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Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord all my life. The Lord reigns forever, your God, O [church], for all generations. Praise the Lord! (Psalm 146:1, 2, 10).

Welcome to September! Are you excited? I expect most of us feel more trepidation than excitement. What will this month bring? What will be the results of children and youth going back to school? Let alone, adults to university and college?

We have been spending some time in the end of the book of Psalms. Its tempting to go elsewhere to mark the beginning of September and everything this month entails. However, these psalms may just offer us the exact spiritual discipline we need to navigate the raging waters that are predicted to come our way this fall.

When we think of the spiritual disciplines, what often comes to mind are prayer, scripture reading, silence, retreats. But that\u2019s a rather narrow perspective. The Bible, it seems to me, includes a more robust list. One of which is the discipline of praising God. \u2018Praise the Lord,\u2019 is the resounding call of these psalms. Its a discipline we ought to take up. Most often we only lift our praises when we feel like it. But these psalms do not ask us if we feel like it. They tell us to \u201cPraise the Lord!\u201d Just do it!

Notice how the Psalmist begins, \u201cPraise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul!\u201d Is it possible that the psalmist doesn\u2019t really feel like doing either? Thus, he has to remind himself to get to it. Just to do it! And then he makes this commitment, \u201cI will praise the Lord all my life.\u201d This is why I say that praising God is a spiritual discipline. We need to commit ourselves to doing it, whether we want to or not.

Once upon a time, I preached a sermon on Psalm 146 in which I encouraged my listeners to be more diligent in evangelism. At first glance that may seem odd, but I think I was on the right track. The word evangelism still scares many us. We see it as something separate from the rest of our faith; something we will get to once we are ready or mature enough, or the Spirit has made us bold enough. It conjures up the image of trying to convince strangers to become Christians.

The Bible persistently gives a different slant to evangelism. The word means \u2018to tell a great story or news.\u2019 If our favourite sports team wins the championship, we like to tell stories of how it happened. And who hasn\u2019t heard the story of the fish that just keeps getting bigger?

The Hebrew verb for praise, HALAL, means to make a show, to boast, to rave, to celebrate, perhaps even to be clamorously foolish--an image that may offer a fair description of the exultant experience of the first Christian Pentecost. Add the Hebrew word for God to Halal and we get Hallelujah!

These psalms tell us to declare the things that God has done. That is how Israel used them. There were sung as expressions of the joy of the exiles coming home from Babylon. God had set them free. He had brought them home. The story needed to be told.

Likewise, evangelism is telling good news, stories of hope. Therefore, Psalm 146 gives helpful advice for us. Evangelism begins with a commitment to praise God. When our goal is to declare the praise of God every day, someone is bound to hear it.

It is true that some Christians have special gifts in evangelism. The church does well to send these people out as missionaries and evangelists. But all of us have the ability to tell stories about what God has done; stories about salvation in Jesus Christ.

These are the stories we ought to tell this fall. As the world seems to be heading ever deeper into chaos, we need to remember that there is a larger story: God\u2019s story. The trials that may come this fall, will be nothing compared to the glory of God\u2019s kingdom when it is all in all.

So, whatever happens, remember, "Praise the Lord, O my soul!"