Only the Wakeful are Praiseful

Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises. – Psalm 47:6

Under Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, the acceptableness of our praise depends very much upon the warmth of it. As cold prayers virtually ask God to deny them, so cold praises ask God to reject them. Cold praises are a sort of semi-blasphemy: they do, as it were, say, “Thou art not worthy to be ardently praised. O God, we bring Thee these poor thanksgivings: they are good enough for Thee.” Surely if we treated our heavenly Father as we should, every sacred passion would glow in our hearts like a furnace: our whole heart would catch fire, and as Elijah went up into heaven with horses of fire and chariots of fire, so, too, our souls, as we thought upon the goodness and the graciousness of God, would ascend to heaven in vehement joy of adoration…Mark with what exhilaration the psalmist rendered praise unto God and imitate him therein. See him dancing before the ark, and hear him cry aloud, “Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises.”

Only the wakeful are praiseful. The very best praises God receives from earth are from His troubled saints; but then they are awake; the strokes of the rod have aroused them…When martyrs have magnified God standing on the burning fagot, they have given God better praise than even the angels can. It was the old fable, that the nightingale was made to sing by the thorn that pricked her breast: and many a child of God has poured forth his sweetest music when the thorn of affliction has pierced his heart…Remember what Job did when he sat on the dunghill, scraping himself with a bit of broken pot- he praised God and said, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” It was grand of thee, O patriarch of Uz, to be able thus to extol thy Lord: then was thy soul fully awake. Beloved friends, may our inmost souls be so energetic with the power of grace that we may spontaneously and earnestly bless the Lord at all times and under all circumstances. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0996.cfm

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