There is nothing new about praise and worship. David experienced it on the hills of Judea or wherever he was overwhelmed with God speaking. And we’re commanded to encourage each other with songs and praise to God. But it’s very important that we know what it is we are praising him for—that we get a running start at praise.
Praise is always a result, not a cause. Praise is not a way to coax God into bringing the results we want or manipulate Him into giving us things we ask for. It is, instead, a result, not a cause--a result of our lives interfacing with something that God is—an encounter with one of the life-changing experiences of raw faith. When the theological truths we talk about become personal for us, the result will be praise! Praise happens as a result of being forgiven, or finding an incredible insight, being filled with the Holy Spirit, or just experiencing the joy of our salvation. We can’t just conger up praise up and make it happen. But when we experience God’s faithfulness, we can’t stop praise from pouring forth. It is not a posture or a position. It is the result of God’s reality breaking through to our dull awareness and making us new again and again. It is removing the obstacles in our own communications with God so that He can be the loving Father he always is. It is gratitude for what God is in our lives this day.
Probably no greater praise and worship song has ever been written than “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” We keep singing it and keep singing it, and somehow, we don’t ever get tired of it, because it is so immensely true.
I think of the Sunday at our church when we were singing a bunch of new songs. There were young kids standing with their hands in the air and the worship team was swaying to the rhythm. This big farmer was sitting in front of us in church. He had his arms crossed and his body language said he was not getting it. Whatever we were singing was not penetrating his worrisome expression. The back of his neck was all sunburned from being out in the field, and I happened to know that he had a daughter at Anderson University. He was worried about the crop, and he was worried about her tuition, and whether or not they were going to have enough corn to pay her college bill. I don’t know if that’s what he was thinking about, but he was certainly not thinking about what we were singing.
About that time our music director started this song we’ve sung a million times: “Summer, and winter, and springtime, and harvest, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above join with all nature in manifold witness to thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.” I saw his shoulders kind of loosening up, and he uncrossed his arms, and you could see in his body language him processing, “You know God’s always been faithful before. We’ve always paid the rent. We’ve got her this far in school...” Then we got to the chorus: “Great is thy faithfulness. Great is thy faithfulness. Morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed Thy hand has provided. Great is thy faithfulness, O Lord, unto me.”
I don’t know; maybe it’s because we live in the Midwest, and we are in the middle of corn fields and soybeans; but, that praise song connected, yet again, all these years after it was written with a farmer and a college student in the middle of Indiana.
I only hope to write a song that one day will connect like that, that will sometime down the road, intersect with real life issues of some farmer, or some worn-out mom, or some confused teen-ager, or some little child right at the reality of their moment and fill them with an awareness of God’s all-sufficient provision and turn turbulence into gratitude and unstoppable praise!
