4 Praising

4

Praising

Praise the LORD, O my soul;

all my inmost being, praise his holy name. . . .

Praise the LORD, you his angels,

you mighty ones who do his bidding,

who obey his word.

Praise the LORD, all his heavenly hosts,

you his servants who do his will.

Praise the LORD, all his works

everywhere in his dominion.

Praise the LORD, O my soul.

I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath,

And when my voice is lost in death,

Praise shall employ my nobler powers.

My days of praise shall ne’er be past

While life and thought and being last,

Or immortality endures.

C. S. Lewis, writer of the Narnia books and of a string of stellar expositions of Christianity, was a praying man. Some of this he shows us in his final book, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer; and his practice matched what he said of himself there. He attended his parish church regularly on Sundays and his college chapel regularly on weekdays, diligently praying his way into and through the liturgy of the Anglican Prayer Book. Then, so his friend and biographer George Sayer tells us, when taking a train journey Lewis would go to the station very early “and walk up and down the platform saying his prayers.” Also, when he stayed at the Sayers’s home, Lewis would retreat to his room each evening about six with a Bible “and say his prayers.” Also, when Sayer brought Lewis morning tea in bed, “he was already awake, and . . . usually praying.” He also liked a quick walk before breakfast, “drinking in the beauty of the morning, thanking God for the weather, the roses, the song of the birds, and anything else he could find to enjoy.” Lewis always knew that prayer is integral to life with God, as witness his words about the day in 1929 when “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed; perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.” Prayer was big in his life pattern as a believer from the start.

But early on, so he tells us, he had a problem: why does God, the God of the Bible, the God of Christianity, call on us to praise him? Lewis’s experience, like our own, with humans who seek compliments had not been pleasant. “We all despise the man who demands continual assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness.” Why should God insist on being praised? Did he want praise (as is so often true of humans) so that he could feel good about himself? Why did so many of the psalms seem to bargain with God about this, as if to say: “You like praise? Do this for me, and you shall have some.” Was this the way of real religion? Was such praising really necessary?

Many devout Christians follow the well-used outline of ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) when they pray, and so begin with words of praise, often half-heartedly, plodding their way through the preliminary exercises until they can get to what’s really on their hearts, namely need in its various forms. Only then do their prayers warm up. They wonder, as they go along, why the preliminaries? Confession of sins and thanksgiving for good things enjoyed, they understand, after a fashion, but adoring God for who and what he is feels like a routine of burdensome flattery. So why praise God first—or indeed at all?

THE PRAISE DILEMMA

So we must ask: Is the prayer of praise—praise prayer, we will call it—anything more than a bargaining counter directed toward God? Why does God ask for it? What is the true point of it? Should humans bargain with God by attempting to trade gain for praise? The psalms, usually our guide for good praying, do not provide much help with these questions. They give us many examples of different kinds of prayers but little analysis as to why we are to pray in the ways that are modeled there, and that is certainly the case with regard to our present concern. Thus David appears to offer praise in exchange for battle victory when he opens Psalm 54 with the request, “O God, save me, by your name, / and vindicate me by your might,” and then promises in verse 6, “With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to you; / I will give thanks to your name, O LORD, for it is good.” Another psalmist, Heman, appears to offer praise as a bargain for life in Psalm 88:10 when he asks, “Do you work wonders for the dead? / Do the departed rise up to praise you?” What kind of God trades protection for compliments? Or does he? Are we, perhaps, missing something?

Lewis, for one, became quite sure that we who think in these terms are indeed missing something. This appears from his account of how he resolved his own original problem. He began by reflecting on what it means to say that a work of art “demands” appreciation:

Admiration is the correct, adequate or appropriate response to it, . . . if we do not admire we shall be stupid, insensible, and great losers, we shall have missed something.

He applied this idea to God:

[God] is that Object to admire which (or, if you like, to appreciate which) is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest experience. . . . The incomplete and crippled lives of those who are tone-deaf, have never been in love, never known true friendship, never cared for a good book . . . are faint images of it.

And then Lewis discerned he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether with regard to praise.

I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. . . . I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. . . . [T]he delight is incomplete until it is expressed.

So praise of the God whose truth, beauty, grace, mercy, greatness and faithfulness we appreciate is the most natural thing in the world, and can be the most joyful too, as well as the most health-giving. “Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.”

Lewis’s wisdom helps us see two things. First, that what looked like bargaining with God is simply honest anticipation of glorifying him through active enjoyment of a renewed display of his active love. Second, that the corporate praise to which the psalms constantly call us, and which we seek to achieve in church every Lord’s Day as we sing out together our shared appreciation of God and his ways, brings him close to us. Writes Lewis: “I did not see that it is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men. It is not of course the only way. But for many people at many times the ‘fair beauty of the Lord’ is revealed chiefly or only while they worship Him together.” Psalmists anticipate this experience in the temple through the sacrifices; Christians seek it in what are nowadays called their “worship spaces” (church buildings, that is), as they look to the Savior’s promise, “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Mt 18:20).

For clarity now, since all this may be coming to us as new thinking, let us formalize the essence of what we have said before we go further. Six alliterative words, linked in three pairs, will help us here.

Praise as declaring and distancing. One function of praise prayer is that our spoken words declare who God is and our relationship to him. Why does God invite our praise? In part it is because as we praise God in prayer, we verbally declare and inwardly realize, every time, that, as it has been put, “He is God, and we are not.” To hear words of praise to God from our own lips helps us to recognize our distance from God. Yet paradoxically these prayers of praise also take us into his presence. As we proclaim both to God and to each other how far he is above us and beyond us in his wisdom, power and purity, a sense of his closeness to us is repeatedly given.

Psalm 95 illustrates this. It starts by celebrating God as our Creator, “the Rock of our salvation,” whose hand holds “the depths of the earth,” the “mountain peaks” and the sea, “for he made it,” and the entire landscape since “his hands formed the dry land” (vv. 1-5). What is the appropriate response to such a God? It is not only to declare these things; it is also for us to draw near, but not with any sense of pride. We are to “sing for joy to the LORD” (v. 1), but how? The psalmist calls for a praise shaped by humility, so that we acknowledge even with our bodies our great distance from this almighty Creator God.

Come, let us bow down in worship,

let us kneel before the LORD our Maker!

For he is our God

and we are the people of his pasture

the flock under his care. (Ps 95:1-7)

Come? Bow down? Kneel in reverent humility? To bow and to kneel are universal, time-honored gestures of acknowledging greatness in some form. Praise prayer acknowledges our dependence on the God who is great in power and wisdom, when we are neither. We approach him in prayer and thus draw near to him because he invites us to do that. But our mental attitude, our posture, our very words must ever declare the difference and distance between God and us.

So who gains from praise prayer? Is it God who has his ego stroked? Or is it praying humans to whom God communicates (in and through their humble praise) some new revelation of his own greatness? C. S. Lewis settled for the latter position. The Jewish sacrificial system, he observed, was not designed to sate a bloodthirsty God. No! “The sacrifice was not really that men gave bulls and goats to God, but that by their so doing God gave himself to men.” Lewis compares the Old Testament sacrifices with the Christian obligation to go to church (never one of Lewis’s favorite disciplines, though he was exemplary in his regularity at church and college chapel). He asserts that corporate praise, as in a church worship service, is not merely given to gratify God. “It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates his presence to men.” So we praise God in prayer. We declare his greatness to his face while on our knees, and in this act God bridges the distance between us and reveals himself to us. As we declare him to be very far above us, so we find him to be very close to us. He receives our praise; we receive his love. That is how praise prayer works.

Praise as discipline and diet. In matters of health, discipline and diet ordinarily go together. A disciplined person will take regular exercise and be careful to eat and sleep enough—not too little, nor too much. It is diet, however, (the food we take in) that actually nourishes us, keeping us alive and strong. Praise prayer is both discipline and diet. As C. S. Lewis sorted through his questions about this activity, he began to notice the kinds of people who praised (anything) and those who simply didn’t. He observed that “cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least,” while the “humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious minds, praised most.” He noticed that lovers seemed to praise most of all, and to delight in drawing others into their praise of the beloved one. We see this in Psalm 96:1 where the psalmist invites all creation to “sing to the LORD a new song; / sing to the LORD, all the earth!” He calls on the seas to roar, the heavens to be glad, the fields to exult, the trees to sing for joy, the earth to tremble and rejoice, and all people to “declare his glory among the nations” (v. 3). What a chorus of praise! We would have to be spiritually deaf not to want to join in such a symphony. We may never have thought of what we call the natural order, the created world around us, as our partner in praise; maybe it is time we did. The fact is that in this, as in other matters, companionship quells inhibitions and creates incentives. As the discipline of bodily exercise becomes easier to give your heart to in a gym, where you are surrounded by a whole crowd of people exercising already, and as sticking to a prescribed diet becomes easier when everyone at the table is on the diet with you, so you are swept up into personal praise much more quickly and powerfully when you realize that praise—from angels, from glorified saints, and from all creation—is going on all around you. And we have already heard Lewis describing praise as “inner health made audible.”

If praise prayer is both discipline and diet, we who want to pray well have great reason to give ourselves to it in a big way. We are to tackle praising as we would any discipline. Having made up our minds to do it, we just do it, both privately and in church, as best we can, knowing that the more we do it the better we will be able to do it. If our God asks all the earth to sing his praises, who are we to refuse? To do so would bring spiritual harm in the form of defective development. And if praise prayer is part of our proper diet, to neglect this kind of praying will signal, even trigger, spiritual starvation, with lack of energy and lowering of morale. We will then be in danger of becoming the cranks, misfits and malcontents that Lewis so rightly characterized as unable to give praise. Learning to praise is necessary from every standpoint if we are to grow in grace.

Praise as duty and delight. By now it is surely clear that praise and thanksgiving belong together, and meld into each other. In idea they are distinct, praise centering on what God is, and thanksgiving on what he does, as a comparison of Psalms 135 and 136 clearly shows; but in practice, sooner or later, the two ideas come together, since God lets us see what he is precisely by what he does. So Psalm 106 begins:

Praise the LORD!

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;

his steadfast love endures forever!

Who can proclaim the mighty acts of the LORD,

or fully declare his praise? (Ps 106:1-2, emphasis added)

The words in italics illustrate the melding to which we referred.

Glory is a key biblical word that expresses the composite notion of weight or weightiness, wealth and whatever else belongs to the state of being wonderful. God, we are told, shows his glory (who and what he is) by what he does; then his rational creatures, angels and humans, give him glory (praise and thanks) for what he has done (and does, and is going to do); thus we glorify him (“the one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me,” [Ps 50:23]); and thus God gets himself glory and glorifies himself by moving us to give him glory in this way. This, fundamentally, is what the angels were made for:

Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings,

ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.

Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name. (Ps 29:1-2)

And it is what we humans were made and redeemed for: “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31). Praise is not an option; it is a vocation and a duty. Psalm after psalm expresses this.

Here is another example. “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,” begins Psalm 136. In this chorus song of praise, each verse recites a praiseworthy deed of the Lord, and then comes the repeated refrain giving the reason why we are to praise: “for his steadfast love endures forever,” and each deed done is a fruit of that steadfast love. Clearly the praise of Psalm 136 is not simply a suggestion. It is a divine order complete with warrant justifying that order in every line. Praise for God’s manifold praiseworthiness is a duty, and it will be a sign of something wrong with us if we do not thus give God his due.

Psalm 42 takes us in a similar direction but goes further. This delightfully structured psalm begins with a beautiful prayer of longing for God:

As a deer pants for flowing streams,

so pants my soul for you O God.

My soul thirsts for God,

for the living God.

When shall I come and appear before God? (Ps 42:1-2)

But longing leads the psalmist to questioning, not questioning of God but questioning of himself. Twice he writes “Why are you cast down, O my soul, / and why are you in turmoil within me?” (vv. 5, 11). Moments and moods of distress and desperation come to us all, and for whatever reason the psalmist is bogged down in such a mood as he writes. Where does this sacred longing take him? Against the background of his knowledge that the steadfast love of God endures forever, he lets the ache in his heart direct him to the duty (and wisdom!) of remembering. “My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you” (v. 6, emphasis added). What does the psalmist remember? He remembers delight.

These things I remember

as I pour out my soul:

how I would go with the throng

and lead them in procession to the house of God. (Ps 42:4)

It is this pattern of longing, leading to the duty of remembering, leading to remembered delight, which in turn leads the psalmist to tell himself to hope, and actually to begin hoping once more. Twice he repeats: “Hope in God: for I shall again praise him, / my salvation and my God” (vv. 5, 11). Thus this lovely psalm shows us the link between the duty of praise and its delight—here, the combined delights of remembering, celebrating and looking ahead to more great things.

One of the greatest joys of delight is to share it, and one of the contrasting frustrations is to lack that opportunity. Here is Lewis again, quoted more fully this time.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; . . . the delight is incomplete until it is expressed. . . . It is frustrating to . . . come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than a tin can in a ditch.

We would do well to remember Lewis’s poignant illustration of unseeing eyes whenever we participate in a worship service where the music is obviously someone else’s favorite—but not ours.

While I (Carolyn) was teaching a youth communicant class last spring, we discussed this very issue. The class had already spent some time thinking together about the implications of 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul defines the church as “the body of Christ,” with Christ as its head. We had talked about what it means to be connected within a single body of Christians not much like ourselves, to serve God together as a single unit, to praise God together in corporate worship. So I posed a tense question for teenagers. “What about music? What would you do in a worship service where nothing there was your kind of music?” It got a little quiet for a moment. I could see wishful mental images of drums and guitars and fast-paced music on a screen (which is rare in our church). I could see their mental images of organ, strings and hymnals (more common here). Then Leslie, age fifteen, said with a shrug and a bright smile. “Stand up and sing!” I laughed at her generous concession, spoken with such full energy—and I wondered how many mature Christians, facing the question in the opposite form, could have done the same. It is this kind of generosity toward each other that makes authentic corporate praise a reality.

In Psalm 66 we see the psalmist both praising God with delight and delighting to involve others in that praise:

Shout for joy to God, all the earth,

Sing the glory of his name;

give to him glorious praise!

Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!” . . .

Bless our God, O peoples,

Let the sound of his praise be heard, . . .

Come and hear, all you who fear God,

And I will tell what he has done for my soul. (Ps 66:1-2, 8, 16)

Here again, praise appears both as a duty and also as an expression of joy and delight. The importance of understanding this conjunction is great, so we will spend a little more time exploring it.

In everyday life, the word duty regularly signifies an unwelcome obligation, like paying taxes and, before that, filling out our tax forms, so our delight is ordinarily found in something other than what we think of as the doing of our duty. But why is this? In the sense that everyone feels this way, the separating of duty and delight in our minds is entirely natural, but in relation to the way God made us to be we are all at this point in a profoundly unnatural state—for we are fallen creatures. The antiGod allergy called original sin resides and marauds in our moral and spiritual system, leading us to deeply egocentric motivation, moral corner-cutting and worse, callousness and cruelty, undervaluing and exploiting others, constant self-admiration and self-pity, playing God while evading the real God, loving ourselves but not loving him, wanting to be praised while declining inwardly to praise or admire others, and many other self-centered vices. For sinners as such, duty, which is first God-centered and then others-centered, can never be a delight. And since, in Christians, sin—though dethroned—is not yet destroyed and still leaves its finger marks more or less obtrusively on everything that we think, wish, plan and do, it is understandable that the thought of praise as both duty and delight hardly seems real at first. And to the extent that original sin still shapes us, praise, though an acknowledged duty, will not be a delight.

But Christians, believers in Jesus Christ, are regenerate—born again, new creatures, dead and risen with Christ, alive to God in Christ (the New Testament has many ways of expressing this). That means that we have been changed, supernaturally renovated in the core of our personal being, what Scripture calls the heart; and the nature of this change, which has been brought about through union with the risen Christ, is that now our hearts have become in a decisive way a transcript of his. In the days of his flesh, as the Gospel stories show, the incarnate Lord was controlled—we might even say, driven—by the life-unifying desire to please, honor, exalt and glorify his heavenly Father in all things by obedient service, and his joy was to do his Father’s will and magnify his Father’s name always and everywhere—in other words, to live a life that expressed worship and adoration of the One who had sent him to earth. That same desire, with the Son and the Spirit joined to the Father as its object, is now implanted in Christian hearts. At motivational level, and perhaps in outward conduct too, original sin will hit back and fight the new heart, producing conflict, tension and less-than-perfect performance, with consequent frustration and distress at our own continuing sinfulness. But for all that, the desires of the renewed heart are now dominant within, and that means that the duty of praise will increasingly become a delight—indeed, the supreme delight—of our life.

Once again, C. S. Lewis helps us to grasp what is involved here, this time by his idea of heaven: “a state” he says “in which angels now, and men hereafter, are perpetually employed in praising God.” To conceive this,

we must suppose ourselves to be in a perfect love with God—drunk with, drowned in, dissolved by, that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable, hence hardly tolerable, bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression, our joy no more separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives is separable from the brightness it sheds. The Scotch [i.e., Westminster Shorter] Catechism says that man’s chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But we shall then know that these are the same thing. . . . In commanding us to glorify him, God is inviting us to enjoy him.

Here then we have the final answer to Lewis’s own question: why does God so constantly and insistently require us to praise him? The answer is: So that we may get into the habit of doing what in heaven we will do spontaneously and wholeheartedly in and from and for enjoyment of God. God’s joy and our joy in our praising will then coincide. Lewis knew that performing the duty of praise may for the moment bring us little or no delight, just as the five-finger exercises prescribed to budding pianists are ordinarily felt as a joyless bore. Nonetheless, he says, “the duty exists for the delight. . . . [W]e are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last the water comes, it may find them ready.” And “there are happy moments, even now, when a trickle creeps along the dry beds; and happy the souls to whom this happens often.” Indeed, the number of praising psalms in which these trickles already find expression (trickles, by comparison with what awaits us; floods, in relation to where we are now) show that already, in this life, heartfelt adoration will again and again bring heartfelt joy. This thought takes us straight to our next point.

ALL TOGETHER, NOW

There is a great difference between being a solo instrumentalist or singer and playing in an orchestra or being part of a choir. In both cases you concentrate just as hard on the notes and on the quality of your own sound, but being in the orchestra or choir when things go right gives you a kind of lift that you do not ordinarily get as a soloist. Why is that? The exhilaration is a spinoff from the awareness of being in a harmonious fellowship, every member of which is at each moment concentrating with you on making music happen with fullest beauty and power. (J. I. is here remembering an efficient but uninspired British orchestra director of whom the players said that when he conducted “nothing ever happened.”) In the praising of God, something of the same principle operates. But when God’s people praise him together with their whole hearts, it is safe to say that something always happens.

We are created to praise God as individuals, but not always as solo instruments. The Scriptures are full of corporate praise and encouragement to find delight in praising God with other believers, backed as we saw by all of his creation, and in joining with the mighty throng of heavenly beings, angels and perfected saints in their ongoing praise. It is hard to imagine our mumbled, whispered, tentative praises as part of such a grand scene, but over and over Scripture portrays our praise praying as one ingredient in this massive chorus of adoration and expects it to take the form of song. (Many of the psalms have their original, now lost, Hebrew tunes included in their headings.) Paul tells Christians to “be filled with the Spirit, . . . singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart” (Eph 5:18-19). Singing, it seems, is of the essence of corporate praise.

A certain eagerness grows from the prospect of conjoined praise. The psalmist in one of his songs of ascents (ascent to the temple, the place of such praise) declares, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’” (Ps 122:1). Jonah, the rebellious prophet, prayed longingly about corporate praise as he lay in the belly of a fish, his custom-designed time-out zone.

I shall again look

upon your holy temple. . . .

I with the voice of thanksgiving

will sacrifice to you. (Jon 2:4, 9)

Psalm 84 opens with similar longing to be part of the temple’s corporate praise:

How lovely is your dwelling place,

O LORD of hosts!

My soul longs, yes, faints

for the courts of the LORD. . . .

my heart and flesh sing for joy

to the living God. . . .

For a day in your courts is better

than a thousand elsewhere. (Ps 84:1-2, 10)

The writer of Psalm 96 breathes enthusiasm as he exhorts us to join existing praise and draw others into that worship, ever enlarging the chorus of those who praise God:

Oh sing to the LORD a new song;

sing to the LORD all the earth!

Sing to the LORD, bless his name;

tell of his salvation from day to day.

Declare his glory among the nations,

his marvelous works among all the peoples!

For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised. (Ps 96:1-4)

The New Testament brings an added dimension to corporate praise. Here we encounter praise united and sustained as a way of life in the context of the church, a living multipeopled organism headed by Christ, of which every congregation was (and is) called to be a credible microscopic sample. Paul, as we saw a moment ago, called on the church at Ephesus to live a Spirit-filled life full of musical praise—using “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, giving thanks always for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 5:19-20). Paul’s vision—his dream, we may call it—in this letter is of Christians living in sustained mutual love (v. 2), always submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ their Lord (v. 21) and singing as they go, with the music of praise prayer constantly on their lips because it is constantly in their hearts, a vision that fifteen-year-old Leslie was already beginning to live out. It is true that for centuries we Western Christians, at least, have for the most part been a pretty quiet lot—but does Paul’s vision have to remain a dream forever?

It is observable that periods and movements of vitality in the church have always been marked by fresh outbreaks of Christian praise songs in one form or another: praise prayer, that is, in the sense we have given to this phrase. Some forty years ago the charismatic movement rediscovered and emphasized the importance of praise songs in worship, and has contributed both an abundance of folk and rock-type lyrics and the now widespread pattern of a half-hour of musical praise by the whole congregation at the start of any worship gathering. The unfamiliarity of both idiom and layout has made this a controversial development in the eyes of some, but the fact remains that we can hardly attend a contemporary Christian worship service without witnessing a high degree of delight in praising God, and feeling drawn joyfully to join in. It would be a happy thing if all those congregations that maintain older styles of corporate praise would make their own patterns of song equally potent and attractive.

Evangelism, meaning what evangelicals have always meant by the word, that is, invitatory presentation of the historical facts, divine promises, and living Savior, that together constitute the substance of the gospel, is much discussed these days, and various forms of seeker-friendly gatherings, distinct from regular patterns of congregational worship are proposed. One point sometimes missed in these discussions is that the robust and exuberant praises uttered by God’s people, as they celebrate their certainties in Christ, has great drawing power for individuals who are spiritually adrift. Whether in the form of old hymns, therefore, or modern songs, whether led by a traditional church organ or a keyboard-guitar-and-drums praise band, much praise prayer should surround the preaching of the Word of God, both when that is being done in a focused evangelistic way and more pastorally, in the ordinary ongoing weekly worship of believers. Experience seems to show that wherever the Word is preached in an enlivening way, and everyone sings the praises of God from the heart, individuals will come in from outside and be affected by God, thus fulfilling within a Christian frame the psalmists’ anticipation of Israel’s magnetic outreach.

Praise and evangelism (missions, outreach) do indeed come together in the biblical vision of present kingdom life, so Christians rightly see praise prayer as having a direct relationship to sharing the love of God with those who do not yet know it.

The same psalm that begins “Oh sing to the LORD a new song” continues:

Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples,

ascribe to the LORD glory and strength!

Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name! . . .

Say among the nations, “The LORD reigns!” . . .

He will judge the world in righteousness,

and the peoples in his faithfulness. (Ps 96:7-8, 10, 13)

When praise prayer becomes corporate, God invites the world to the party, and each group of those who are already at the party should be as compelling an advertisement for what goes on there as possible. It is rightly urged that evangelism should convey a clear invitation to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ for salvation; it should equally be urged that the invitation involves linking up with those who worship God already, and joining in their life together. And when that community is marked by biblically faithful preaching and wholehearted praise prayer, people will constantly be drawn into the church as God’s first step in drawing them to Christ. Praise prayer, we may truly say, is contagious with a contagion that we can hardly have too much of at the present time.

Psalm 66 is a recounting of God’s “awesome deeds” which also includes an invitation:

Shout for joy to God, all the earth;

sing the glory of his name;

give to him glorious praise!

Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds! . . .

All the earth worships you

and sings praises to you;

they sing praises to your name.”

Come and see what God has done:

he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man. . . .

Bless our God, O peoples,

let the sound of his praise be heard. . . .

Come and hear all you who fear God,

and I will tell what he has done for my soul. (Ps 66:1-3, 4-5, 8, 16)

Praise and proclamation join hands in this psalm. In our own church worship services, at their best, the same will happen.

The New Testament speaks with similar clarity about Christian identity and Christian vocation and makes the same connection between corporate praise and evangelism.

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God’s] own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Pet 2:9-10, emphasis added)

The people who have received God’s mercy must remember that they themselves needed that mercy and so be willing to “proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” Is the proclamation that Peter had in mind Godward in praise or manward in witness? Commentaries divide, so the only safe (and probably correct) thing is to say that it is both, though most certainly the second. Praise and proclamation once again join, therefore, this time so that others may be drawn to become “God’s people,” along with those who are such already.

PRAISE AS PREPARATION

On March 23, 1631, knowing he was on his deathbed (his life ended eight days later), John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s, London, wrote “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness,” which began thus:

Since I am coming to that Holy room

Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,

I shall be made thy Music; As I come

I tune the Instrument here at the door,

And what I must do then, think here before.

Donne’s image is of an Elizabethan or Jacobean banqueting hall, where musicians would be brought in to play for as long as the feast lasted. Tuning their instruments at the door is what they would do just prior to their entry. Donne’s thought is that the music will all be praise for God’s pleasure and that he himself is the instrument that, in company with countless other such instruments, will be playing that praise. C. S. Lewis echoes Donne’s phrase and Donne’s thought, as he reflects, realistically enough, on the often difficult and daunting character of our experiences in the school of prayer, including our attempts at praise. (“Irksome . . . humiliating . . . frustrating . . . time-wasting—the worse one is praying, the longer one’s prayers take.”) But one day the tuning of the instrument will be done, and we, in Donne’s sense, as ourselves both instrumentalist and instrument, will start really to play. We will round off the present chapter by briefly reflecting on this.

Is heaven like an eternal church service? This is another question that troubled the young Lewis, who never developed a great love of church services—in spite of thirty-four years of faithful attendance, following his conversion to theism in 1929. For him, church was a discipline, and a difficult one. “No,” he decided, “Our ‘services’ both in their conduct and in our power to participate, are merely attempts at worship; never fully successful, often 99.9 per cent failures, sometimes total failures.” But these puny services of corporate praise prepare us, however dimly, for an eternal future where praise and delight come together. Lewis elaborates on this as he dwells on the fact that praying, here and now, is a Christian duty.

If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be. The same is true of many other behaviors which now appear as duties. . . . To practice them spontaneously and delightfully is not yet possible. This situation creates the category of duty, the whole specifically moral realm. . . . But . . . there is no morality in heaven. The angels never knew (from within) the meaning of the word ought, and the blessed dead have long since gladly forgotten it. . . . This is why Dante’s Heaven is so right. . . . This also explains . . . why we have to picture that world in terms which almost seem frivolous. . . . We can picture unimpeded, and therefore delighted, action only by the analogy of our present play and leisure.

Lewis’s breathtaking point is surely undeniable. When we are resurrected in our finally perfect state, duty will be a word that we will not need. Thoroughgoing love (admiration, appreciation, valuation, gratitude, goodwill), both to our triune God and to all our glorified fellow sinners, will be the spontaneous, wholehearted, unqualified and indefatigable expression of what we now are. All the thoughts that pass through and come from our minds will have at their center praise to God, all the time and all the way. And it will be fun!—pure, celestial, transcendent, glorious fun. We will never have enjoyed anything so much. We are not there yet, but we are rehearsing for heaven, nothing less, every time we give ourselves to praise. We are tuning ourselves up to be the instruments making the music with which heaven will be filled. Thank you, John Donne, for your gift to us of the perfect analogy.

Now we see why at many Christians’ funerals joy blends with grief as we glimpse for a moment this eternal view, perhaps with the uttering of the words “Precious in the sight of the LORD/ is the death of his saints” (Ps 116:15) or perhaps with the often used quote from the King James Version of Revelation: “I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they rest from their labors” (Rev 14:13). Far from demeaning this life, a Christian’s eternal perspective makes that life (and death) precious—even to God. Our loved ones go, as we ourselves will one day go, simply, safely and with utter satisfaction to be part of God’s praise music forever and ever. In heaven the song has already started, and in the book of Revelation God briefly draws the curtain so that we can form some idea of what is happening:

Day and night they never cease to say,

“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,

who was and is and is to come!” . . .

They cast their crowns before the throne, saying,

“Worthy are you, our Lord and God,

to receive glory and honor and power,

for you created all things,

and by your will they existed and were created.” . . .

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” (Rev 4:8, 10-11; 7:9-12)

Some of these thoughts were in Carolyn’s mind as recently she sat through the night with a dying believer of eighty-eight, reading Scripture, singing to her and praying for her until God took her home. Some of them were in J. I.’s mind as not too long ago he recited Scripture and prayed for his comatose sister during the last four hours of her earthly life. Some of them were certainly in the mind of another eighty-eight-year-old, John Wesley, who the day before his death sang with great effort the first two verses of Isaac Watts great hymn, sparked by Psalms 146 and 148, “I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath,” the opening stanza of which we used as an epigraph for this chapter. Through the night that followed, Wesley kept repeating “I’ll praise—I’ll praise” (all he could now manage to say) until his heart finally stopped beating. A non-Western student once memorably said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Dr. Packer died preaching.” Maybe so, but to die praising, while at rehearsal, as one might express it, would surely be even more wonderful. For Watts is exactly right in the way he expresses the central contented confidence of every regenerate heart:

My days of praise shall ne’er be past

While life and thought and being last

Or immortality endures.

We, Carolyn and J. I., can think of nothing better than that when our time comes we should be enabled to depart this world praising, and it is our hope and prayer that the same will be true for everyone who reads these pages.

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