Praise for the Lord

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PRCUALife, protecting life through all its stages. Welcome to If Not For God, stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. If Not For God with Mike Zwick. How fun today, Michael.

You're wanting to talk about praise. I actually woke up this morning, and I was on the way over here, and I was going to call Robbie. I was going to do all these different things in Winston-Salem. And I started to think about it, and I said, Mike, take 30 minutes. Don't make any phone calls while you're on the road.

Don't do anything that you could do to kind of plan, prepare, or whatever. Just sit there and spend time with the Lord. And all of a sudden, I started to sing an old song, and I thought about praise.

But years ago, I was a client of mine, and she was up in Asheville, North Carolina, and she was in her mid-80s. And she said to me, she said, Mike, she says, when praises go up, blessings come down. I've always found that to be true, but look at—this morning, we'll look at Psalm 150, and it says, 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 the lyre. Praise Him with timbrel and dancing. Praise Him with the strings of pipe and pipe. Praise Him with the clash of cymbals. Praise Him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. And that's actually the last psalm.

I think it's something that's pretty good, and I can think of many, many examples in my life of where I was having a tough time, or I was trying to figure things out, and I think sometimes we just need to take some time and praise the Lord. There was an example that I thought about. It was a guy who worked for Welch's. They told him, you have six months to make this new flavor. He said, okay, and he took about five and a half months, and he kept on trying to make the flavor, kept on trying to make the flavor, and there was about a week left, and it was the Monday, and by that Thursday, he had to have this new flavor or else. Now, what that or else was, I don't know, but it was or else, and he said, look, he said, God, I'm just going to take some time to praise you over the next day. He put all of his work down, took, put everything that he did down, and he said, I'm just going to praise the Lord, and he praised the Lord, praised the Lord until the next day, which was Tuesday, and he said, all of a sudden, on that Tuesday, he said, it came to him. You need to mix this flavor, mix that flavor, and you'll get your flavor, and he did it, and sure enough, he got the flavor that he wanted. So, when he took time to praise the Lord, and I think sometimes where, you know, he worked for Welch's, he needed to stop his whining.

Yeah, for something great. That's it, you know, but if we take time to praise the Lord, it's amazing how many answers that he'll give us to prayer. The funny thing was, was he said, God, he said, I, I've been asking you for these flavors for the past six months, and he said, Lord, why didn't you give it to me until now? And he said, the Lord told him, he said, well, you didn't need it until Thursday, right? That's his sense of humor too, by the way.

There you go. My experience, yeah. Well, the faith that's involved in that is spectacular, and I love, in 119 Psalm, there's a verse that's challenging, yet beautiful, because King David said, and at seven times a day, I will praise you because of your righteous judgments. Now, righteous judgments, that's the stuff that you might think is tough, right? And an interesting thing, since I learned that verse, as I go through my day, I'll quite often, something will happen that really just, you know, kind of like, wow, that one good. Yeah. And I go, okay, that's one of my seven. Yeah. Because one of the, you know, it's an opportunity to say, okay, God, that's what you had. Sure. And here we go. It's one of the things that I love about this verse.