Monday October 1st Singing a New Song of Praise!

"How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him."
"Praise the LORD.  Sing to the LORD a new song."

These two verse in Ps. 147 and 149 really made me stop and think today.  Do I truly take time out of my day to ponder how good it is to sing praises to God?  Do I get busy and caught up in my day that I forget how good it is to praise the LORD?  Do I think of praising God as pleasant and good or as a task to check off my spiritual to do list?  Do I sing along to K-love out of a desire to lift up praise to God?  Do I ponder the words I am singing and use them as an offering of praise to the Lord, or is it more about how I like the songs that are playing and I am singing along without even giving thought to the words?  Am I like a broken record at times lifting up the same thing or am I seeing God's new mercies every morning and experience Him in new ways so that each day my song of praise is a new one?

I regret to say that I fail to see on a daily basis how good it is to praise the Lord.  How pleasing and necessary it is to my often dry and parched spirit.  Praise is not something that God needs to hear from us.  Praise is something we need to do to remind us of just how great our God truly is.  Praise is what helps keep me anchored during the storms of life because it reminds me who is at the helm whether my life is rough or calm.  If times are tough or things are going smoothly God never changes and is always worthy of my praise and my heart will always benefit from it.

These two verse talk of singing our praise to God.  Sometimes my heart is in despair and musical notes just don't seem to be able to form from my lips.  I don't think that a song of praise necessarily has to sound like something out of a Disney movie.  I think that true songs of praise are more from a heart of sincere adoration then a voice with a melody in it.  Songs of praise are spoken words of delight in who God is.  Just the utterance of them off our lips creates a melody that soothes the "singers" heart.  A few weeks ago we read the book of Job.  There was no song of praise on Job's lips because his view of who God was had been distorted.  He needed to be reminded of how great his God, his redeemer, was.  Once that happened Job's attitude changed (not his circumstance right away) and from his lips was able to flow a new song of praise to an awesome and amazing God who loved him more then Job had realized.

Despite my circumstances I want to remember how great my God is all the time.  I want the words I speak about Him to be melodies of praise lifted up from a heart of gratitude and delight.  I want the song on my lips to be new each day, fresh remembrances and gratitude to an enormously infinite, graciously giving, abundantly loving God who has new blessings and encouragement for me each and every day.

The key is to not let my circumstance steal my song.  Not to let the disappointments of life rob me of my melody.  Not to let the calm moments of life rock me into a songless slumber.  Instead I want to wake up every single day and say:

"It is good to sing praises to our God, and it is pleasant and fitting to praise him! Here is my new song."