When We Praise

Welcome to this weekend's In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley. As a believer, praise and thanksgiving were never meant to be reserved for Sunday morning only. Worship should be your lifestyle. Learn more about what happens when you give praise to God. Learn more about what happens when you give praise to God.

A hundred and fiftieth Psalms. Praise the Lord. Praise God in His sanctuary. Praise Him in His mighty expanse. Praise Him for His mighty deeds. Praise Him according to His excellent greatness. Praise Him with a trumpet, with trumpet sound. Praise Him with harp and lyre. Praise Him with timberland dancing. Praise Him with stringed instruments and pipe. Praise Him with loud cymbals. Praise Him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.

I want to say this beginning and all through the message. Listen carefully. If you have no feeling and no sense of desire to praise God, then there is a dryness in your spirit. A dryness in your soul that you need to ask. God, is something missing? Is it that I don't know how? Is it that I've never thought about it?

Is it that I am so backslidden? I can't think about it. God, you know, if I don't feel it, is there some reason for this dryness in my soul? That people around me can sing praises to you and I just don't feel anything.

And nobody can answer that but you. So I just want to ask you to consider that if there's that sense of dryness in your own heart. Now, what happens when you and I praise Him? So I want you to jot down simply five things that I think would be worthy of your thinking about, considering, praying about, asking God to search your own praise life with these five simple things. First of all, praise magnifies God. Because you see, I can't do anything else while I'm praising God.

I just can't. That is, I can't think about something else while I'm praising God. And therefore, God is magnified.

When I begin to praise Him, my focus is upon Him. I can't be thinking about what am I going to do tomorrow? What did I do yesterday? What about the schedule? What about this? What about that?

How do I look? None of those things can be involved in true praise. True praise is so focused on God, so centered on Him that the only thing that goes on in my mind is God.

That is who He is and what He is doing. And so if you'll think about in these Psalms how the praise is expressed. And let's go back to Psalm 145 and let's just stay close to this last part here. Listen to the Psalmist. I will extol thee, my God, O king.

Look at that. Three times he points to God. I will extol thee, my God, king. I will bless thy name forever and ever. Every day I will bless thee and I will praise thy name forever and ever. Great is the Lord and highly to be praised. His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise thy works to another.

We shall tell each other about Him. And shall declare thy mighty acts on the glorious splendor of thy majesty and on thy wonderful works I will meditate. Now, if you are not usually a person who spends time praising God, I just want to challenge you to take this one Psalm, 145, and you can just limit it to the first five verses. And you may just want to say, now, Lord, I want to learn how to praise you. You may feel foolish. You may hope nobody's listening at your house.

And you may not even feel comfortable, but just out loud just say, I will praise thee, my God, O king. And just go through that passage. You may want to do that for a week. I can tell you this. If you'll do it for three weeks, you'll never stop.

If you'll do it for twenty-one days, you won't stop. And see, that's one way to do it. That's one way to learn to praise Him with your lips. So, that is one Psalm you could use. Look in Psalm 147. And he says in Psalm 147, verse one, and look at this, it is good to sing praises to our God.

Now, we know that's true in the church building, but what about privately? How many of you ever, in your own private devotions, you just break out singing? Somebody says, well, man, I don't even know the words. It doesn't make any difference what you sing. You may well sing Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound That Saved a Wretch Like Me. There's nothing wrong with praying and singing. You say, well, I don't sing very well.

That's your opinion. That isn't God's. He's the one who gave you the voice. Now, He may not make you a great soprano or a great bass, but He's given you a voice. And if you can talk to Him, you can sing to Him. You can just sing, my Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine. There's nothing wrong with singing to Him.

Listen to what He says. He says, praise the Lord, it's good to sing praises to our God. It's pleasant and praise is becoming. He likes it. That is, God loves to hear our praise. He wants to hear it. So if I stumble, so what?

If I mispronounce the words, so what? It doesn't make any difference. We are praising God. So we say, first of all, that it magnifies God. And the reason it does is because that's where our focus is upon Him. The second thing I want you to jot down is this, that praise modifies man's estimation of himself. It modifies man's estimation of himself.

That is, it brings it down to the size it ought to be. If we were created to glorify God, we cannot glorify God and glorify ourselves. We cannot elevate ourselves and become prideful and egotistical and boastful and praise God. Man ultimately has this foundation, pride. Whatever we do, the whole basic problem is pride. Because you see, if it's to do something before God's timing, what I'm saying is, God, I know better about the timing than you do.

If it is to desire something that God doesn't want me to have, it's God, I know better about what I need than you do. It doesn't make any difference what the issue is. The issue ultimately is pride. Now, nobody likes to admit that they have to deal with pride. But the truth is, we all have to deal with it. And it comes in subtle forms in the back door and sometimes it hits us head on. But what praise does, because my focus is upon Him and not myself, it enables us to see ourselves as God sees us.

And how is that? Totally dependent upon Him. Objects of His love, accepted by His goodness and grace, forgiven by His grace, our sin atoned for forever. It is all of what God does and nothing of what we do. And if you notice in these Psalms, what is the Psalmist doing? But he's praising God for His works and praising God for who He is and His greatness and His mighty power and His holiness and all that He is. And you see, when I see God for who He is, I also am able to see myself for who I am. A saint, saved by the grace of God, absolutely and totally dependent upon Him. And so that's the second thing that happens.

There's a third I want you to jot down, and that's this. That our praise manifests, reveals, our devotion to Christ. And I want to go back again to say, if I have no genuine love in my heart that gets me emotional about Jesus, then am I really devoted to Him? You see, my devotion to Him speaks of my love and my adoration for Him and my desire for Him. And if I really love Him and praise Him and adore Him, I'm going to express it.

If I truly love Him, I'm going to express it by life, the desires and attempts to walk holy before Him. And amidst all that, it's our faults and our failures and our weaknesses and our frailties, confessing, repenting and getting up and moving on and not having myself a pity party. You see, to have myself a pity party, I'm not focusing on God.

I'm focusing on myself. Looking to Him will reveal our sins and praising Him brings them quickly. And we deal with them and keep going. And you'll fall and you'll be frail and weak and you'll sense your own inadequacies. That's not a time to stop praising Him. That's a time to praise Him. You say, but I feel so unworthy. My friend, the moment you get on your face before God and you start feeling worthy, it's all over.

Because, you see, my focus is upon holy God. I'm always going to feel unworthy to come to Him. Listen, unworthy to come to Him, but having authority to come to Him. To be unworthy doesn't mean that I'm absolutely nobody and should drag my face in the dust. But I am unworthy to come in the presence of God, but because the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, my one mediator between God and myself, has saved the way and has opened the door, I can come to Him face to face and know that I'm perfectly accepted. There's no contradiction between that and humility.

If I love Him, I'm going to express it one way or the other. Let's look at something else. If I really and truly praise God and am praising Him, it's going to motivate me to holy living. Holiness is God's goal for our life. And so what does He do? That's why He says we're to walk in the light.

As He is in the light. The blood of Jesus Christ is continually cleansing us from all sin. Every single believer is viewed by God under the canopy of the holiness of God and the blood of Jesus Christ.

It is the blood that makes me acceptable in His sight, not my deeds. And He says we are to praise Him as a holy God. Now, in the Old Testament, God identified certain things as holy. For example, the Ark of the Covenant, where the law was kept. He said a person's not to touch it.

You remember they had to praise Him. They put it on these two poles they carried it on. Don't touch it. On one occasion, it was about to fall.

And here's a man with a very pure motive. This is the Ark of the Covenant. And no way should it touch the ground. Reaching to keep it from falling, God struck him dead.

You say, that wasn't very fair. I mean, He's only trying to help God. My ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are your thoughts. My ways are higher than your ways.

My thoughts are higher than your thoughts. You know what God did in that one instance? By taking His life? He declared in the most powerful fashion to all of Israel, I am a holy God and there are no exceptions. Even a good man died, disobeying God with a pure motive. But God said, don't touch it. You see, to God, His holiness is an extremely important attribute.

Now, for me to tell you that one attribute is more important than others, I can't do that. Because you see, one part of God isn't any better than the other part. Another attribute, which is one characteristic of God, is not more important than one other attribute, but holiness is a vital part of His true identity. Because you see, you can't know God unless you know also that He's a holy God. And you recall when He came to Moses, met Moses there in the desert?

What did He say to him? He said, take off your shoes because the ground upon which you stand is what? Holy ground. And listen, that was the same old dirt that had been there a long time. Probably sand.

Same old sand that had been there for years in the desert. What made it holy? One thing, God's presence made it holy. And He said, take off your shoes, I'm here. He manifested Himself, His presence to Moses in such a fashion that Moses dare not look up. You remember when Joshua saw the Lord, he's drawing his sword, wanted to fight.

Until the Lord said to him, you're standing on holy ground. Now, I want you to think about something. You say, well, you know, I've never been on holy ground.

Yes, you have. So, I want to challenge you to do something, think about something. Do you have a certain place that you pray? Now, you pray anywhere, just like I do, but do you have a certain place to pray?

Let me tell you why that's important. The importance of it is if there is a place where you and God really get down to business. There's something about that place that becomes very sacred in your thinking.

But more important than that is this. If that's the place you pray, if that's the place you go to morning or evening or whenever you're going to God about things and you're under the great temptation of trials or stress or tribulations or heartaches, and that's where you go, you know what happens? After a while, if that's a particular corner of the room or a bedroom or an area that you go to, only when you want to talk to God, that place becomes very, very sacred to you.

And it's like as soon as you get in that spot or you kneel there, you don't have to get in tune. It's like, because that's what you do there, it's like you meet God there. And I want to encourage you to find a place where you and God put a Bible there, whatever Bible you want to, whatever translation. But have a place where you and God can deal with issues and things in your life.

And what's going to happen? The sight of it reminds you. And when you get there, you don't have to psychologically get yourself psyched up to talk to God.

You just start. And I'm here to tell you that's the spot in your home or in your office or wherever it may be, will be just as holy in the eyes of God as that sand where Moses knelt and that sand where Joshua knelt in the presence of Christ. Because you see, He's just as concerned about your holiness and mine as He was their obedience to Him. It's going to motivate us to holy living. The last thing I want you to jot down, and that is that praise ministers to our life. It ministers to three aspects of our life. First of all, it ministers to our spirit. The Bible says we are composed of body, soul and spirit. It ministers to our spirit.

What does it do? Well, in our spirit, it does several things. And I think, first of all, we could say it generates humility. Praising Him is going to make me continually aware of my absolute total dependence upon Him. Secondly, it releases a joy in our life. It elevates a sense of assurance with Him. We are praising Him. It strengthens our faith. It undergirds our sense of acceptance by Him. That is, praise ministers to my spirit. Secondly, praise ministers to my soul, mind, will and emotion. It clears our mind. When you begin to praise God, what happens?

Your focus is upon Him. You see things the way He sees them, and so you get a clearer picture of things. Not only that, it clears your vision of God. When you begin to praise Him, He begins to give back in return a clearer vision of who He is, His being and His deeds. So our soul is ministered to.

Not only that, it calms our emotions. If you are all hung up and strung up and strung out and worried and fretful, and you get on your face and you begin to praise God, I guarantee you, you cannot remain worried, fretful, and all that goes on with that, and at the same time praise Him. You start praising Him, something's going to happen emotionally. That's just the power of praise in a person's life.

You can't be the same and praise God. Then something happens to our physical body. That is, something happens to spirit, soul, and body.

What does it do? First of all, it releases the tension and the stress in the human body. There's no doubt in my mind about it. When you begin to praise the Lord and you get His focus, and you're focusing upon Him, and thinking His thoughts, and seeing Him, and recognizing who He is, and exalting Him, the tension and the stress disappear. The second thing that happens is there is an energy release in a person's physical body when they begin to praise the Lord. Even though you may never ask Him for one thing, He's going to prosper you in your spirit, in your soul, and your body, and He may prosper you other ways. But that's the power of praise. And you see, as you and I learn to praise Him, something happens to us. And if we can just get our focus off of ourselves.

And see, we live in a very, very selfish society. And many people come to church to get their needs met. I want to sing so I'll feel better, hear a message that'll teach me how to get out of my mess or help me to do better. I want to be, I want to be entertained with the choir.

And I want someone to pray for me. What would, I wonder how many people would come if the only thing we did was just praise God. Just exalt Him and honor Him and talk about God.

And not talk about needs. You know what would happen? God would become so preeminent in our thinking, our life would become so holy and all of our needs would be met and we wouldn't even have to think about it.

We've got it all turned around backwards. God do this, God do that, and God do the other. God says, if you'll just love Me, you don't have to think about that.

I'll be happy to do all of that if you just set your focus on Me. So I simply want to ask you, when it comes to praising, do you feel dry inside? Or is there something flowing within you that you just have to tell Him, Oh Jesus, I love You, I praise You, I worship You, I adore You.

And then you still feel inadequate that you haven't said it the way you really feel it. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.