“One generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts.”
– Psalm 145:4
O God, help us to be found faithful in commending Your works and mighty acts to the next generation.
Psalm 145:4 is a verse that every parent needs to hide within our hearts. But I would not just say parents or grandparents, but every one of us in the church. One generation shall commend your works, oh God, to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.
This is a picture we see all throughout the Psalms and all throughout Scripture. That the next generation will not know the works and the worth of God if the previous generation doesn’t commend his works to them, declare his mighty acts to them. And those words, commend and declare, are so important. It’s not just tell, it’s not just talking here, because there’s a way to talk about God’s works that can be, well, frankly, kind of boring and dry.
Psalm 145:4 Reminds Us to Praise God
The whole picture here is one generation shall commend, like exalt and praise and brag on and boast in God’s works to another. That’s the picture here. So Mom, Dad, Grandma and Granddad, your duty, responsibility and privilege.
My duty, responsibility and privilege as a dad is to commend God’s works to my children. To not just tell them what God has done, but tell them with zeal about what God has done, to boast in what God has done, to commend what God has done to them. To declare his mighty acts to them, to tell them how awesome God is. And not just moms and dads and grand-moms and granddads, but all of us in the church, to look at the next generation, to just look at generation or two generations, or even three generations for some, behind you and think, how can I commend God’s works to them?
We must do this. We must do this from one generation to another. So God help us, we pray, to commend your works to succeeding generations. God, we pray for children right now in our lives and our churches. We pray for children in our homes. We pray for teenagers. We pray even for young adults and just those who are one generation behind us.
Psalm 145:4 Leads Us to Pray for Our Children
God, we pray that you would use our lives to come in your works to them, help us to tell them how awesome you are, how mighty your acts are, how worthy you are. And may they hear that from our lips, may they see that in our lives.
God, I pray. I pray that every one of our kids who’s represented, some are listening to this right now, I pray that even right now, every child, every student who’s listing this would hear God is awesome. His works are mighty. His acts are beyond our comprehension and he’s worthy of all praise and all worship. And God, that you would cause that message to resound from our lips and resound from our lives and resound in our homes and resound in our churches.
This Verse Leads Us to Pray for Help to be Faithful
God, help us to be faithful, to commend your works to the next generation, to coming generations, to declare your mighty acts, that they might know you and fear you, and love you and worship you, and follow you and trust you, and surrender their lives to you and spend their lives making your glory known among the nations.
God, we pray that that would be the fruit of our lives. That succeeding generations would be making disciples of the nations as a result of our lives, because we have commended your works to them. God, please may that be so. I pray for that in my home. God, I pray for that in my home. I pray for that in the church family I’m a part of. God, raise up a generation who loves you, desires you glorifies you. Spends their lives making your glory known in all the earth.
God, please cause that to be the fruit of our lives. Lord, don’t let this commendation of your works stop with us. Cause this commendation of your works to spread through us, that our children, our children’s children and their children, that children yet unborn, to use language from Psalm 78, would know you one day because of how we commended your works in our day. God, may it be so, we pray. That generations to come might know and love and worship and experience you and your mighty acts, in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
