Wednesday, January 5

Wednesday

Praise the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens.  Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness.  Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and flute, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals.  Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.  – Psalm 150

This is the last of the Psalms.  Notice how many times you see the word “praise” in this Psalm, 13 times in 6 verses.  In fact, this word is used over 200 times in the book of Psalms.  It is no accident that the final phrase of the final Psalm is “Praise the LORD.”  Praise is the fundamental purpose for why the Psalms were written.  Halal is a primary Hebrew root word for praise. Our word "hallelujah" comes from this base word. It means "to be clear, to shine, to boast of, to rave about, celebrate, to be clamorously foolish."  Praise is at the heart of the Christian life; it is what we were made to do, and what we will do for all eternity!  Praise can be distinguished from worship in that worship is something that encompasses all of our life and our total being, while praise is a specific act we engage in.

C.S. Lewis once commented that when he first began to believe in God, he used to struggle with the idea of a God who is always telling his people to praise him and demanding praise from his creation.  Lewis said he felt that if God was really so great, then He wouldn’t need to be praised.  After all, nobody likes to be around a person who continually needs to be praised.  Lewis even remarked that he couldn’t stomach the idea of a God who seemed to be saying, “what I want most is to be told how great and wonderful I am.”  But Lewis admits that he missed something critical about the nature of what it means to praise.  The following excerpt from his book Reflections on the Psalms has been a great help to me; take a few moments to read it carefully.

But the most obvious fact about praise-whether of God or any thing-strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise-lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game-praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least…I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?" The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 93-95)

The basic idea is that God tells us to praise Him more for our sake than for His!  In commanding us to praise and glorify Him, God is actually inviting us to enjoy Him!  We delight to praise what we enjoy – Do you enjoy God?  Do you want to?

Then praise Him!