Praise!

Praise Is A Weapon

Weird flex, right? But it’s true. Praise is a weapon.

It might not be the kind of weapon that slashes and crushes, It’s more like Frodo’s flask that keeps the giant spider away or Gandalf’s staff of light (Yes, I like Lord of The Rings.) It’s the reason why light has no fellowship with darkness. The minute there is light – the darkness vanishes.

Resist!

When I was a child, I would laugh at the devil when trouble came my way. The devil cannot bear be mocked, Mom would say. It’s probably because C.S. Lewis quoted Thomas Moore at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters. So we would make a show of laughing at him for trying. James 4:7 says, “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”(emphasis my own) This was our way of resisting.

Another way to resist is praise.

God Is With You

Psalm 22:3 says that God inhabits the praises of His people. That means HE is there with you when you are praising Him. That’s what I call back up!

In fact, we can look at how God showed up when His people praised Him. Think about Job –Though He may slay me, yet will I praise Him. Job refused to curse God even in his darkest hours. God showed up and blessed him even more than He had prior to being tormented by Satan. What about Paul and Silas singing praises from behind prison bars? Imagine that! God shook the doors open and not only was the jailer saved as a result, but Paul and Silas were released.

Praise Him Anyway

When we praise God through hardship, we take our eyes off our own suffering and place them on the God who can do something about it. When I sat down to begin writing this today, it had been very windy for a few hours. My husband went out for a moment and called me out. The soffit on our garage had been ripped off and was hanging on by the smallest piece. This huge aluminum strip was flapping in the wind right over our neighbor’s yard.

I will admit that at first, I heaved a heavy self-pitying sigh of, “Something else?!” Then the lyrics of a song started buffering in my mind, Praise Him Anyway. So I did. I began thanking God that it hadn’t broken off fully. Thanking God for keeping it where we could grab it and preventing it from flying off and hitting or hurting someone changed my attitude. We managed to break it off the rest of the way so that we can reattach it when the winds are not so high and the place where we need to put our ladder isn’t covered in ice and snow.

Sure this wasn’t some terrible tragedy, but like any muscle – I was practicing with light weights so that I can lift heavy later.

Practice!

It seems like the easiest way for Satan to attack us is in the mundane, everyday stuff. If he can get us to focus on a “Why me?” or “Not again!” in the little inconveniences, aggravations, and troubles, he’s that much closer to getting us to forget to call on Jesus when the big storms in life happen. Praise, however, is the perfect weapon to make him back down. What can he do with someone who praises God even when things are going badly? Why keep attacking if the attack itself causes the person to praise God?

So, I’m going to practice my praise muscles the next time someone cuts me off, if I have an unexpected expense, or any time something doesn’t go my way. Because praise isn’t about my circumstances, it’s about who God is through it all.