearts, locked away in the hidden treasuries of our beings. It is will deal with even those elements, which of themselves are of no ill purpose or intent, but which still maintain a greater place of honor within our desires for relaxation, or exhilaration, or solitude, or human enjoyment and stimulation. 
Be they simple, or be they long standing habits, or sport, or game, or anything else which would pull us away from the place that God has set before us as our treasured stance in His divine presence, they will all need to be dealt with! 
Some may be a straightforward reality shown to us by the Holy Spirit in which we did not realize how important this or that activity was, thus causing us to set it aside! Some other actions of our hearts and lives may require a death knell by the Holy Spirit, to utterly eliminate it from the scope of our behavior and uproot our comfortable rituals and routines. Large or small, if anything other than our earnest and whole-hearted love of God is held with honor in our beings, it needs to be set into its proper subjugation by The Holy Spirit in order that Jehovah is fully and holy blessed in us! 
We continue with this intense directive to the people unto the blessing of Jehovah by the Psalmist in the 145th Psalm. Please open to it with a heart that desires nothing else but that God is fully and magnificently adored, praised, and blessed in the great work of His salvation of those who will but call upon His name. 
Ps 145, I will extol Thee, my God, O King; And I will bless Thy name forever and ever. Every day I will bless Thee, And I will praise Thy name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised; And His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise Thy works to another, And shall declare Thy mighty acts. On the glorious splendor of Thy majesty, And on Thy wonderful works, I will meditate. And men shall speak of the power of Thine awesome acts; And I will tell of Thy greatness. They shall eagerly utter the memory of Thine abundant goodness, And shall shout joyfully of Thy righteousness. The Lord is gracious and merciful; Slow to anger and great in lovingkindness. The Lord is good to all, And His mercies are over all His works. All Thy works shall give thanks to Thee, O Lord, And Thy godly ones shall bless Thee. They shall speak of the glory of Thy kingdom, And talk of Thy power; To make known to the sons of men Thy mighty acts, And the glory of the majesty of Thy kingdom. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, And Thy dominion endures throughout all generations. The Lord sustains all who fall, And raises up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to Thee, And Thou dost give them their food in due time. Thou dost open Thy hand, And dost satisfy the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all His ways, And kind in all His deeds. The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, To all who call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him; He will also hear their cry and will save them. The Lord keeps all who love Him; But all the wicked, He will destroy. My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord; And all flesh will bless His holy name forever and ever. 
	Please note the detailing of the many things that God has done and Who He is in the Psalmist’s continual recollection and deliberation upon the vast splendor of Jehovah. This is not a once a week coming together to sing songs and to hear someone speak about the Words that are written in the Bible. Many of us are so guilty of such a mediocre modicum of routine and ritual. We feel that it is enough to give God an hour or so on Sunday morning and then live the rest of the week in the manner that pleases us, whether it pleases and blesses Him or not! 
	That is a deception which has been planted in the minds of so many in this world. It is the appearance of spiritual awareness within a semblance of holiness without any real grasp on what it means to be the Chosen people within the family of God through Jesus Christ! 
When we decide to be serious about a commitment unto following The Lord as a disciple, with the every intent and focus on that which serves God and God only in the course of our every interaction and testimony of the risen Christ Jesus, there will be nothing else of importance within each week, much less each day! All that we do, all that we say, all that we engage in will be in line with that which is honoring and pleasing to God for the sake of His name and His testimony in us!
	That leads us to our final scripture of this morning, the reading of Psalms 146. Again, as we read it together, please hold within each of our hearts that place which is reserved for those things that we most cherish. In truth, it is a place that must be restored to that for which it was created by Jehovah. We put so many elements of our lives into the depth of our soul and our hearts that was to be filled by the glory and the love for God, Alone. 
We spend our lives working for those things which will never fill the void that only finds complete satisfaction when Jehovah sits upon that throne in our crucial core reality of meaning and validity of spirit! That is when we will be able to enjoin our utmost essence into the praise and the worship of being a living sacrifice to God and thereby unto those in such need of His so great love.
	Ps 146, Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul! I will praise the Lord while I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. Do not trust in princes, In mortal man, in whom there is no salvation. His spirit departs, he returns to the earth; In that very day his thoughts perish. How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, Whose hope is in the Lord his God; Who made heaven and earth, The sea and all that is in them; Who keeps faith forever; Who executes justice for the oppressed; Who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind; The Lord raises up those who are bowed down; The Lord loves the righteous; The Lord protects the strangers; He supports the fatherless and the widow; But He thwarts the way of the wicked. The Lord will reign forever, Thy God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the Lord! 
	Notice within this praise and adoration, there is that call which is put upon those who belong to the Lord with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their might. There is that underlying heart which will hear the cries of those in need. We will serve those who are hungry from the resources that have been lavished upon us in Jesus Christ. We will see the oppressed and the hurting and seek to show them the justice and kindness and the compassion and the charity of the One Who brought all His loving kindness and righteousness into our lives by the giving of the Only Begotten of The Father. As well, we will seek to offer solace and comfort to the hurting and the maligned of this realm.
	There is the additional reality of the needs of those who are part of the fellowship of Christ Jesus. There is the nurturing and the encouragement and the gathering together in the assembly in order to grow together into all that is at the heart of what it means to be joined as one in Jesus Our Lord. It is the establishment of a place of safety and well-being for those who need to be covered with the love and the hope that is only found in the sanctuary of God. We stand as one body for the sake of the witness and the expression of all that The Lord has offered through His people as willing sacrifices for the glory and the praise of Him Who reigns on high, today, tomorrow and forevermore. 
	Lord willing, next year, we will finalize this current consideration of the need to always bless God with all our beings. This will be in terms of this current passage. However, as we know, this will be the eternal chorus and anthem that will be our portion now and evermore. So be it!
The king has also said thus, 'Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who has granted one to sit on my throne today while my own eyes see it.'" Amen.

This morning’s benediction is 1 Peter 1:3, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, Amen.