Praise the Lord Saints!

There are moments for some of us, hopefully for all of us claiming the title Christian, when the Spirit of the Living God gets in us and gives birth to thanksgiving and reflection. Moments when we really, truly, deeply understand how good God has been to us.

There are moments when I contemplate not only how good God has been in general, but how good He has been to me particularly; not just to my family, friends, hubbers, co-workers, saints and others, but how good He has been to Me. I recall the times when He stepped into my own situation; how when nothing else could help, His love lifted me; how when I was down so low I had to reach up to touch the ground, He spoke to my heart, lifted my burdens and set my foot on triumphant ground.

There is something about when we really stop to think about how good God has been, we get caught up in an avalanche of emotions and so full we cannot keep it to ourselves, even if we wanted to. We have got to tell somebody. It is like fire shut in our bones.

The history of the early Christian Church is a history of Praise. The young Church did not buy into the pessimism of the age. Regardless of their personal circumstances, they continually engaged in giving triumphant praises to God and like Paul and Silas, experienced supernatural delivery. We are living in a time when people have lost their hope, their joy, their enthusiasm, and find themselves wondering:

Where is the blessedness I knew when first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view of Jesus and his word?
What peaceful hours I once enjoyed! How sweet their memory still!

But they have left an aching void, the world can never fill.
Return, O holy Dove, return! Sweet the messenger of rest!
I hate the sins that made thee mourn and drove thee from my breast.

William Cowper

But the early Church seems to have understood that you do not lose your joy, your excitement, your hope. We turn things over to God and go on in our praise (a form of prayer) and thanksgiving. I do not care how dysfunctional life gets; I can still sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.

If you are living in a crazy household, working on a job you detest, residing is a less than desirable neighborhood, nothing seems to be going right, you can still sing His praises and thank Him that it is as well as it is. There is always something to praise and glorify God for.

“Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31.

Let’s be honest. It does not matter how often the skies of our lives get cloudy; there are times when the skies are clear. Then, praise Him! I know we talk about, “troubles in my way,” “nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen,” “sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” but, glory to God; it does not rainALLthe time. Every now and then God gives us a respite from our troubles, a vacation from difficulties, and relief from our grief. Every now and then, God orders the clouds to drift away, speaks peace to our troubling waters, commands the sun to shine in our lives for a little while and we ought to give thanks to a merciful God.

We may not have everything that we desire. Our name may not be a Trump or Gates or Winfrey, but we ought to thank God for reasonable health, strength, our right mind, still making it day by day. Some of us may be hopping, some crawling, others dragging, still others slow stepping, but thank God, we are moving.

Every morning when we wake up we ought to thank God that we did not go crazy during the night, no one broke into our home and harmed us, we still have the activities of our limbs and the blood that He has given us still flows warmly through our veins. I do not care about what I think may not be going right in my life; I will still praise and thank God for all His mercies. The Psalmist said, Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands. Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

You will notice that the Psalmist takes his praise public. He is not going to just stay home and get happy. It is not enough for him to sing and shout by himself. He has to take it public. He has to share his joy. In fact, Psalm 100 became one of the worship psalms. Whenever the temple worship convened, they would open with: Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.

Praise is the responsibility of all God’s people. We have a responsibility to let God and the world know how grateful we are for all His blessings. I realize that there are some ingrates who just want to always receive and not give. But if God has been good to us, we ought to witness to His goodness.

Yet, it does not stop there. After we praise God with our shouts, amens, hallelujahs, hand claps and tears of joy, there must be service. Service is praise in action. Praise with no service is lip service. God is saying it is not an either or situation, but both. We have to bring the two together. Anything we do in obedience to His commission and for His sake is giving Him praise. If you mop or sweep the floors so His House of Worship will be clean, that is praising Him. If you are holding an office and performing your ecclesiastical duties for His sake, that is praising God and thanking Him for the privilege. Now, if you are serving for the pastor, then you are serving the wrong person and you are at the wrong house; go to the pastor’s house.

Praise and service are two sides of the same coin. Praise is our verbal “joyful noise unto the LORD” and service is our physical “joyful noise unto the LORD” .  Let me take it a step further. Service is a horizontal demonstration of vertical praise. So you see, basically praise is verbal, emotional and self contained. We rejoice and have a uniquely personal experience of praise and thanksgiving. But service takes it further by saying my praise to God can best be seen, not in how high I get spiritually, but how I walk when I come down from my spiritual high. How I praise God in my everyday life and in my everyday interactions with my fellow man.

Thus, it is unimportant how regularly we may attend Church or how much verbal praise we give God, if we do not serve Him; we are nothing but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. It is ridiculous to get all excited talking about how God has blessed us and then we fail to be a blessing to others. If God has done great things for us, then we ought to attempt great things for Him. If the Lord has blessed us, our praise of God and for God is incomplete until we become doers of the Word. The Psalmist said, “Serve the LORD with gladness” because it is the gladness and joy in serving God that draws people to God.

This is my perception of how it works: service implies work, work implies sacrifice, and sacrifice implies sorrow. When we are seen as saints serving, laboring, and sacrificing but NOT gloomy, despondent, depressed and sorrowful, but joyful and excited, it may cause people to wonder what it is about us that we seem so content and glad in our service to God that they may desire what we have.

And finally, we praise God in our giving. Even though tithing was superseded by the new covenant of God’s grace and is a freewill offering, His grace is what inspires our liberal giving.

Oswald Sanders in his book, “Enjoying Intimacy With God,” made this point: “This is. . . the new mathematics, the arithmetic of heaven. God estimates our gifts not so much by their financial value, as by the sacrifice involved, the love that accompanies it, and the amount that is left. The supreme value of the widow’s gift lay in the fact that she ‘out of her poverty, put in all she owned, all she had to live on’ - while the others gave ‘out of their surplus’ (Mk. 12:44). Here is a searching test of our giving, but that incident should greatly encourage those who have only a little to give, but give it gladly.”

Notice that the widow is not said to have given a tithe of ten percent, but a love sacrifice of 100 percent. Jesus took notice and the point He makes is blazingly clear: the gift which counts is the gift which costs. This is one of many instances in Scripture where Jesus contrasts God’s computation with that of man. It was not all about what the widow gave, but what she had left after giving. Something to think about.

The distinguishing mark of the widow’s gift, however, was not merely its proportion to her means; there was something in her heart that lifted her gift out of routine into the realm of sacrifice. We all know only too well the easy, reasonable justifications she might have given for not giving anything or only one mite (about a penny). She could have excused herself by rationalizing that she did not have anything to spare. We are quite acquainted with this rationalization because we would have used it to justify our walking away with the two mites still in our wallet or pocketbook. But Jesus’ recognition of the greatness of the gift eliminates our shabby excuses. No gift of love is too small to count, nor can any life be excused from the grace and duty of sharing. Nothing escapes the notice of the God from whom no secrets are hid.

Our giving is our praise, our sacrifice of love and thanksgiving and obedience to the God of our salvation.

Thus, we praise and glorify our Lord with our mouths, we serve our Lord with our strength, and we give of our substance to the work of our Lord. Praise triumphs gloriously! For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endures to all generations.