There was a time in my life where I didn’t understand what real praise was. I’ve heard all my life people say the words, “Give praise unto God because He is worthy,” and truly He is worthy of it all. I grew up thinking praise and worship meant to sing a couple of songs, amen the preacher that was preaching the sermon, and move on. Maybe a shout of excitement every once in a while.
It wasn’t until I had gotten older and rededicated my life back to God, did I really care to have a question of anything anyone ever done in a church service. I always went with the flow of doing things. It was at this time of rededication I became completely concerned with my walk with God. I had become so serious in my walk with God that some had said, “Karlee you are way to serious. You need to have a little fun every now and then.”
I became part of a praise and worship group at my home church about three and a half years into my journey with God. There was a young lady there about my age that had asked us a very serious and eye opening question. She asked all of us individually what we thought praise and worship was. Up until that moment I had never really gave it a thought. I knew it had to do with lifting God up higher than anyone but still at that I didn’t have the understanding of what lifting or esteeming someone higher than yourself meant. Everyone was kind of quiet and really didn’t know what to say either. I had studied worship and knew that worship was more than a song but worship was really shown through prayer unto God. As for praise I was completely stumped.
Almost a year later I found myself in some awesome revival services and I kept hearing the preachers or leaders of worship say, ” Give God some praise!” I still questioned what Praise meant. How do I praise God? I really felt like the desciples when they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. I asked God to teach me how to praise Him because He was and is and will always be worthy of my praise. As I heard the crowed start shouting and heard some cry out the name of Jesus, I still questioned is this real praise? Do you just shout and God is like oh thanks for your vocal cords of praise? I felt in my spirit that there was more to it than shouting in excitement.
It was during this time of examining that God gave me a complete revelation of what profited Him more. He pressed it on my heart to look up the word praise in the hebrew dictionary and the hebrew word for praise is Yadah which means to give thanks. This made a world of a difference on my outlook of things. It made sense that praising God was really becoming aware of what God has done for us and thanking Him for it.
I have found that the more I loved on God through thankfulness of His goodness and bragging on his beauty, that there has been a deeper love I have found for Him and Him I. It has caused a deeper connection between me and my Redeemer. There has been many times Jesus has loved on me and I have felt such a comfort. He desires us to love on Him and be thankful for Him as well. If we look at the perfect couple, you’ll see that both speak highly of each other and thank each other for being there in times of need or loving them when they were unlovable and even in there times of failure. Praise is simply recognition of the good things that sometimes go unnoticed. It is a heartfelt thankfulness for the goodness and mercy of God.
Now when someone says, “Give God some praise,” I don’t awkwardly stand there waiting to see what someone else does and then shout awkwardly to hype myself up to recieve the glory from God. I now reflect on the many things God has done and I learned that God would rather hear how good He is and how beautiful His countenance is any day of the week over a shout. Shouting does have its own purpose of releasing into the atmosphere the overwhelming power of His glory, but it is not a praising mechanism that moves God to love on us even more.
Kingdom Minded Ministries 