Phil. 4:4-8
You’ve heard of the power of positive thinking. It’s in the Bible. That’s where it came from and one example is right here in Phil. 4. Paul practiced what he preached too. One of the popular children’s stories is from the book of Acts in which Paul and Silas were singing praises to God late at night. They couldn’t sleep because they were in chains and in pain from a cruel beating! In that situation, they could have been crying and complaining about how unfair it all was. But instead, even though they were in jail, and maybe even because they were in jail, giving thanks for the honor of suffering for Jesus, they spent some time singing praises to God most high!
It’s important to realize that we have very good reasons to have a positive attitude. It’s not just a mental trick. There really is good science behind the observation that positive thinking tends to lead to a healthier life. But pop psychology usually leaves God out of the equation. They say things like, “Being miserable is a habit. Being happy is a habit. And the choice is yours. Or, “Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” Or, “All we are is the result of all we think.” That’s attributed to Buddha. So, even Buddha got that far. However, positive thinking in and of itself might not always work. Here’s an example: “Assert your dominance by writing 100% on top of your test paper, before you turn it in.” That might not really work too well, no matter how much you positively think about it!
But add God into the equation and we have good reason to take a positive attitude. It is grounded in the fact that we have a loving God, who cares for us, watches out for us, and causes everything to work together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose. So, it is good to have a positive attitude. But we are not here to praise the virtues of positive thinking. We are not here to praise ourselves for being able to have a positive attitude in the face of great difficulties. Some of us are just wired that away. We are here to praise the Lord God of Heaven, who hears our prayers and acts according to his compassionate love and wisdom!
Paul in the verses we read did not say, “Do not be anxious about anything because it is emotionally healthy for you to have a positive attitude toward life.” Paul did say, “Present your requests to God, trust him and you will be at peace in this world, even though your circumstances may appear to be unbearable.” The true power pf positive thinking lies in thinking positively about the powerful God we love and serve! Praise and thanksgiving are two elements of prayer that help us to rejoice always.
This message is the first installment in a series of four messages about prayer. The four messages will correspond to what many saints have identified to be four important aspects of prayer that are good to include in every prayer. It employs an acronym on the word ACTS. It’s simple and easy to remember. It forms a good summary of a way to “cover all the bases” when we go to God in prayer. There is no rule that says you have to include everything in every prayer. And there are many other very useful and powerful prayer tools that can effectively guide our prayers. I think all of them incorporate and expand upon the basic four; Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication.
It’s a good idea to know about these four essential elements of prayer for your personal devotional use as well as public prayers in worship. We will pray well when we Adore our God, Confess our sin, Thank Him for his forgiveness and blessings, and after seeking his face this way, then seek his favor, boldly, bringing our Supplications to the throne of grace.
Today, we focus on Adoration. This is the practice of telling God who we know him to be and how great he is at being the most wonderful God we could ever imagine, and even better than we could ever imagine. It is the best beginning of prayer. It is sort of like addressing the envelope with accurate information to make sure your message gets to the right recipient. But this is not to suggest that there might be any other recipient, or to suggest that the one true God won’t hear our prayer if we don’t flatter him.
The actual purpose of our adoration is for us to realize and remember just how wonderful our God is. God is infinite. But our perception is limited. That’s why we ought to actively magnify him in our own minds and hearts. This will boost our confidence that when we boldly come before the throne of Grace, the God who sits there is more than capable of caring about and wisely and powerfully dealing with us and our needs according to his riches in glory. Adoration of God doesn’t boost his ego. It boosts our confidence in him.
The good Lord does understand that we need to do this. The reason we need to do this is to fight against our own sinful natures that tend to draw us away from God. Think about this, back in the Garden of Eden, if Adam and Eve had been singing God’s praises when the devil tried to persuade them that God was being selfish, how far do you think he would have gotten? This tendency to forget God’s goodness still persists in us today.
We counter it by adoring him. In adoration, we specifically focus on who he is, not on what he has done for us. It is true that we often learn who he is through the facts of what he has done for us. How else would we know that God is love if he had not given Jesus Christ, his one and only son to die on the cross for us? But we can still distinguish between giving thanks for what he has done, and adoring him for who he is. So, I want to take some time to focus on the characteristics or attributes of God that help us talk about who he is.
Our God is great! He is all loving, all powerful, all knowing, all being, and all creating. The fancy words for that are Omnibenevolent, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnificent. Omni means all. These five words are a tightly packed way to speak of God’s infinite capacity in each of five important areas: God is all-loving, all-powerful, knows all, is ever present and possesses all authority. These five omni- words add up to an omni-awesome God! I haven’t put them in any particular order except for the importance of putting love first. For God is love!
Benevolence is from Latin for “bene” which means good, and “volo,” or where we get volition, which means want, or will. God’s good will is unlimited. He is omnibenevolent. Omnibenevolence means that God is all loving, filled with loving kindness. This most foundational and beautiful aspect of God’s character is what gives us the greatest confidence and to trust someone who is also all powerful, and inescapable because of his omnipresence and omniscience. If this super mighty God were not filled with love for us, we wouldn’t even exist, not to mention be blessed with provision for living.
If it were not for his love, there would be no beauty, no joy, nothing to smile or laugh about and no family connections to enjoy. If there were any creation at all, creatures would probably all reproduce like lizards, lay eggs and forget about the kids. But God is love, and because of that everything about our place and role in creation is relational. This is why we are expected to love God and love one another. This is what our very existence is all about. It is why God created anything! God is love! And his creatures are happiest and most blessed when we love him back!
Potent means power so omnipotent means God can do anything and nothing can stop him. This conjures up the challenge question that asks, “If God can do anything, can he create a rock so big that he can’t lift it?” But the question is illogical, a semantic game. God can in fact do anything that is logically possible because he created logic and the way things work and the laws of physics and all of it. We can’t challenge God to violate his own laws.
Another tough question is, if God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, why is there evil? Can’t he stop it? Or won’t he? In fact, God’s love prevents him from doing what we would do if we were god. What we see in Christ is that God in his amazing love has done everything needed to put an end to evil and wipe away every tear from every eye. And God’s power enables him to redeem every evil while at the same time allowing the history of his world to run its course so that every child that would ever be born into the kingdom would be born at the right time and before the end of the ages. Since I am now alive, I thank God that he didn’t end the world before I was born!
But above all, what we can really focus on is that God is bigger than all the rest of us and anything else in all creation. Even satan is a limited, created being, whose foolishness is evident in his presumption that he could wage war with God and win. But in fact, we have confidence in what it says in Romans 8:38. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Knowledge is represented here by the Latin word for science. “Scient” means knowledge. God is omniscient, all-knowing. He knows everything about everything because he created everything. Psalm 139 is one of the best places to read about God’s omniscience. The first few verses say, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
God has complete and perfect knowledge of all things, including Himself and everything actual or potential in His creation. Only the all-knowing and all-powerful God can guarantee real freedom from sin, decay, and death. He can begin a process of change in believers during the present age; for where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor. 3:17).
God knows everything that is knowable or that can be known. He even knows more than Google! He knows where you are, and how you are doing. As Jesus said, even the very hairs of your head are numbered. Now if you don’t have a lot of hair, that might not impress you very much. But you can still give thanks that God knows the number of hairs on every head and cares for all of his people the same.
Present means, “present!” So omnipresent means God is everywhere at once. Again, Psalm 139 says it so well. “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” Because God exists, you can be sure that you are never alone.
The next Omni word is omnificent. It sounds a lot like omniscient. But suffice it to say that the Latin word, “Ficent” has to do with work. It is related to the word fix. We fix things. God fixes things. All things are the work of God who created all things. Now I’m going to use some other words also based in the Latin word for fix. God’s work is more than sufficient. It is not just enough. It is more than enough, more than we can even ask or imagine. God’s work is more than efficient. His work is more than effective and competent and time saving. God’s work is also more than beneficent too. His work is motivated by his love, but is not limited at all. So, we say God is omnificent. Capable of anything! And he only does good things! And he does it because He cares.
That’s all five of the omni-words I could find that apply to God: Omnibenevolent, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnificent. God is omni-awesome! But you don’t have to remember those fancy words. We have really only scratched the surface anyway, even with these big words. We also know that God is the mighty God, the wonderful counselor, the prince of Peace, the great provider and many other adjectives that describe his holy magnificence! Just let the Spirit bring to mind and heart anything that is true of God when you want to adore him!
Speaking of awesome, among theologians and pastors there is a little movement going on to pray that people would stop saying everything they like is “awesome.” Only God is awesome! That word shouldn’t be used for lesser things, such as when customer service on the phone asks for your phone number that you have to give anyway and when you say that you will because you have to, you get this enthusiastic response, “That’s awesome!” It would be enough for them to say, “Thank you.” Awesome just isn’t true in that case.
Our God is awesome, and awesome is not something he does it is who he is! We adore him for who he is! God encourages and even commands that kind of positive thinking. When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, he strictly obeyed God’s battle plan and his entire army marched around the city for six days in a row, not making a sound, just marching. But every day, the ark of the Covenant and the worship leaders led the way, silent as the rest of the army for six days, but on the seventh day the first thing that the enemy heard was the sound of worship as the priests blasted out music in their trumpets. The praise of God is powerful. And the walls came tumbling down!
The praise of God is top priority. I read in 1 Chronicles 9:33, “Those who were musicians, heads of Levite families, stayed in the rooms of the temple and were exempt from other duties because they were responsible for the worship day and night.” There wasn’t even a temple yet. But David arranged for 24/7 worship and it was so important that the musicians didn’t have to do anything else. Their job was to specialize in playing and singing music to adore the Lord our God.
Years later, when King Jehoshaphat was threatened by a great army, he knew he didn’t have any power to withstand it unless God would intervene. He prayed, and he praised God with words of adoration, “God of our ancestors, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you. We have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”
In response, God sent a prophet to tell them, “Do not be afraid. Go out and pursue the army and you will find them. But you will not have to fight them. I’m taking care of everything for you.” That’s a little bit of paraphrase there. Jehoshaphat and his people took courage from this and believed the Lord. They showed their faith, too. We read in 2 Chron. 20:21, “After consulting the people, Jehoshaphat appointed men to sing to the Lord and to praise him for the splendor of his holiness as they went out at the head of the army.”
Think of it. No modern militarist would come up with that plan. Even though all our military branches have official bands that play great music, I don’t think our military strategists would put them in the advance guard to be the first to meet the enemy, brandishing their trumpets, flutes and drums. But Jehoshaphat could do it because he had such confidence in God. He was sending out the choir to sing God’s praises and celebrate the victory even before they could actually see it with their own eyes. That’s what I call positive thinking! And sure enough, when the men of Judah came to the place that overlooks the desert and looked toward the vast army, they saw only dead bodies lying on the ground; no one had escaped.
King James Psalm 22:3 says, “The Lord inhabits the praises of his people.” IT is important to hear that right. It is not that the Lord inhibits the praises of his people. He inhabits those praise! That’s where God lives! Literally the Hebrew describes God as “sitting on” the praises. It is a very graphic language. There are really no abstract words in Hebrew. Ideas are always conceived through word pictures like this. The truest sense then is that as we lift up praises to the Lord, his royal and holy throne is made up of the praises we have offered. God loves to dwell with people who really appreciate him for who he truly is.
Let’s finish this off with a rousing recitation of Psalm 150. Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord with wild abandon! Praise the Lord! It is the most positive thing you can possibly think of!
You’ve heard of the power of positive thinking. It’s in the Bible. That’s where it came from and one example is right here in Phil. 4. Paul practiced what he preached too. One of the popular children’s stories is from the book of Acts in which Paul and Silas were singing praises to God late at night. They couldn’t sleep because they were in chains and in pain from a cruel beating! In that situation, they could have been crying and complaining about how unfair it all was. But instead, even though they were in jail, and maybe even because they were in jail, giving thanks for the honor of suffering for Jesus, they spent some time singing praises to God most high!
It’s important to realize that we have very good reasons to have a positive attitude. It’s not just a mental trick. There really is good science behind the observation that positive thinking tends to lead to a healthier life. But pop psychology usually leaves God out of the equation. They say things like, “Being miserable is a habit. Being happy is a habit. And the choice is yours. Or, “Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” Or, “All we are is the result of all we think.” That’s attributed to Buddha. So, even Buddha got that far. However, positive thinking in and of itself might not always work. Here’s an example: “Assert your dominance by writing 100% on top of your test paper, before you turn it in.” That might not really work too well, no matter how much you positively think about it!
But add God into the equation and we have good reason to take a positive attitude. It is grounded in the fact that we have a loving God, who cares for us, watches out for us, and causes everything to work together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose. So, it is good to have a positive attitude. But we are not here to praise the virtues of positive thinking. We are not here to praise ourselves for being able to have a positive attitude in the face of great difficulties. Some of us are just wired that away. We are here to praise the Lord God of Heaven, who hears our prayers and acts according to his compassionate love and wisdom!
Paul in the verses we read did not say, “Do not be anxious about anything because it is emotionally healthy for you to have a positive attitude toward life.” Paul did say, “Present your requests to God, trust him and you will be at peace in this world, even though your circumstances may appear to be unbearable.” The true power pf positive thinking lies in thinking positively about the powerful God we love and serve! Praise and thanksgiving are two elements of prayer that help us to rejoice always.
This message is the first installment in a series of four messages about prayer. The four messages will correspond to what many saints have identified to be four important aspects of prayer that are good to include in every prayer. It employs an acronym on the word ACTS. It’s simple and easy to remember. It forms a good summary of a way to “cover all the bases” when we go to God in prayer. There is no rule that says you have to include everything in every prayer. And there are many other very useful and powerful prayer tools that can effectively guide our prayers. I think all of them incorporate and expand upon the basic four; Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication.
It’s a good idea to know about these four essential elements of prayer for your personal devotional use as well as public prayers in worship. We will pray well when we Adore our God, Confess our sin, Thank Him for his forgiveness and blessings, and after seeking his face this way, then seek his favor, boldly, bringing our Supplications to the throne of grace.
Today, we focus on Adoration. This is the practice of telling God who we know him to be and how great he is at being the most wonderful God we could ever imagine, and even better than we could ever imagine. It is the best beginning of prayer. It is sort of like addressing the envelope with accurate information to make sure your message gets to the right recipient. But this is not to suggest that there might be any other recipient, or to suggest that the one true God won’t hear our prayer if we don’t flatter him.
The actual purpose of our adoration is for us to realize and remember just how wonderful our God is. God is infinite. But our perception is limited. That’s why we ought to actively magnify him in our own minds and hearts. This will boost our confidence that when we boldly come before the throne of Grace, the God who sits there is more than capable of caring about and wisely and powerfully dealing with us and our needs according to his riches in glory. Adoration of God doesn’t boost his ego. It boosts our confidence in him.
The good Lord does understand that we need to do this. The reason we need to do this is to fight against our own sinful natures that tend to draw us away from God. Think about this, back in the Garden of Eden, if Adam and Eve had been singing God’s praises when the devil tried to persuade them that God was being selfish, how far do you think he would have gotten? This tendency to forget God’s goodness still persists in us today.
We counter it by adoring him. In adoration, we specifically focus on who he is, not on what he has done for us. It is true that we often learn who he is through the facts of what he has done for us. How else would we know that God is love if he had not given Jesus Christ, his one and only son to die on the cross for us? But we can still distinguish between giving thanks for what he has done, and adoring him for who he is. So, I want to take some time to focus on the characteristics or attributes of God that help us talk about who he is.
Our God is great! He is all loving, all powerful, all knowing, all being, and all creating. The fancy words for that are Omnibenevolent, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnificent. Omni means all. These five words are a tightly packed way to speak of God’s infinite capacity in each of five important areas: God is all-loving, all-powerful, knows all, is ever present and possesses all authority. These five omni- words add up to an omni-awesome God! I haven’t put them in any particular order except for the importance of putting love first. For God is love!
Benevolence is from Latin for “bene” which means good, and “volo,” or where we get volition, which means want, or will. God’s good will is unlimited. He is omnibenevolent. Omnibenevolence means that God is all loving, filled with loving kindness. This most foundational and beautiful aspect of God’s character is what gives us the greatest confidence and to trust someone who is also all powerful, and inescapable because of his omnipresence and omniscience. If this super mighty God were not filled with love for us, we wouldn’t even exist, not to mention be blessed with provision for living.
If it were not for his love, there would be no beauty, no joy, nothing to smile or laugh about and no family connections to enjoy. If there were any creation at all, creatures would probably all reproduce like lizards, lay eggs and forget about the kids. But God is love, and because of that everything about our place and role in creation is relational. This is why we are expected to love God and love one another. This is what our very existence is all about. It is why God created anything! God is love! And his creatures are happiest and most blessed when we love him back!
Potent means power so omnipotent means God can do anything and nothing can stop him. This conjures up the challenge question that asks, “If God can do anything, can he create a rock so big that he can’t lift it?” But the question is illogical, a semantic game. God can in fact do anything that is logically possible because he created logic and the way things work and the laws of physics and all of it. We can’t challenge God to violate his own laws.
Another tough question is, if God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, why is there evil? Can’t he stop it? Or won’t he? In fact, God’s love prevents him from doing what we would do if we were god. What we see in Christ is that God in his amazing love has done everything needed to put an end to evil and wipe away every tear from every eye. And God’s power enables him to redeem every evil while at the same time allowing the history of his world to run its course so that every child that would ever be born into the kingdom would be born at the right time and before the end of the ages. Since I am now alive, I thank God that he didn’t end the world before I was born!
But above all, what we can really focus on is that God is bigger than all the rest of us and anything else in all creation. Even satan is a limited, created being, whose foolishness is evident in his presumption that he could wage war with God and win. But in fact, we have confidence in what it says in Romans 8:38. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Knowledge is represented here by the Latin word for science. “Scient” means knowledge. God is omniscient, all-knowing. He knows everything about everything because he created everything. Psalm 139 is one of the best places to read about God’s omniscience. The first few verses say, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
God has complete and perfect knowledge of all things, including Himself and everything actual or potential in His creation. Only the all-knowing and all-powerful God can guarantee real freedom from sin, decay, and death. He can begin a process of change in believers during the present age; for where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor. 3:17).
God knows everything that is knowable or that can be known. He even knows more than Google! He knows where you are, and how you are doing. As Jesus said, even the very hairs of your head are numbered. Now if you don’t have a lot of hair, that might not impress you very much. But you can still give thanks that God knows the number of hairs on every head and cares for all of his people the same.
Present means, “present!” So omnipresent means God is everywhere at once. Again, Psalm 139 says it so well. “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” Because God exists, you can be sure that you are never alone.
The next Omni word is omnificent. It sounds a lot like omniscient. But suffice it to say that the Latin word, “Ficent” has to do with work. It is related to the word fix. We fix things. God fixes things. All things are the work of God who created all things. Now I’m going to use some other words also based in the Latin word for fix. God’s work is more than sufficient. It is not just enough. It is more than enough, more than we can even ask or imagine. God’s work is more than efficient. His work is more than effective and competent and time saving. God’s work is also more than beneficent too. His work is motivated by his love, but is not limited at all. So, we say God is omnificent. Capable of anything! And he only does good things! And he does it because He cares.
That’s all five of the omni-words I could find that apply to God: Omnibenevolent, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnificent. God is omni-awesome! But you don’t have to remember those fancy words. We have really only scratched the surface anyway, even with these big words. We also know that God is the mighty God, the wonderful counselor, the prince of Peace, the great provider and many other adjectives that describe his holy magnificence! Just let the Spirit bring to mind and heart anything that is true of God when you want to adore him!
Speaking of awesome, among theologians and pastors there is a little movement going on to pray that people would stop saying everything they like is “awesome.” Only God is awesome! That word shouldn’t be used for lesser things, such as when customer service on the phone asks for your phone number that you have to give anyway and when you say that you will because you have to, you get this enthusiastic response, “That’s awesome!” It would be enough for them to say, “Thank you.” Awesome just isn’t true in that case.
Our God is awesome, and awesome is not something he does it is who he is! We adore him for who he is! God encourages and even commands that kind of positive thinking. When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, he strictly obeyed God’s battle plan and his entire army marched around the city for six days in a row, not making a sound, just marching. But every day, the ark of the Covenant and the worship leaders led the way, silent as the rest of the army for six days, but on the seventh day the first thing that the enemy heard was the sound of worship as the priests blasted out music in their trumpets. The praise of God is powerful. And the walls came tumbling down!
The praise of God is top priority. I read in 1 Chronicles 9:33, “Those who were musicians, heads of Levite families, stayed in the rooms of the temple and were exempt from other duties because they were responsible for the worship day and night.” There wasn’t even a temple yet. But David arranged for 24/7 worship and it was so important that the musicians didn’t have to do anything else. Their job was to specialize in playing and singing music to adore the Lord our God.
Years later, when King Jehoshaphat was threatened by a great army, he knew he didn’t have any power to withstand it unless God would intervene. He prayed, and he praised God with words of adoration, “God of our ancestors, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you. We have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”
In response, God sent a prophet to tell them, “Do not be afraid. Go out and pursue the army and you will find them. But you will not have to fight them. I’m taking care of everything for you.” That’s a little bit of paraphrase there. Jehoshaphat and his people took courage from this and believed the Lord. They showed their faith, too. We read in 2 Chron. 20:21, “After consulting the people, Jehoshaphat appointed men to sing to the Lord and to praise him for the splendor of his holiness as they went out at the head of the army.”
Think of it. No modern militarist would come up with that plan. Even though all our military branches have official bands that play great music, I don’t think our military strategists would put them in the advance guard to be the first to meet the enemy, brandishing their trumpets, flutes and drums. But Jehoshaphat could do it because he had such confidence in God. He was sending out the choir to sing God’s praises and celebrate the victory even before they could actually see it with their own eyes. That’s what I call positive thinking! And sure enough, when the men of Judah came to the place that overlooks the desert and looked toward the vast army, they saw only dead bodies lying on the ground; no one had escaped.
King James Psalm 22:3 says, “The Lord inhabits the praises of his people.” IT is important to hear that right. It is not that the Lord inhibits the praises of his people. He inhabits those praise! That’s where God lives! Literally the Hebrew describes God as “sitting on” the praises. It is a very graphic language. There are really no abstract words in Hebrew. Ideas are always conceived through word pictures like this. The truest sense then is that as we lift up praises to the Lord, his royal and holy throne is made up of the praises we have offered. God loves to dwell with people who really appreciate him for who he truly is.
Let’s finish this off with a rousing recitation of Psalm 150. Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord with wild abandon! Praise the Lord! It is the most positive thing you can possibly think of!
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