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December 5: Worshiping God for His discipline and correction.

Psalm 94:12-19:
Blessed is the man whom You instruct, O Lord, and teach out of Your law, that You may give him rest from the days of adversity, until the pit is dug for the wicked. For the Lord will not cast off His people, nor will He forsake His inheritance. But judgment will return to righteousness, and all the upright in heart will follow it. Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity? Unless the Lord had been my help, my soul would soon have settled in silence. If I say, “My foot slips,” Your mercy, O Lord, will hold me up. In the multitude of my anxieties within me, Your comforts delight my soul.

Psalms 95:1-11:
Oh come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving; let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms. For the Lord is the great God, and the great King above all gods. In His hand are the deep places of the earth; the heights of the hills are His also. The sea is His, for He made it; and His hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you will hear His voice: “Do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, when your fathers tested Me; they tried Me, though they saw My work. For forty years I was grieved with that generation, and said, ‘It is a people who go astray in their hearts, and they do not know My ways.’ So I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest.’ ”

These two psalms that we are going to study today are different in the subject on which each one is focused, but in the middle of them there is a subject that both expound, and it is about the correction and instruction from the Lord.
Psalm 94 is a cry for God's justice. First, the psalmist was surprised to see how the wicked have no foundation in the truth and live thinking that they will not suffer the consequences of their actions.
But the psalmist also knew that they will not be able to avoid those consequences for their injustices; rather he focuses on what God does with us, His children. When we do wrong, the Lord, in different ways, corrects us and instructs us on the path we should follow. Just as a father disciplines and corrects his children, in the same way God corrects His children; and this should not discourage us, on the contrary, it should motivate us to express gratitude to the Lord because He loves us so much that He wants the best for us. The psalmist understood this because he said that it is better to be disciplined, punished and corrected to learn from mistakes than to fall into a hole and not be able to get out of there as it will happen with the bad ones.
In the end, he knew that when he went through that process of discipline and correction, he would grow in wisdom and be more mature. When we go through injustice or we see the wicked having a feast, we will continue keeping in God even though they make fun of us. The reward will be that we will receive peace and comfort from God for passing the test of feeling lonely and mocked.

Psalm 95 teaches us two things. First, the attitude we should have when we worship the Lord. The correct attitude of adoration is to begin to adore Him with words of gratitude, of joy, and having a physical posture of respect and veneration, presenting ourselves on our knees, showing ourselves with an attitude of humility and surrender.
And second, the psalmist closed by giving us a warning, to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors so that we don't make the same mistake again when they had an arrogant, defiant and ungrateful attitude, distrusting the Lord and tempting Him with their...