“Today, If You Hear His Voice”

Psalm 95 (NRSVue): A Call to Worship and Obedience

¹ O come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!

² Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

³ For the Lord is a great God
and a great King above all gods.

⁴ In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.

⁵ The sea is his, for he made it,
and the dry land, which his hands have formed.

⁶ O come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!

⁷ For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture
and the sheep of his hand.
O that today you would listen to his voice!

⁸ Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,

⁹ when your ancestors tested me
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.

¹⁰ For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they do not regard my ways.”

¹¹ Therefore in my anger I swore,
“They shall not enter my rest.”

Psalm 95 stands at the beginning of Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It is a threshold text, one that gathers the community of faith before God each day. The psalm begins with a call to come, to sing, and to kneel, and it ends with a sober reminder to listen. This movement from invitation to warning establishes a rhythm for daily devotion. It turns the heart toward praise while keeping it attentive to the possibility of hardness. The psalm thus opens the morning with a recognition that we must be addressed again.

The opening verses summon the people to make a sound before God. The verbs (come, sing, shout, kneel) give shape to a practice that is neither solitary nor abstract. The call is rather communal and physical, instructing the body in the grammar of worship. Devotion is a response to a summons that already resounds. The psalm commands praise so that joy may be learned through the act itself. In this way the discipline of praise trains the senses to perceive what is already true: the world is held in the hand of its Maker, and life is sustained by a will greater than our own.

The psalm names God as “a great King above all gods” and as the one who holds “the depths of the earth” and “the heights of the mountains.” The scope of this confession establishes a certain ground of trust. The worshiper begins the day by acknowledging divine reality. Yet the same God who commands reverence also speaks with tenderness: “We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” Majesty and intimacy are not opposed; sovereignty and care belong to the same presence. The morning act of worship is thus humble and confident. The one who calls us to kneel is also the one who sustains us in the ordinary terrain of life.

When the psalm turns to the plea for listening—“O that today you would listen to his voice”—the mood seems to change. The energy of praise yields to an examination of the heart. The memory of Meribah and Massah enters as a mirror in which the community recognizes its own tendencies toward distrust.1 The psalm speaks of hearts that were hardened when the people tested God in the wilderness. It invites the hearer to notice the subtle resistance that arises whenever fear governs perception. The reference to divine anger and the loss of rest should not be read as threat alone. It is a description of what happens when the heart closes itself to the sustaining word. A hardened heart cannot enter rest because it cannot receive it. The warning functions as instruction in realism rather than punishment: devotion that forgets its own fragility becomes presumptuous; devotion that remembers it learns endurance.

The word “today” in the psalm carries special weight. It draws the act of hearing into the present. We learn that devotion is a present encounter with the living God. Each repetition of the psalm re-enacts this kind of immediacy. The worshiper begins again by consenting to listen in the moment that is given. Hebrews later interprets this “today” as the open horizon of divine rest. Yet even without that later reflection, the psalm itself already points toward a rest that exceeds human labor. The day begins with praise so that it may unfold within that promise.

In the practice of Morning Prayer, Psalm 95 teaches that hearing God’s voice extends into the fabric of life. To listen to God is also to remain attentive to the neighbor, to creation, and to the situations that demand mercy or justice. The psalm’s declaration that God is “a great King above all gods” becomes an act of freedom from the powers that claim our ultimate loyalty. It reorders our allegiance at the start of the day, reminding the heart that it belongs to another ruler whose sovereignty is expressed through steadfast love rather than domination. This recognition allows the life of prayer to remain open to the world rather than withdrawn from it.

The wilderness imagery in the psalm also keeps devotion honest about suffering. The memory of thirst and complaint acknowledges that divine faithfulness is not necessarily measured by our personal comfort. To begin the morning with this memory is to accept a kind of realism about the day ahead. The world is not yet at rest. Human projects remain provisional. The psalm situates prayer in this unfinished landscape without despair. Its final line, in which the generation of the wilderness fails to enter rest, marks a boundary that later generations may cross by faith. In the daily rhythm of the office, this means that the worshiper confesses both the persistence of hardness of heart and the ongoing possibility of renewal.

The practice of repeating Psalm 95 each morning may seem rote, yet repetition is itself a form of shaping. The text becomes familiar enough to dwell in the background of consciousness. Over time, its two movements—praise and hearing—begin to form the day’s inner structure. One learns to begin from gratitude and to continue in attentiveness. The psalm’s simplicity conceals a depth of pedagogy, too. It does not teach new information about God but forms a way of being before God. Each day begins with acknowledgment of what is not self-made and ends, implicitly, in rest that cannot be earned.

When heard through the witness of Christ, the psalm’s promise of rest deepens but does not lose its original force. The one who calls us to sing and to listen also bears our failure to do so. In the life of Christ, the Shepherd of the flock enters the wilderness and turns judgment into reconciliation. The morning recitation of the psalm, therefore, is an announcement of grace. Praise and hearing belong within that grace. They are gifts given to sustain a life of faith amid uncertainty.

Psalm 95 thus serves as both entrance and measure for daily devotion. It begins the day with recognition of God’s creative and sustaining power, it invites honest listening to the divine voice, and it leaves the heart poised between memory and hope. To pray it each morning is to allow oneself to be formed by its rhythm. Within that rhythm the promise of rest remains alive as the quiet assurance that God’s presence endures in the world we inhabit today.