The Birthplace of the Praise of God

"He put a new song in my mouth,

a song of praise to our God."

- Psalm 40:3a (ESV)

God is the author, 
of this song of praise to God. 

Delight in God always originates in God.

The praise of God flows out from God,
and back to Him. It is His purpose in salvation:

"For my name's sake I defer my anger;
for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,

that I may not cut you off."
- Isaiah 48:9 

"Sing to him a new song..."
Psalm 33:3a

"Sing to God, sing praises to his name..."
Psalm 68:4a

See also:  Psalm 9:11, 22:23, 30:4, 47:6, 95:2, 
96:1, 98:1, 98:4, 98:5, 100:4, 105:2, 106:1,
 111:1, 112:1, 113:1. 117:1, 135:1, 146:1, 
147:1, 149:1, and more.

All Scripture is inspired by God.
Therefore the praise of God, 
is planned and purposed,
arranged and designed,
by him and for Him.

Because nothing else will satisfy our hearts.
He made us that way.

The Wastefulness of God

Guest Post by KG:

I went with my wife Su one day, one rainy day, as she stopped at a couple of garage sales. I sat in the car and waited while she ‘cased the joint’. As I set I began to watch the rain, how it washed everything: the streets the houses the cars and the lawns. Suddenly a fall leaf fell on the window and was immediately pasted there by the misting rain. My attentions to the effect of the rainfall shifted to the leaf. I was struck by its amazing beauty and complexity between the serrated edges, its symmetry and the articulate branching of the veins. As I looked closer and closer it seemed that they spread out ever more finely. "What a waste" I said to myself without thinking. I knew that there were millions of leaves that littered everything and each was as artistically crafted as the one on my car window.  “Isn’t such careful architecture and finery spent on this one leaf (or any leaf for that matter) just a waste of good art?” And it is all so temporary, just a few months of the year. The tree takes in sunlight, minerals and moisture and builds its bulky foliage. And not just any foliage but these masterfully crafted leaves... hundreds of millions of them. I knew that in the leaves that populate each tree (I’m told 6 million on the average large elm) there are millions and millions of cells in each leaf, every one of which has a blueprint for building another tree with leaves included.  In the end there is just decay and dirt, like the artist who completes a masterpiece only to crumple it up and throw it away. What a waste.

It didn’t take long for my thoughts to multiply. What I judged to be the case in the single instance of this one leaf/tree is true of even more that I wasn’t seeing. This is true of every living plant whether it blooms and is carefully cultivated in the flower pot or wild and grows on the remote and inaccessible mountain side. This is true of every enormously complex insect that roam's the forest floor or the farmer's field or for the briefest 24 hour life hovers over and inhabits the decaying carcass on the shore of an island. This is true of every animal that lives as a child's pet or inhabits the sea or roams the Serengeti or clings to the roof of the nearby cave. This is true of the grass that grows or the plants that sprouts up in the otherwise vacant field or the fungus that pops up everywhere and in abundance over all the earth however extreme the condition. Billions of times over again and again this exquisite parade marches relentlessly on. Finally, this is true of people whatever their color or size for however long their life may be.  And then the uninvited thought came to mind: and a large majority of all that wonder no one will ever see. What a waste.

Looking back I have to admit that it is clear to me now that I was indulging in an all too familiar way of thinking, a God absent or ‘horizontal’ way of thinking. I am a believer but I am not surprised at the things that go on in my head. I have found that it is not at all unusual for me to carry at least two contradictory ways of looking at events or issues in my head at the same time. In the case of my reflections on the leaf pasted against the window it is this sort of  ‘horizontal’ thinking. It is for me the default way of looking at things. It is that way because that is natural to me. And it natural to me because it is my earliest way of looking at life, i.e. with God there but only figured into the scheme of things. The other way of looking at life, a very different ‘other’, is the God tempered world and is ‘vertical’ in its orientation. I have been at pains to fit into it ever since God’s world caved in on me. It is the God-haunted world in which I now live. Because of that I live a dimensionally challenged life shuffling between life in the vertical and the horizontal.

The world is described in Genesis as a “good” thing. It is so not because God was merely commenting on how the things he had made met some necessity or satisfied some particular need he had.  When God said “it is good” he meant little more than that it flowed from his own goodness and was like himself, good. He liked what he had made, much like an artist who reflects on his own finished work. He liked it which is more than just a statement about God’s ‘tastes’.  It was good and he was satisfied with what he had made. If there was an audience it was the artist himself. It was what he wanted. As he said in his final inquisition of Job, “Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt,  to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground sprout with grass?” (Job 38:25-27). In other words, no one ever sees some of God’s best work. God’s ‘performances’ are meant to satisfy an audience of one.

This exquisite orchestration that I took to be a ‘wasted’ effort was and is for the designer of that leaf a personal thing, his thing, and because it is his work, his fingerprints are left all over it. G. K. Chesterton talks about his own experience  in his book Orthodoxy. There he says that the impression left on his thinking by this phenomena of recurrence in nature was eventually life changing for him. “Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.” In other words, the occurrence of reoccurrence can have other than prodigal implications. Seen from the vantage point of the vertical our Father is younger than we are. He has the eternal appetite of infancy which in the moment of finishing a task shows his delight with the joyful appellation ‘do it again’. It is to his glory that he seems to exult so evidently in the repetition of the things he deems to be ‘good’. How else might a God drop hints about his life?

My time in those  idle ‘arboreal’ moments  eventually landed me in the lap of an ongoing project. It is a project begun years before when I had read something C.S. Lewis had written in Christian Reflections. It had made sense at the time but was hard to integrate into my selfish life, my life framed in the horizontal. Lewis had made the observation that there is an important difference between gratitude and adoration. Gratitude exclaims, very properly, "How good of God to give me this." Adoration says, "What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!" He adds,  in adoration “(o)ne's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.” I suppose that for me gratitude begins and ends in the self. That’s not a bad thing. God calls us to do it. But adoration takes us beyond ourselves. It is genuinely “un-selfing”. It is a moment of wonder into which I am, for at least a moment, erased.  Adoration always leads me to follow the moment back to its source. It was just that sort of moment I was having that wet Fall day.

Sometimes our first thoughts on a given subject aren’t our last thoughts on that subject. At least it shouldn't be when two plains of existence are lodged in the same person’s head. In all of my attention to and thoughts about such beauty my first thought suggested the conclusion that without an audience, without watching eyes, all of this is gloriously wasteful. My second thoughts however led me to wonder about the kind of being who ladles such attention on something so ephemeral. It was truly (eventually) a timeless moment. While my bride was hunting treasures I was preoccupied with unpacking one, “lost in wonder, love and praise”.

Sunrise from the median...

The sunrise was magnificent yesterday morning as I sat in my patrol car parked in the median. I took this photo while in the median of I-94 near the 12 mile marker. (I took a similar photo of a sunset several months ago, that photo recently was put on the cover of the Trooper magazine.) In case you're wondering, the item in the photo is the hood ornament on my patrol car.

It is good not to waste such moments. All creation displays the glory of God, as He has designed it to do so. While walking (and working) "in the valley of the shadow of death" it is nothing short of majestic to enjoy the varied displays of God's glory, which He makes of Himself in order that we may know Him more and enjoy Him more. That His light does so shine here is but a taste of the glories we will experience when we are eternally encompassed with His glory, as we live in His presence, enjoying Him and glorifying Him forever.

Again I am reminded of the famous catechism statement:
The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Or as Piper put it:
The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

Both of these statements have proved powerful in relaying truth to the inmates at the jail recently.

(Originally published on 03-18-2008)

One Day The Fog Will Lift

The other morning while returning home from work I was impressed at the thickness of the fog hanging in our neighborhood. Once inside I looked out my front window into the gray haze surrounding our home. The thick gray mist was almost blinding. I could barely see a nearby tree across the street from our house.  The fog caused me to be completely unable to see the house right behind that tree.

I was struck by the illustration of our temporal shortsightedness. Caught as we are in the midst of this temporary fog, we are amazingly shortsighted. Our present state of blindness regularly prohibits us from seeing the various dangers on our paths and often we run headlong into them.

Then it hit me. One day this temporal fog will be entirely dissipated as the light of the Son is unveiled and as it shines in its full strength illuminating everything. On that great day even the blindest among us will behold His glory. In the all encompassing light of His glory even our hidden sins will be illuminated as we will begin to behold the horror of the manifold atrocities of which we are all guilty. We will come face to face with the guilt of our continual exchanging His magnificent glory for many things infinitely less glorious.

It is also then that those who are in Christ will see more clearly than ever the glories in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. The gold mine that is the cross of Christ will be more thoroughly mined in that single moment than it has been by all of the theology books throughout history combined. We will stand in awe of the Lamb of God and of what He accomplished upon that cross. Thus the eternal worship of the great Christ will begin as His purchased people will be intensely satisfied by beholding the eternal magnificent light of the Lamb who was slain from the foundations of the earth.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
- 1st Corinthians 13:12

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.- Revelation 21:23

A View From 37,000 ft. at 629 mph

The view from my window seat, on the flight to South Africa, was a vivid display of glory that David wrote about in Psalm 19.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Surely the evidence of Your glory in creation is overwhelming. It is more than enough to convict us as guilty of knowing of Your existence.

That small window served, on that morning, as a foretaste of the glories of heaven. Pure and unstained, peaceful and breath taking. I can still hear the sky proclaiming Your handiwork...

The in flight info.
37,000 ft. !
629 mph !

Ever Wonder?

A Call to Wonder - Paul Washer from I'll Be Honest on Vimeo.

Momentary vs. Eternal

2 Cor. 4:16-18


So we DO NOT lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.

FOR this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an ETERNAL WEIGHT of GLORY beyond all comparison,

as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.

FOR the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

.

Fearful Encounters with the Glory of Christ

Have you ever noticed the numerous accounts of people in the Gospels being "afraid" or "filled with great fear" at the manifestations of the glory of Jesus? I'm finding this quite frequently in my reading of the Gospels, here are a few examples from the Gospel of Luke alone:

Luke 5:8-10
But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men."

Luke 7:14-16
Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has arisen among us!" and "God has visited his people!"

Luke 8:25
He said to them, "Where is your faith?" And they were afraid, and they marveled, saying to one another, "Who then is this, that he commands even winds and water, and they obey him?"

Luke 8:35-27
Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how the demon-possessed man had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked him to depart from them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.

Luke 9:34-35
As he was saying these things, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, "This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!"

Sufferings & Glory

Romans 8:18
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

In November of 2008 I had an opportunity to share a message on the magnificent text of Romans 8:18 at FPBC.

When Paul speaks of suffering, he doesn't speak as one who has merely studied this theologically in some books. He speaks as an expert who experienced significant suffering. He speaks as an authority on the topic as he has endured suffering more intense than anybody I know.

His glory will be revealed to us:

His glory then will be unfaded, unveiled, unhindered, unsheathed, unleashed, before His people for all eternity. This will be heaven! This will be heaven: God's people glorifying God by enjoying His revelation of His magnificent and infinite glory for eternity. John Piper's great saying is true, "God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him." God is most glorified in His people when His people are most satisfied in Him, and this will be the case for all eternity. God will be glorified as His people will be marvelously satisfied to delight in His magnificence for eternity without end.