A Word in Season: Ready Praises (Psalm 119:164)

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I am not sure that we, if we are Christians, are as adept at the praise of God as we might perhaps imagine ourselves to be.

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Very often we confuse praise with singing, as if all singing is praise, and most praise at least is singing.

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But there's much more to it than that, and even in our singing, let alone in our testifying or in our praying, privately or publicly, there is not perhaps as much true praise as we might imagine.

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I've heard people, for example, ask to lead a congregation in a season of praise, and very quickly they slide into thanksgiving, and then from that perhaps very quickly into petition, asking

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God for things. Now please don't misunderstand me, thanksgiving is itself a very proper element of our dealings with God, and of course asking him for what we need is part of the very essence of prayer.

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But what about praise? What about that unadulterated exaltation of God, that pure and simple testifying of his glory, that concentration upon him, upon his words and his acts, so as to simply declare the glory that is his.

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In Psalm 119 and verse 164, the psalmist says, seven times a day

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I praise you because of your righteous judgments. Now you might read that and jump to the conclusion that he's imposing some rigid formula, as if you haven't praised

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God until you've said a certain thing or a certain kind of thing at least seven times in the day, so that we need to be there ticking off a list, checking off the number of times that we've actually said those particular words or given that particular sense.

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But in a number of other places in the scriptures, that kind of language of doing something seven times indicates a repetition, perhaps even a completeness, that there is something here that is reflecting the spirit, the attitude of the heart, and that is worked out continually and completely in the life of a child of God in this case.

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And so here you've got somebody whose days are characterised by praise.

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There's an ease to it, there's a readiness to it, there's a repetition to it.

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And he praises God, not first and foremost thanking him, although doubtless he does, as is expressed elsewhere in the psalm.

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Certainly he asks him for things woven through Psalm 119. There is a sense of dependence upon the

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Lord, craving his blessing in order that the psalmist might serve him. But here he simply declares seven times a day,

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I praise you. He's telling us that often, almost unbidden, come from his heart and from his lips these testimonies of his delight in God, and he declares the worthiness of the

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Most High. He is worshipping him, and he does so here because of your righteous judgments.

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Now that in itself is striking. Seven times a day he praises God because of God's righteous judgments.

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What about all the other things for which he might praise the Lord? Truly this man is characterised by a sense of God, and it's particularly his righteous judgments to which he draws our attention here.

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On the one hand, the things that God has spoken in righteousness and perhaps developed from that a sense of the righteousness of God's judgments in the earth.

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Here is a man then who hears what God has said and what God has said about himself and to us, and who looks at what

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God is doing in terms of governing and directing the world that he has made.

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And when he considers those things, it does not prompt him to bitterness or complaint or fear, but rather to praise.

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Now, is the same true of us? When we hear God's word and when we consider that the

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Lord of heaven is directing all the things in the world that he has made for his own glory and the good of his people, does it prompt us repeatedly and regularly to praise the

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God who rules on high, the God of righteous judgment? Let us look around us, let us listen to what

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God says in his word, and let us consider that however confusing and troubling sometimes it may seem to us, however we may ourselves suffer, that God's righteous judgments demand our ready praises.