What is Praise?
Praise.
We all have heard the word thrown around. Often the first thing to come to a Christian’s mind is the time of praise and worship that most American church services open with. This is a time of singing intended to prepare our hearts to hear the Word of God preached. But this is not a blog about singing or leading worship. This is a blog about prayer.
The outline for prayer that Jesus taught us to use opens with the command to praise the Father, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name . . .” (Matthew 6:9, ESV) Jesus teaches us our experience of prayer should begin should begin with praise. Yet for many of us, clear praise is absent from our time spent talking to God. Or it is vastly outweighed by the time spent asking for things.
Offering praise to God brings joy, both to us, and our heavenly father. It has many other benefits for us as well. If we are going to learn how to incorporate praise into our prayer lives, we should start at the beginning.
Praise Defined
Before we can start to effectively praise our Father in heaven, we must understand what it means to praise God. This is how we define praise:
Praise is recognizing God’s character and attributes and in response to them, offering glory and adoration to God.
Let’s work through this definition.
Praise begins with God’s character. God reveals his attributes to humanity through his inspired Word, the Bible. He tells us what he is like. The Bible boldly declares attributes he manifests that we could never show – his incommunicable attributes. God is all-knowing. He is all-powerful. God is present in all places at once. The Bible also proudly displays other attributes of God that humans can demonstrate – his communicable attributes. God is love. The Lord is patient. The Scriptures paint a clear picture of who God is and what he is like.
We must start with this picture the Bible paints. Do not start with what we think God is like. And do not start with what we want God to be like. Psalm 145:18 says, “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.” (ESV) If we call upon, or offer praise, to God in a way that does not line up with his true character – we lie to God and ourselves. We waste our time. No one benefits. If we respond to God in line with the way he really is – God will be near.
The starting place for praise, then, is God’s true character. The starting place is the Bible. Crack open the Bible and read about who God is. Then we respond. 
Recognizing an attribute about God is not enough. Intellectual assent is insufficient, insufficient to bring about joy in our hearts or change our lives. And it fails to fully glorify God.
Instead, we contemplate upon a trait of God and we respond to it from our head and our heart. We start to respond with wonder and awe. We realize how amazing it is that a being could be the way he is described. Pausing, we are filled with wonder as we think about how big the universe really is, and that God sustains it all. We are overcome with awe when we realize how powerful God really is – and how weak we are in comparison.
Our minds and hearts also respond with the offer of Glory to God. The more we realize how different, and better, God is from any other being – the more we should be inspired to tell him how much better he is than anything else in all creation.
Ultimately, our response should turn to adoration. Seeing all of the attributes that are true about God and knowing how superior he is to all things – and then finding out this God if for us . . . Love is an appropriate response. Praise is an expression of that love and appreciation.
Praise vs Thanksgiving
A point of clarification is in order here. Discussions of praise will always be incomplete if they do not in some way include thanksgiving. Praise and thanksgiving are closely related, yet they are different. There is some overlap in their application, yet they are distinct.
The crucial difference is this: Praise is to glorify God for who he is. Thanksgiving is to express gratitude for what he has done.
Praise is concerned with who God is. God is celebrated because of his unique and perfect attributes. “Lord, because you are truly omnipotent and in control of everything, you are worthy of fear and respect – you are far above all people!” “Father, you are a generous God who gives willingly, freely and happily!”
Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with what God has done in our lives. It is our expression of gratitude for the ways we have seen God’s hand at work in our lives. “Thank you Lord, for providing the extra $1,000 we needed to pay the rent.” “Thanks be to you Father, for giving me the right words to say at that important moment yesterday.”
Being closely related, praise and thanksgiving often blend together. “God, you are so generous, thanks for being so generous to us and providing a job when we needed it.” Both are vital. Since both are vital, it is important that we clearly discern between the two so we can be sure to include them both in our prayer life.
Why We Need to Praise God
There are several good reasons for us to be careful to include the regular practice of praising God.
Praise is the Ultimate Expression of Our Purpose
The Bible is clear on what God’s purpose is. The prophet Isaiah speaks for God when he says, “For my own sake, for my own sake I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.” (Isaiah 48:11, ESV) God is telling his hearers that what he is doing, he is doing only for his sake. Only for his own glory. He is not doing it for their sake. For his. He will not share the credit, nor the recognition. The prophet Ezekiel expresses similar words from God in chapter 20 of his book. Three times in that chapter God says through him that “. . . I acted for the sake of my name . . .” (Ezekiel 20:9,14,22, ESV) God’s purpose is his the magnification of his name – his glory.
Everything God does, everything he allows to happen, he does in order to magnify and increase his glory. John Piper says, “God governs the world with glory precisely that he might be admired, marveled at, exalted and praised.” (Piper, Desiring God, 46)
If then, God’s purpose is his glory, and if he manages everything in such a way as to increase his glory – one of humanity’s main purposes must be the offering of praise to God. Piper says, “The climax of his (God’s) happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praise of his saints.” (Piper, Desiring God, 46)
The offer of praise to God fulfills the purpose of two parties. It makes God happy. It fulfills his purpose – he receives glory. Praise also fulfills our purpose – as creatures made to praise the creator.
Praise Roots us in Reality
In our culture it is not that hard to get disconnected from reality. Our pride, our hurts, our preconceptions and our ignorance – can all color the glasses we use to look at our world. It is easy to carry inside of us a picture of reality that does not truly, or completely, line up with reality. This is 
particularly true of spiritual reality.
The practice of praise forces us to recognize many realities we may me ignorant of, or realities we may be suppressing. For example, as we recognize the fact that God is sovereign, we are forced to realize we are not king of our own lives. We also are forced to acknowledge that we are dependent. The more we rightly praise God, the more we know him rightly, and the more our sense of reality will conform to the actual reality.
Living life with a correct concept of reality will free us from many frustrations and false hopes.
Praise Completes Our Joy
We have made the point already that one of our main purposes is praise. If we regularly practice praising God, then the joy and satisfaction that come with fulfilling our purpose will follow. But there is more to it than this.
Think back to the last time we saw a movie in the theater that we thought was amazing. A movie we loved. What happened for the next few days? We talked about the movie! We asked our friends if they had seen it. Excitedly we told them about it, about how entertaining it was, or how about how it moved us in a special way. We eventually tell our friends they need to go see it. And if a friend of ours has already seen it, together we extol the virtues of the film.
What is going on in this situation? We watched a movie and enjoyed it very much. But the experience of watching the movie was not enough. Watching the movie again was not enough. We are so full of excitement and joy that we have to tell someone about it. Piper perfectly explains this phenomenon when he says, “We praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise.” (Piper, Desiring God, 49) You see, praise completes joy. We gain a great amount of pleasure from watching the movie, but we gain more satisfaction when we tell our friends how great the movie is. And we gain even more when they go see it, enjoy it, come back and praise the movie with us.
This principle works exactly the same with our experience of God. When we praise God, we experience God’s true self. The response to such a joyful experience is to share it with someone. The difference between the experience of God and of the movie is the direction of the praise. When we glorify the movie, we aim the glory towards others. The virtues of the movie are directed towards others. With the experience of God, we express some of the glory towards other people, but primarily we offer the glory right back to the source: God himself.
Learning who God is and what he is really like should thrill our hearts. Responding to that by praising God completes that joy.
The Process of Praise
Recognizing the benefits of praise, both to God and to ourselves, the next question is obvious. How do we effectively praise God? We offer a simple process.
The first step is to open the Bible. To praise God, we must know him as he reveals himself. We have created a PDF that you can find on the PRAYER TOOLBOX PAGE that includes a list of God’s attributes and the verses where they are found. You can download the guide to guide you on this step.
Second, as you read these verses, pick out one of God’s attributes to focus on. Then meditate on it by asking yourself these questions as you pray:
1) Lord, I realize you are ____________.
2) Lord, because you are ____________ . . . I know . . . I feel . . . I can . . .
3) Lord, if you were not ____________ . . . I would feel . . . I would think . . . I would do/not do . . .
Finally, because we want to be well rounded, include a time of thanksgiving. Consider your life and circumstances, and think about specific ways God has expressed this attribute towards us. Then tell him thank you.
Putting Praise into Practice
As Part of the One Year Prayer Experiment
When something becomes unbalanced, it is often necessary to shift some things around in order to restore balance. Regardless of what the imbalance is in, be it physical weight, skill, or knowledge, one area must be built up to restore balance. When the imbalance is found in our skill set, extra effort is often required to fill in the gaps and re-balance our skill set.
I think the practice of praise falls into this category for many of us. If we started out day one praying like Jesus taught us Matthew 6 – which we talked about in a previous post – we would have a perfectly balanced prayer life. Many of us, however, did not get off on the perfect first step. I certainly did not.
Many of our prayer lives end up unbalanced. The amount of time and effort we spend on offering praise to God pales in comparison to the time and effort we spend asking God for things.
So, we need to really work on praising God in order to build our skill and comfort with offering praise to God. And, we may need to rebalance an out of whack prayer life.
To jump in with both feet, I am going to do something a little different. I am going to spend one week spending my daily thirty-minute time of prayer only offering praise and thanksgiving to God.
A Word of Caution
I will not recommend praying this way as a long-term practice. But to accelerate learning and to restore balance this could be a useful practice. It also has a place for occasional short periods of just wanting to praise God.
With that said, try this method of prayer. Just do not do it for more than a week. Or else we will end up unbalanced in the opposite direction in which we started.
I will give it a try and LET YOU KNOW.
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