Thought for today…
Praise to the King of kings
Psalm 24:7-8…(7) Lift up your heads, O you gates! And be lifted up, you everlasting doors! And the King of glory shall come in. (8) Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, The Lord mighty in battle. (NKJV)
When we praise God it can come in different forms. We can praise through song, we can give testimony of an answered prayer or we can praise Him through the lifting up of thanksgiving. True praise starts with the attitude of our heart. We acknowledge, with joy and thanksgiving, who He is, King of kings. This attitude should be there when we stand on the mountain top and all is going good, or when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death and all seems to be going wrong. Praise is to be lifted up to the Lord because, God is worthy of all our praise, all the time. When we lift up our hearts before the Lord, and bring Him praise, we take our eyes off ourselves. Consider these when praising the Lord…
Keep your eyes on Christ and not the circumstance. Nothing slips up on God, everything we as His children go through has been sifted through his fingers to help us grow in our walk of sanctification. But, we have to keep our eyes fixed firmly on Him.
Tell God how much you love Him. He is, and should be, our First Love, above everyone else. When our hearts overflow with love, our praises are sweet before God.
In prayer use ‘I surrender’. When we relinquish all to the Lord, we will be free to praise Him from a lifted heart. I do this in my own prayer life and God has taught me so much about myself and my heart. He has drawn me, through the Holy Spirit, to repentance and opened my eyes more to Him. Because I emptied myself of me and He filled me more with Himself. I challenge you to start using surrender in your prayers, it is amazing how God works in a heart totally surrendered to Him. Even as believers we still can hold on to issues in our hearts that we need to repent of, and that is why surrendering all is so freeing.
Remember God inhabits the praises of His people! and when we are praising Him, as the hymn says, ‘and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace’.
In Christ,
Kimberlery S. White
Soli Deo Gloria (Solely to the Glory of God)