Sacrifice of Praise. What? Praise is a sacrifice? Really?! Yes, it can be. We don’t (or at least I don’t), often think that our simply praising God is a worthy Sacrifice.
Sacrifice to me has always meant relinquishing control or yielding something I feel entitled to over to another. It’s a sacrifice to put the welfare of others before yourself. It’s a sacrifice to spend your hard earned money on someone else. It’s a sacrifice to provide for another. It’s a sacrifice to spend excessive amounts of time to a cause or another person. It’s a sacrifice to give our efforts and energies to something beyond ourselves.
When the seas of life get rough, we do what the disciples did when they were crossing the sea, we panic ad go nuts in dismay amidst the struggles and surrounding chaos. We rely on our own efforts and energies and what we can do physically in the natural to help ourselves (exercising self-preservation). I’m not saying we should abandon all hope of a rescue or deliverance, but shouldn’t our first strategy for self-preservation be to go beyond ourselves and ask Jesus to help us? Ultimately, that’s what happened. Jesus calmed the storm and then rebuked the disciples for their lack of faith.
It’s difficult to not wish that certain parts of our lives weren’t just a little bit easier to get through. But we’re not just supposed to get through it, we’re supposed to be triumphant over these circumstances and situations and struggles.
An easy victory is meaningless, just like beating a 5 year old in basketball if you have even as little as a two year age advantage.
Choosing to praise God amidst troubles, struggles, and less-than-ideal circumstances is a great sacrifice. It’s a humbling thing, really. I don’t have anywhere close to half the answers, but need to rely on God to deliver me and to speak to me as to how I should go about this. Make no mistake, God can do anything, but if we are adamant about sitting on our hands, waiting for God to make everything disappear, we’ve got another thing coming. He’s God, the Alpha and Omega, the great I AM, not a magician/illusionist. If God says something to us by way of a strategy for our deliverance, WE MUST ACT! Sitting on our hands will get us no where fast. God delivered the Jewish people out of Egypt, but they had to actually leave on their own efforts. They did not suddenly get teleported out of there.
“Beam me up, Scotty!”
*whooo0000o0oooSssssshhhhhh*
nope, not gonna happen like that, sorry.
Praise is sacrifice. Praise exalts God and lifts His name and brings glory and attention to Him. He is a jealous God. The creator of the universe demands our praises and exaltations unto Him. To magnify our problems bigger than our God is a sin and folly on our parts. There is nothing to great for our God; no circumstance, no problem, no sin, nothing. Lifting our problems to a higher place than where Christ sits is actually idolatry, even though this idol manifested in the form of problem/struggle/etc is a pain in our side.
Oddly enough, it’s been really hard to worship in this season. Circumstances can seem so big and looming. It’s just what we do, we retreat away from the source. It’s part of our sin nature that is prideful and says that we can figure it out for ourselves. Or, it is the part of us that would just rather stew in our present circumstances and believe that this is our lot in life, that there is nothing beyond this.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick. There is hope. It’s Passover season approaching Good Friday and Easter. Find hope and be restored.
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