The psalmist invites us to sing a “new song” because the LORD has done marvelous things. This isn’t about changing musical styles or chasing fresh feelings; it’s about freshly responding to God’s unchanging faithfulness. When He moves in power, delivers with His own hand, and wins victories we could never win, silence is not an option. Psalm 98:1 calls us to see His saving work again with wide-eyed wonder and to let our praise catch up to His goodness.

The God Who Still Does Wonders

“Sing to the LORD a new song, for He has done wonders; His right hand and His holy arm have gained Him the victory” (Psalm 98:1). The “wonders” of God are not just ancient stories; they are the pattern of His character. He split seas, toppled idols, and raised dry bones to life. Above all, He sent His Son to bear our sin on the cross and rise again in power. The greatest “marvel” is that a holy God would save unholy people and call us His own. “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory… full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Because God is living and active, yesterday’s song is never enough on its own. His mercies “are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!” (Lamentations 3:23). That means today—right in the middle of your ordinary schedule—God is worthy of a fresh response. A new song is simply a renewed heart seeing His hand in today’s battles, today’s temptations, and today’s small victories, and then answering Him with specific, personal praise.

The Victory That Reshapes Our Story

Psalm 98 points to a victory won by the LORD’s “right hand” and “holy arm.” In the fullness of time, that victory was revealed in Jesus Christ. At the cross, He disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities: “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15). His resurrection sealed it: sin, death, and hell no longer have the last word over those who belong to Him.

That victory reaches right into your story. “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The “new song” of Psalm 98 is sung by people who know they have been forgiven, adopted, and made new through Christ’s blood. You may feel weak, but the truth is, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). Your praise today doesn’t come from pretending life is easy, but from standing on a finished victory that cannot be undone.

Living the New Song Today

When God saves us, He doesn’t just change our destination; He changes our soundtrack. “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the LORD” (Psalm 40:3). Your worship is not background noise; it is testimony. The way you speak of Christ at work, the way you sing in your car, the way you give thanks in hardship—these are all verses in the song He is writing through your life.

This “new song” is nourished by the Word. “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you… and… sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16). As Scripture fills your mind, the Spirit tunes your heart. Even heaven is singing: “And they sang a new song: ‘Worthy are You to take the scroll… for You were slain, and by Your blood You purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue and people and nation’” (Revelation 5:9). Today, you get to join that eternal choir—right where you are, with the voice and circumstances you have—by deliberately choosing thankful, Christ-centered praise.

Lord, thank You for the victory of Your right hand and the new song You put in our mouths. Today, help me open my lips in specific, fearless praise so that others may see, fear, and put their trust in You.

Most of the world's great souls have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness.

In the morning of the world (or should we say, in that strange darkness that came soon after the dawn of man's creation), that pious soul, Enoch, walked with God and was not, for God took him; and while it is not stated in so many words, a fair inference is that Enoch walked a path quite apart from his contemporaries.

Another lonely man was Noah who, of all the antediluvians, found grace in the sight of God; and every shred of evidence points to the aloneness of his life even while surrounded by his people.

Again, Abraham had Sarah and Lot, as well as many servants and herdsmen, but who can read his story and the apostolic comment upon it without sensing instantly that he was a man "whose soul was alike a star and dwelt apart"? As far as we know not one word did God ever speak to him in the company of men. Face down he communed with his God, and the innate dignity of the man forbade that he assume this posture in the presence of others. How sweet and solemn was the scene that night of the sacrifice when he saw the lamps of fire moving between the pieces of offering. There, alone with a horror of great darkness upon him, he heard the voice of God and knew that he was a man marked for divine favor.

Moses also was a man apart. While yet attached to the court of Pharaoh he took long walks alone, and during one of these walks while far removed from the crowds he saw an Egyptian and a Hebrew fighting and came to the rescue of his countryman. After the resultant break with Egypt he dwelt in almost complete seclusion in the desert. There, while he watched his sheep alone, the wonder of the burning bush appeared to him, and later on the peak of Sinai he crouched alone to gaze in fascinated awe at the Presence, partly hidden, partly disclosed, within the cloud and fire.

The prophets of pre-Christian times differed widely from each other, but one mark they bore in common was their enforced loneliness. They loved their people and gloried in the religion of the fathers, but their loyalty to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their zeal for the welfare of the nation of Israel drove them away from the crowd and into long periods of heaviness. "I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children," cried one and unwittingly spoke for all the rest.

Most revealing of all is the sight of that One of whom Moses and all the prophets did write, treading His lonely way to the cross. His deep loneliness was unrelieved by the presence of the multitudes.

'Tis midnight, and on Olive's brow

The star is dimmed that lately shone;

'Tis midnight; in the garden now,

The suffering Savior prays alone.

'Tis midnight, and from all removed

The Savior wrestles lone with fears;

E'en the disciple whom He loved

Heeds not his Master's grief and tears.

- William B. Tappan

He died alone in the darkness hidden from the sight of mortal man and no one saw Him when He arose triumphant and walked out of the tomb, though many saw Him afterward and bore witness to what they saw. There are some things too sacred for any eye but God's to look upon. The curiosity, the clamor, the well-meant but blundering effort to help can only hinder the waiting soul and make unlikely if not impossible the communication of the secret message of God to the worshiping heart.

Sometimes we react by a kind of religious reflex and repeat dutifully the proper words and phrases even though they fail to express our real feelings and lack the authenticity of personal experience. Right now is such a time. A certain conventional loyalty may lead some who hear this unfamiliar truth expressed for the first time to say brightly, "Oh, I am never lonely. Christ said, `I will never leave you nor forsake you,' and `Lo, I am with you alway.' How can I be lonely when Jesus is with me?"

Now I do not want to reflect on the sincerity of any Christian soul, but this stock testimony is too neat to be real. It is obviously what the speaker thinks should be true rather than what he has proved to be true by the test of experience. This cheerful denial of loneliness proves only that the speaker has never walked with God without the support and encouragement afforded him by society. The sense of companionship which he mistakenly attributes to the presence of Christ may and probably does arise from the presence of friendly people. Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross. "They all forsook Him, and fled."

The pain of loneliness arises from the constitution of our nature. God made us for each other. The desire for human companionship is completely natural and right. The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share inner experiences, he is forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

The man who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. But he should not expect things to be otherwise. After all he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and the journey he takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the garden of his own soul - and who but God can walk there with him? He is of another spirit from the multitudes that tread the courts of the Lord's house. He has seen that of which they have only heard, and he walks among them somewhat as Zacharias walked after his return from the altar when the people whispered, "He has seen a vision."

The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Savior glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and overserious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none, he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd - that Christ is All in All, that He is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, that in Him we have and possess life's summum bonum.

Two things remain to be said. One, that the lonely man of whom we speak is not a haughty man, nor is he the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly satirized in popular literature. He is likely to feel that he is the least of all men and is sure to blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to share his feelings with others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him, but the spiritual climate around him does not encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his griefs to God alone.

The second thing is that the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against human suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. Just the opposite is true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the brokenhearted and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world, he is all the more able to help it. Meister Eckhart taught his followers that if they should find themselves in prayer and happen to remember that a poor widow needed food, they should break off the prayer instantly and go care for the widow. "God will not suffer you to lose anything by it," he told them. "You can take up again in prayer where you left off and the Lord will make it up to you." This is typical of the great mystics and masters of the interior life from Paul to the present day.

The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful "adjustment" to unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them and accepts them for what they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints.

Tozer in the Evening
BROTHERHOOD OF THE REDEEMED

Anyone making even a quick review of Genesis will discover that God has told us more about His presence in creation and in history than about the details of human civilization. We believe that eternity dwells in the Person of God and that the material universe came into being through God's creation. The first man and woman in the human race were created. They failed in their initial encounter with Satan, our archenemy. Following that, the Genesis record becomes a narrative of human failure against the abiding backdrop of God's faithfulness. God Himself, through the Holy Spirit, points out a universal problem: the natural brotherhood of human beings is a sinful brotherhood. It is the brotherhood of all who are spiritually lost. But the Bible has good news. It is the revelation of a new brotherhood, the brotherhood of the redeemed! We know it in our time as the believing church of our Lord Jesus Christ in all nations. It is a new brotherhood among men based on regeneration-and restoration!

The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is desperately sick: who can know it? - Jeremiah 7:9

I was going to use an inappropriate word, and say, the superb ease with which Christ grappled with, and overcame, all types of disease is a revelation on a lower level of the inexhaustible and all -sufficient fulness of His healing power. He can cope with all sin, the world’s sin and the individual’s. And, as I believe. He alone can do it.

Just look at the problem that lies before any one who attempts to staunch these wounds of humanity. What is needed in order to deliver men from the sickness of sin? Well! that evil thing, like the fabled dog that sits at the gate of the infernal regions, is three-headed. And you have to do something with each of these heads if you are to deliver men from that power.

There is, first, the awful power that evil once done has over us of repeating itself on and on. There is nothing more dreadful, to a reflective mind, than the damning influence of habit. The man that has done some wrong thing once is a rara avis indeed. If once, then twice; if twice, then onward and onward through all the numbers. And the intervals between will grow less, and what were isolated points will coalesce into a line; and impulses wax as motives wane, and the less delight a man has in his habitual form of evil the more its dominion over him; and he does it at last, not because the doing of it is any delight, but because the not doing of it is a misery. If you are to get rid of sin and to eject the disease from a man, you have to deal with that awful degradation of character and the tremendous chains of custom. That is one of the heads of the monster.

But, as I said, sin has reference to God, and there is another of the heads. For with sin comes guilt. The relation to God is perverted; and the man that has transgressed stands before Him as guilty, with all the dolefulness that that solemn word means; and that is another of the heads.

The third is this- the consequences that follow in the nature of penalty - "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." So long as there is a universal rule by God, in which all things are concatenated by cause and effect, it is impossible but that " Evil shall slay the wicked." And that is the third head. These three, habit, guilt, and penalty, have all to be dealt with if you are going to make a thorough job of the surgery.

And here I want not to argue, but to preach. Jesus Christ died on the Cross for you, and your sin was in His heart and mind when He died, and His atoning sacrifice cancels the guilt, and suspends all that is dreadful in the penalty of the sin. Nothing else - nothing else will do that. Who can deal with guilt but the offended Ruler and Judge? Who can trammel up consequences but the Lord of the Universe? The blood of Jesus Christ is the sole and sufficient oblation for, and satisfaction for, the sins of the whole world.