Praise and Grace

The crowd cheers, students praising God. A particularly moving song begins. Everyone in the room, including me, faces the same “spiritual” choice, to raise the hands in praise or no? It looks like everyone else is. God has died for my sins, I guess I might as well. OK, done. Oh, boy. My arms are getting tired. I wonder if I’m on the big screen… What is that woman doing? Oh we’re clapping now, should I bring my hands down and clap? Ooh, maybe if I keep my hands up people will think I’m more spiritual! The classic church youth conference problem, we are distracted people. We have a Maker, a Maker that has completely saved us. Yet when we come to praise Him we are still just as distracted. We are all ADD, maybe not in the medical definition, but in the spiritual. We come to worship and the first thing we think about is ourselves. That’s because spiritual ADD is known as selfishness. We can’t be reverent for God because we’re too focused being reverent with ourselves.

Why is this a problem? Why can’t we have a little time to think about ourselves? God receives enough praise from this crowd doesn't He? Let’s go back to the Garden. Back when praise was perfect, when God and man were locked together in a perfect relationship. We weren't thinking about ourselves, we were thinking about the God that just created us. The one who said: “Look at all this stuff I just made, oh by the way, you can have it.” Yet even in this environment where God dwelt with us in a perfect place we found a way to mess it up, in the words of a popular saying: WE HAD ONE JOB. There was a perfect relationship with God and we messed it up because a snake told us we could have it better. So at this point God had every right to wipe us out, start over, press the reset, game over, but that is not the nature of our God. The God we worship, the God we praise looked at our insubordination and our rebellion and decided that He would never go to plan B. Because God does not need a plan B. We are God’s great Plan A, even if we are ignorant and intolerable and sometimes a little smelly.