Make a joyful shout to the LORD, all you lands! Serve the LORD with gladness; Come before His presence with singing. Know that the LORD, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. For the LORD is good; His mercy is everlasting, And His truth endures to all generations. – Psalm 100:1-5
Psalm 100 is the ticket to entering into the presence of God. There’s many people today complaining about what’s going on in the nation, in the government, and everywhere else. If we would stop complaining and stop magnifying those things, and would start praising God and magnifying Him, some of those things would just fall away. Yes, some of those things would still be there. You have to do what the Word of God, the Holy Ghost, and Jesus says.
If we did that, those things that stick around wouldn’t be so big in your life. They wouldn’t cause stress in your life like they do. God is bigger than your problems. If God made you, He can take care of you. The Bible doesn’t say to come to Him with a magic lamp mentality. It says to come to Him with thanksgiving and praise. Come to Him being thankful for what He has done. Come into His presence praising Him.
The Bible says ‘fight the good fight of faith’ in the sense that we’ve got to take a stand on what God’s Word says belongs to us and not move off of it. You can grumble and complain or you can stand up and fight the good fight of faith. You can complain about how bad it is for you in life and how this isn’t working and how we don’t have enough money and how my health is going down and how my children are driving me crazy; or you can stand on God’s Word. I’m not knocking anybody, I’m just showing you how this works. You start talking that way and the devil sits right beside you saying, “Oh yeah, you just thought you were crazy, wait till I get through with you!” And he will! I have relatives that are proof of it.
You fight by standing on the Word of God. Find out what the Word says, grab ahold of those promises, and don’t let go. And after you have gotten your eyes off the circumstances, after you have gotten in faith, after you have prayed, you start praising God. Remember when Paul and Silas were in prison. It was about the midnight hour and they were praising God. It’s when we’re praising God that things happen. And when they were praising God, something happened. The prison doors opened! They got into the presence of God and they got their answer.
We are to enter into His gates (the outer wall) with thanksgiving. Praises take you into His court – His throne room. Complaining about the situation doesn’t do anything. Grumbling about what’s going on doesn’t do anything. It just makes things worse because you get your focus on those things. Get your focus on God – come to Him with thanksgiving and praise. Faith gets the answer, but thanksgiving and praise takes you there.
